III
It was with no feeling of pity that Mrs. Mote now turned in her own mind to the second episode.
A journey to Madrid in search of pictured dons and high hidalgos had led Mrs. Robinson to make the acquaintance of a Spanish gentleman, a certain Don José Moricada; and the old Englishwoman, with her healthy contempt of extravagance of behaviour and language, could now smile grimly as she evoked the striking individuality of the man who had given her the worst quarter of an hour she had ever known.
At the time of their first meeting Don José had seemed to Penelope to embody in his single person all the qualities which may be supposed to have animated the noble models whose good fortune it was to be immortalized by Velasquez; indeed, he ultimately proved himself possessed to quite an inconvenient degree of the passion and living fervour which the great artist, who was of all painters Penelope's most admired master, could so subtly convey.
With restrained ardour the Don had placed himself, almost at their first meeting, at the beautiful Englishwoman's disposal, and Penelope had seldom met with a more intelligent and unobtrusive cicerone. At his bidding the heavy doors of old Madrid mansions, embowered in gardens, and hidden behind gates which had never opened even to the most courteous of strangers, swung back, revealing treasures hitherto jealously hidden from the foreign lover of Spanish art. Together they had journeyed to the Escurial in leisurely old-world fashion, driving along the arid roads and stony tracks so often traversed at mule gallop by Philip of Arragon; and the mouldering courts of the great death-haunted palace through which her Spanish gallant led Mrs. Robinson had rarely seen the passage of a better contrasted couple.
Softer hours were spent in the deserted scented gardens of Buen Retiro, and not once did the Spaniard imply by word or gesture that he expected his companion's assent to the significant Spanish proverb, Dame ye darte he (Give to me, and I will give to thee).
Penelope had never enjoyed a more delicate and inconsequent romance, or a more delightful interlude in what was then a life overfull of unsought pleasures and of interests sprung upon it. In those days Mrs. Robinson had not found herself. She was even then still tasting, with a certain tearfulness, the joys of complete freedom, and those who always lie in wait, even if innocently, to profit by such freedoms, soon called her insistently back to England.
They had an abettor in Mrs. Mote, whose long-suffering love of her mistress had seldom been more tried than during the sojourn in Spain, spent by the maid in gloomy hotel solitude, or, more unpleasing still, in company where she felt herself regarded by the Spaniard as an intolerable and somewhat grotesque duenna, and by her mistress as a bore, to be endured for kindness' sake. But the boredom of her old nurse's companionship was not one which Penelope often felt called upon to share with her indefatigable cavalier, and, as there came a time when Don José and Mrs. Robinson seemed to the old nurse to be scarcely ever apart, Mrs. Mote often felt both angry and lonely.
Suddenly Penelope grew tired, not of Spain, but of Madrid, perhaps also of her Spanish friend, especially when she discovered, with annoyance, that he had arranged, if not to accompany her, at least to travel on the same days as herself first to Toledo, and thence to Seville. Also something else had happened which had proved very distasteful to Mrs. Robinson.
The English Ambassador, an old friend of her parents, and a man who, as he had begun by reminding Penelope at the outset of their detestable conversation, was almost old enough to be her grandfather, had called on Mrs. Robinson and said a word of caution.
The word was carefully chosen; for the old gentleman was not only a diplomatist, but he had lived in Spain so many years that he had caught some of the Spanish elusiveness of language and courtesy of phrase. Penelope, with reddening cheek, had at first made the mistake of affecting to misunderstand him. Then, with British bluntness, he had spoken out. 'Spaniards are not Englishmen, my dear young lady. You met your new friend at my house, and so I feel a certain added responsibility. Of course, I know you have been absolutely discreet; still, I feel the time has come when I should warn you. These Spanish fellows when in love sometimes give a lot of trouble.' He had jerked the sentence out, angry with her, angrier perhaps with himself.
The day before Mrs. Robinson was leaving Madrid, and not, as she somewhat coldly informed Don José Moricada, for Toledo, there was a question of one last expedition.
