The Velvet Glove Part 32

But Juanita only shook her head and laughed.

Sarrion did not persuade her, but turned to quit the room. His hand was on the door when some one tapped on the other side of it. It was Marcos'

servant.

"The doctor, Excellency," he announced briefly.

In the pa.s.sage stood a man of middle height, hard and wiry, with those lines in his face that time neither obliterates nor deepens; the parallels of hunger. He had been through the first Carlist war nearly thirty years earlier. He had starved in Pampeluna, the hungry, the impregnable.

Sarrion shook hands with him and pa.s.sed into the room.

"Ah!" he said, in the quiet voice of one who is accustomed to speak in the presence of sleep, when he saw Juanita, "Ah--you!"

"Yes," said Juanita.

"So you are nursing your husband," he murmured abstractedly, as he bent over the bed.

And Juanita made no answer.

"How long has he been asleep?" he asked, after a few moments, and in reply received the written paper which he read quickly, with a practised eye, and laid it aside.

"We must wait," he said, turning to Sarrion, "until he awakes. But it is all right. I can see that while he sleeps. He is a strong man; none stronger in all Navarre."

As he spoke, he was examining the bottles left by the village apothecary, tasting one, smelling another. He nodded approval. In medicine, as in war, one expert may know unerringly what another will do. Then he looked round the room, which was orderly as a hospital ward.

"One sees," he said, "that he has a nun to care for him."

He smiled faintly, so that his features fell into the lines that hunger draws. But Juanita looked at him with grave eyes and did not answer to his pleasantry.

Then he turned to Sarrion.

"It was only by the kindness of a mere acquaintance," he said, "that I was enabled to get here so soon. My own horses were tired out with a hard day yesterday, and I was going out to seek others in Pampeluna--no easy task on market-day--when I met a travelling carriage on the Plaza de la Const.i.tution Its owner must have divined my haste, for he offered a.s.sistance, and on hearing my story, and whither I was bound, he gave up his intended journey, decided to remain a few days longer in Pampeluna and placed his carriage at my disposal. I hardly know the man at all--though he tells me that he is an old friend of yours. He lives in Saragossa."

"Ah!" said Sarrion, who was listening with rather marked attention.

Juanita had moved away, but she was standing now, listening also, looking back over her shoulder with waiting eyes.

"It was the Senior Evasio Mon," said the doctor. And in the silence that followed, Marcos stirred in his sleep, as if he, too, had heard the name.

CHAPTER XXIII

KIND INQUIRIES For the next fortnight Juanita remained in supreme command at Torre Garda, exercising that rule which she said she had acquired at the convent school. It had, in reality, come to her straight from Heaven, as it comes to all women. Is it not part of the gentler soul to care for the helpless and the sick? Just as it is in a man's heart to fight the world for a woman's sake.

Marcos made a quick recovery. His broken bones knit together like the snapped branch of a young tree. His cuts and bruises healed themselves unaided.

"He has no nerves," said Juanita. "You should see a nun when she is ill!

St. Luke and all the saints have their hands full, I can tell you."

With returning health came energy. Indeed, the patient had never lost his grip of the world. Many from the valley came to make inquiry. Some left a message of condolence. Some departed with a grunt, indicative of satisfaction. A few of the more cultivated gave their names to the servant as they drank a gla.s.s of red wine in the kitchen.

"Say it was Pedro from the mill."

"Tell him that Three Fingered Thomas pa.s.sed by," muttered another, grudgingly.

"It is I, so-called Short Knife, who came to ask," explained a third, tapping the sheath of his baptismal weapon.

"How far have you come?" asked Juanita, who found these gentlemen entertaining.

"Seventeen miles from the mountain," was the reply.

"All your friends are calling to inquire after your health," said Juanita to Marcos. "They are famous brigands, and make one think fondly of the Guardia Civile. There are not many razors in the valley, and I am sure there is no soap."

"They are honest enough, though their appearance may be disquieting."

"Oh! I am not afraid of them," answered Juanita, with a shrewd and mystic smile. "It is Cousin Peligros who fears them. She scolded me for speaking to one of them on the verandah. It undermines the pedestal upon which a lady should always stand. Am I on a pedestal, Marcos?"

She looked back at him over her shoulder, through the fold of her mantilla. It was an opportunity, perhaps, which a skillful lover would have seized. Marcos was silent for a moment. Then he spoke in a repressed voice.

"If they come again," he said, "I should like to see them."

But Juanita had already put into the apothecary's lips a command that no visitors should be admitted.

She kept this up for some days, but was at length forced to give way.

Marcos was so obviously on the high road to recovery. There was no suggestion of an after-effect of the slight concussion of the brain which had rendered him insensible.

It was Short Knife who first gained admittance to the sick-room. He was quite a simple person, smelling of sheep, and endowed with a tact which is as common among the peasantry as amid the great. There was no sign of embarra.s.sment in his manner, and he omitted to remove his beret from his close-cropped head until he saw Juanita whom he saluted curtly, replacing his cap with a calm unconsciousness before he nodded to Marcos.

"It was you I heard singing the Basque songs as I climbed the hill," he said, addressing Juanita first with the instinct of a gentleman. "You speak Basque?"

"I understand it, at all events, though I cannot speak it as well as Marcos."

"Oh, he!" said the man, glancing towards the bed. "He is one of us--one of us. Do you know the song that the women of the valley sing to their babies? I cannot sing to you for I have no voice except for the goats.

They are not particular, the goats--they like music. They stand round me and listen. But if you are pa.s.sing in the mountain my wife will sing it to you--she knows it well. We have many round the table--G.o.d be thanked.

It makes them sleep when they are contrary. It tells how easy it is to kill a Frenchman."

Then, having observed the conventionalities, he turned eagerly to Marcos.

Juanita listened to them for a short time while they spoke together in the Basque tongue. Then she went to the balcony and stood there, leaning her arms on the iron rail, looking out over the valley with thoughtful eyes. She had seen clearly a hundred devices to relieve her of her watch at the bedside. Marcos made excuses for her to absent herself. He found occupations for her elsewhere. With his returning strength came anxiety that she should lead her own life--apart from him.

"You need not try to get rid of me," she said to him one day. "And I do not want to go for a walk with Cousin Peligros. She thinks only of her shoes and her clothes while she walks. I would go for a walk with Perro if I went with any one. He has a better understanding of what G.o.d made the world for than Cousin Peligros. But I am not going to walk with any one, thank you."

Nevertheless she absented herself. And Marcos' attempts to find diversions for her, ceased with a suspicious suddenness. She fell into the habit of using the drawing-room which was immediately beneath the sick-room, and spent much of her time at the piano there.

"It keeps Marcos quiet," she explained airily to Sarrion, and vouchsafed nothing further on the subject.

Chiefly because the music of Handel and Beethoven alone had been encouraged by her professors, Juanita had learnt with some enthusiasm the folk songs of the Basques, considered worthy only of the attention of the people. She had a pretty voice, round and young with strange low notes in it that seemed to belong not to her but to some woman who had yet to live and suffer, or, perhaps, be happy as some few are in this uneven world.