The Velvet Glove Part 2

"Sign the will now," suggested the lawyer, with a look of doubt towards the dark doorway behind the sick man's head. "Sign now, and see your son to-morrow."

"There is no to-morrow, my friend. Send for my son at once."

Mon grudgingly nodded his head.

"It is well, I will do as you wish," said the notary, only too glad, it would seem, to rise and go into the next room to receive further minute instructions from his chief.

The dying man laid with closed eyes, and did not move until his son spoke to him. Leon de Mogente was a sparely-built man, with a white and oddly-rounded forehead. His eyes were dark, and he betrayed scarcely any emotion at the sight of his father in this lamentable plight.

"Ah!" said the elder man. "It is you. You look like a monk. Are you one?"

"Not yet," answered the pale youth in a low voice with a sort of suppressed exultation. Evasio Mon, watching him from the doorway, smiled faintly. He seemed to have no misgivings as to what Leon might say.

"But you wish to become one?"

"It is my dearest desire."

The dying man laughed. "You are like your mother," he said. "She was a fool. You may go back to bed, my friend."

"But I would rather stay here and pray by your bedside," pleaded the son.

He was a feeble man--the only weak man, it would appear, in the room.

"Then stay and pray if you want to," answered Mogente, without even troubling himself to show contempt.

The notary was at his table again, and seemed to seek his cue by an upward glance.

"You will, perhaps, leave your fortune," he suggested at length, "to--to some good work."

But Evasio Mon was shaking his head.

"To--to--?" began the notary once more, and then lapsed into a puzzled silence. He was at fault again. Mogente seemed to be failing. He lay quite still, looking straight in front of him.

"The Count Ramon de Sarrion," he asked suddenly, "is he in Saragossa?"

"No," answered the notary, after a glance into the darkened door.

"No--but your will--your will. Try and remember what you are doing. You wish to leave your money to your son?"

"No, no."

"Then to--your daughter?"

And the question seemed to be directed, not towards the bed, but behind it.

"To your daughter?" he repeated more confidently. "That is right, is it not? To your daughter?"

Mogente nodded his head.

"Write it out shortly," he said in a low and distinct voice. "For I will sign nothing that I have not read, word for word, and I have but little time."

The notary took a new sheet of paper and wrote out in bold and, it is to be presumed, unlegal terms that Francisco de Mogente left his earthly possessions to Juanita de Mogente, his only daughter. Being no notary, this elderly priest wrote out a plain-spoken doc.u.ment, about which there could be no doubt whatever in any court of law in the world, which is probably more than a lawyer could have done.

Francisco de Mogente read the paper, and then, propped in the arms of the big friar, he signed his name to it. After this he lay quite still, so still that at last the notary, who stood watching him, slowly knelt down and fell to praying for the soul that was gone.

CHAPTER III

WITHIN THE HIGH WALLS In these degenerate days Saragossa has taken to itself a suburb--the first and deadliest sign of a city's progress. Thirty years ago, however, Torrero did not exist, and those terrible erections of white stone and plaster which now disfigure the high land to the south of the city had not yet burst upon the calm of ancient architectural Spain. Here, on Monte Torrero, stood an old convent, now turned into a barrack. Here also, amid the trees of the ancient gardens, rises the rounded dome of the church of San Fernando.

Close by, and at a slightly higher level, curves the Ca.n.a.l Imperial, 400 years old, and not yet finished; a.s.suredly conceived by a Moorish love of clear water in high places, but left to Spanish enterprise and in completeness when the Moors had departed.

Beyond the convent walls, the ca.n.a.l winds round the slope of the brown hill, marking a distinctive line between the outer desert and the green oasis of Saragossa. Just within the border line of the oasis, just below the ca.n.a.l, on the sunny slope, lies the long low house of the Convent School of the Sisters of the True Faith. Here, amid the quiet of orchards--white in spring with blossom, the haunt of countless nightingales, heavy with fruit in autumn, at all times the home of a luxuriant vegetation--history has surged to and fro, like the tides drawn hither and thither, rising and falling according to the dictates of a far-off planet. And the moon of this tide is Rome.

For the Sisters of the True Faith are a Jesuit corporation, and their Convent School is, now a convent, now a school, as the tide may rise or fall. The ebb first came in 1555, when Spain threw out the Jesuits. The flow was at its height so late as 1814, when Ferdinand VII--a Bourbon, of course--restored Jesuitism and the Inquisition at one stroke. And before and after, and through all these times, the tide of prosperity has risen and fallen, has sapped and sagged and undermined with a noiseless energy which the outer world only half suspects.

In 1835 this same long, low, quiet house amid the fruit-trees was sacked by the furious populace, and more than one Sister of the True Faith, it is whispered, was beaten to the ground as she fled shrieking down the hill. In 1836 all monastic orders were rigidly suppressed by Mendizabal, minister to Queen Christina. In 1851 they were all allowed to live again by the same Queen's daughter, Isabel II. So wags this world into which there came nineteen hundred years ago not peace, but a sword; a world all stirred about by a reformed rake of Spain who, in his own words, came "to send fire throughout the earth;" whose motto was, "Ignem veni metteri in terram, et quid volo nisi ut accendatur."