On the outskirts of the town, in an old house reputed to have been at one time the country residence of that French Ambassador, Monsieur de Villars, whose wife had left so vivid an account of seventeenth-century Madrid, were to be seen a magnificent collection of paintings and studies by Goya. According to tradition, they had been painted during the enchanted period of the Don Juanesque artist's love passages with the Duchess of Alba, and very early in her acquaintance with the Spaniard Penelope had expressed a strong desire to see work done by the great painter under such romantic and unusual circumstances. And Don José had been at considerable pains to obtain the absent owner's permission. His request had been acceded to only after a long delay, and at a moment when Mrs. Robinson had become weary both of Madrid and of her Spanish gallant's company.
It seemed, however, churlish to refuse to avail herself of a favour obtained with so much difficulty. For awhile she had hesitated; not only did the warning of the old Ambassador still sound most unpleasantly in her ears, but of late there had come something less restrained, more ardent, in the attitude of the Spaniard, proving only too significantly how right the old Englishman had been. But even were she to return another year to Madrid, the opportunity of visiting this curious old house and its, to her, most notable contents, was not likely to recur.
The appointment for the visit to Los Francias was therefore made and kept; but when Don José, himself driving the splendid English horses of which he was so proud, called at the hotel for Mrs. Robinson, he found, to his angry astonishment, that her old nurse, the maid he so disliked, was to be of the company.
During the drive, Mrs. Mote, in high good-humour at her approaching release from Madrid, noticed with satisfaction that her mistress's Spanish friend seemed preoccupied and gloomy, though Mrs. Robinson's high spirits and apparent pleasure in the picturesque streets and byways they passed through might well have proved infectious.
At last Los Francias was reached; and after walking through deserted, scented gardens, where Nature was disregarding, with triumphant success, the Bourbon formality of myrtle hedges, marble fountains, and sunk parterres, the ill-assorted trio found themselves being ushered by a man-servant, with great ceremony, into a large vestibule situated in the centre of a house recalling rather a French château than a Spanish country-house.
In answer to a muttered word from the Spaniard, Mrs. Mote heard her mistress answer decidedly: 'My maid would much prefer to come with us than to stay here with a man of whose language she doesn't know a word. Besides, this is not the last time. I hope to come back some day, and you will surely visit England.'
On hearing these words Don José had turned and looked at his beautiful companion with a curious gleam in his small, narrow-lidded eyes, and a foreboding had come to the old servant.
The high rooms, opening the one into the other, still contained shabby pieces of fine old French furniture, of which the faded gilding and moth-eaten tapestries contrasted oddly with the vivid, strangely living paintings which seemed ready to leap from the walls above them. The heavy stillness, the utter emptiness, of the great salons oddly affected the old Englishwoman, walking behind the other two; she felt a vague misgiving, and was more than ever glad to remember that in a few days Mrs. Robinson would have left Madrid.
Suddenly, when strolling through the largest, and apparently the last of the whole suite of rooms, Mrs. Mote missed her mistress and Don José.
Had they gone forward or turned back? She looked round her, utterly bewildered, then spied in the wall a narrow aperture to which admission was apparently given by a hinged panel, hung, as was the rest of the salon, with red brocade.
This, then, was where and how the other two had disappeared. She felt relieved, even a little ashamed of her unreasoning fear.
For a moment she hesitated, then stepped through the aperture into a narrow corridor, shaped like an S, and characteristic—but Motey knew nothing of this—of French château architecture; for these curiously narrow passages, tucked away in the thickness of the wall, form a link between the state rooms of many a great palace and the 'little apartments' arranged for their owner's daily and familiar use.
The inner twist of the S-shaped corridor was quite dark, but very soon Mrs. Mote found that the passage terminated with an ordinary door, through which, the upper half being glazed, she saw her mistress and the Spaniard engaged in an apparently very animated conversation.
The room in which stood the two she sought was almost ludicrously unlike those to which it was so closely linked by the passage in which the onlooker was standing. Perhaps the present owner of the old house, or more probably his wife, had found the Goyas oppressive company, for here no pictures hung on brocaded walls; instead, the round, domed room, lighted only from above, was lined with a gay modern wall-paper, of which the design simulated a fruitful vine, trained against green trellis-work. Modern French basket furniture, the worse for wear, was arranged about a circular marble fountain, which, let into the tiled floor, must have afforded coolness on the hottest day.