The road that runs by the bank of the ca.n.a.l was deserted when the Count de Sarrion turned his horse's head that way from the dusty high road leading southwards out of Saragossa. Sarrion had only been in Saragossa twenty-four hours. His great house on the Paseo del Ebro had not been thrown open for this brief visit, and he had been content to inhabit two rooms at the back of the house. From the balcony of one he had seen the incident related in the last chapter; and as he rode towards the convent school he carried in his hand--not a whip--but the delicately-wrought sword-stick which had fallen from the hand of Francisco de Mogente into the gutter the night before.

In the gra.s.sy sedge that bordered the ca.n.a.l the frogs were calling to each other with that conversational note of interrogation in their throats which makes their music one of Nature's most sociable and companionable sounds. In the fruit-trees on the lower land the nightingales were singing as they only sing in Spain. It was nearly dark, a warm evening of late spring, and there was no wind. Amid the thousand scents of blossom, of opening buds, and a hundred flowering shrubs there arose the subtle, soft odour of sluggish water, stirred by frogs, telling of cool places beneath the trees where the weary and the dusty might lie in oblivion till the morning.

The Count of Sarrion rode with a long stirrup, his spare form, six feet in height, a straight line from heel to shoulder. His seat in the saddle and something in his manner, at once gentle and cold, something mystic that attracted and yet held inexorably at arm's length, lent at once a deeper meaning to his name, which a.s.suredly had a Moorish ring in it. The little town of Sarrion lies far to the south, on the borders of Valencia, in the heart of the Moorish country. And to look at the face of Ramon de Sarrion and of his son, the still, brown-faced Marcos de Sarrion, was to conjure up some old romance of that sun-scorched height of the Javalambre, where history dates back to centuries before Christ--where a.s.suredly some Moslem maiden in the later time must have forsaken all for love of a wild yet courteous Spanish knight of Sarrion, bequeathing to her sons through all the ages the deep, reflective eyes, the impenetrable dignity, of her race.

Sarrion's hair was gray. He wore a moustache and imperial in the French fas.h.i.+on, and looked at the world with the fierce eyes and somewhat of the air of an eagle, which resemblance was further accentuated by a finely-cut nose. As an old man he was picturesque. He must have been very handsome in his youth.

It seemed that he was bound for the School of the Sisters of the True Faith, for as he approached its gate, built solidly within the thickness of the high wall, without so much as a crack or crevice through which the curious might peep, he drew rein, and sat motionless on his well-trained horse, listening. The clock at San Fernando immediately vouchsafed the information that it was nine o'clock. There was no one astir, no one on the road before or behind him. Across the narrow ca.n.a.l was a bare field.

The convent wall bounded the view on the left hand.

Sarrion rode up to the gate and rang a bell, which clanged with a sort of surrept.i.tiousness just within. He only rang once, and then waited, posting himself immediately opposite a little grating let into the solid wood of the door. The window behind the grating seemed to open and shut without sound, for he heard nothing until a woman's voice asked who was there.

"It is the Count Ramon de Sarrion who must without fail speak to the Sister Superior to-night," he answered, and composed himself again in the saddle with a southern patience. He waited a long time before the heavy doors were at length opened. The horse pa.s.sed timorously within, with jerking ears and a distended nostril, looking from side to side. He glanced curiously at the shadowy forms of two women who held the door, and leant their whole weight against it to close it again as soon as possible.

Sarrion dismounted, and drew the bridle through a ring and hook attached to the wall just inside the gates. No one spoke. The two nuns noiselessly replaced the heavy bolts. There was a m.u.f.fled clank of large keys, and they led the way towards the house.

Just over the threshold was the small room where visitors were asked to wait--a square, bare apartment with one window set high in the wall, with one lamp burning dimly on the table now. There were three or four chairs, and that was all. The bare walls were whitewashed. The Convent School of the Sisters of the True Faith did not err, at all events, in the heathen indiscretion of a too free hospitality. The visitors to this room were barely beneath the roof. The door had in one of its panels the usual grating and shutter.

Sarrion sat down without looking round him, in the manner of a man who knew his surroundings, and took no interest in them.

In a few minutes the door opened noiselessly--there was a too obtrusive noiselessness within these walls--and a nun came in. She was tall, and within the shadow of her cap her eyes loomed darkly. She closed the door, and, throwing back her veil, came forward. She leant towards Sarrion, and kissed him, and her face, coming within the radius of the lamp, was the face of a Sarrion.

There was in her action, in the movement of her high-held head, a sudden and startling self-abandonment of affection. For Spanish women understand above all others the calling of love and motherhood. And it seemed that Sor Teresa--known in the world as Dolores Sarrion--had, like many women, bestowed a thwarted love--faute de mieux--upon her brother.

"You are well?" asked Sarrion, looking at her closely. Her face, framed by a spotless cap, was gray and drawn, but not unhappy.

She nodded her head with a smile, while her eyes flitted over his face and person with that quick interrogation which serves better than words.

A woman never asks minutely after the health of one in whom she is really interested. She knows without asking. She stood before him with her hands crossed within the folds of her ample sleeves. Her face was lost again in the encircling shadow of her cap and veil. She was erect and motionless in her stiff and heavy clothing. The momentary betrayal of womanhood and affection was pa.s.sed, and this was the dreaded Sister Superior of the Convent School again.