Memories of former occupants, and of another age, were conjured up by a First Empire table, pushed back against the wall; and opposite the door behind which the old nurse stood peering was the entrance, wide open, to a darkened room, while just inside this room Mrs. Mote was surprised to see a curious sign of actual occupancy—a small, spider-legged table, on which stood a decanter of white wine, a plate of chocolate cakes, and a gold bowl full of roses.
But these things were rather remembered later, for at the time the old woman's whole attention was centred on her mistress and the latter's companion. Mrs. Robinson, her back turned to the darkened room beyond, was standing by a slender marble pillar, rimmed at the top with a tarnished gilt railing; a long grey silk cloak and boat-shaped hat, covered with white ostrich feathers, accentuated her tall slenderness, for in these early days of widowhood Penelope was exquisitely, miraculously slender. With head bent and eyes cast down, she seemed to be listening, embarrassed and ashamed, to Don José Moricada. One arm and hand, the latter holding a glove, rested on the marble pillar, and her whole figure, if instinct with proud submissiveness, breathed angry, embarrassed endurance.
As for the Spaniard, always sober of gesture, his arms folded across his breast in the dignified fashion first taught to short men by Napoleon, he seemed to be pouring out a torrent of eager, impassioned words, every sentence emphasized by an imperious glance from the bright dark eyes, which, as Mrs. Mote did not fail to remind herself, had always inspired her with distrust.
The unseen spectator of the singular scene also divined the protestations, the entreaties, the reproaches, which were being uttered in a language of which she could not understand one word.
For a few moments she felt pity, even a certain measure of sympathy for the man. To her thinking—and Mrs. Mote had her own ideas about most matters—Penelope had brought this torrent of words and reproaches on herself; but when the old nurse heard the voice of the Spaniard become more threatening and less appealing, when she saw Mrs. Robinson suddenly turn and face him, her head thrown back, her blue eyes wide open with something even Motey had never seen in them before—for till that day Penelope and Fear had never met—then the onlooker felt the lesson had indeed lasted long enough, and that, even at the risk of angering her mistress, the time had come when she should interfere. Her hand sought and found the handle of the door. She turned and twisted it this way and that, but the door remained fast, and suddenly she realized that Penelope was a prisoner.
In this primitive, but none the less potent, way had the Spaniard made himself, in one sense at least, master of the situation—the old eternal situation between the man pursuing and the woman fleeing.
Caring little whether she was now seen or not, Mrs. Mote pressed her face closely to the glass pane. She looked at the lithe sinewy figure of Penelope's companion with a curiously altered feeling; a great sinking of the heart had taken the place of the pity and contempt of only a moment before.
For awhile neither Penelope nor Don José saw the face behind the door. Mrs. Robinson had turned away, and had begun walking slowly round the domed hall, her companion following her, but keeping his distance. At last, when passing for the second time the open door leading to the darkened room beyond, she had looked up, uttered an exclamation of angry disgust, and had slackened her footsteps, while he, quickening his, had decreased the space between them....
When, in later life, Penelope unwillingly recalled the scene, her memory preferred to dwell on the grotesque rather than on the sinister side of the episode. But at the moment of ordeal—ah, then her whole being became very literally absorbed in supplication to the dead two who when living had never failed her: her father and Melancthon Robinson.
They may have been permitted to respond, or perhaps a more explicable cause may have brought about a revival of pride and good feeling in the Spanish gentleman; for when there came release it seemed as if Mrs. Mote was the unwitting dea ex machina.
The two, moving within panther and doe wise, both saw, simultaneously, the plain, homely face of Mrs. Robinson's old nurse staring in upon them, and the sight, affording the woman infinite comfort and courage, seemed to withdraw all power from the man, for very slowly, with apparent reluctance, Don José Moricada turned on his heel, and unlocked the door.
The maid did not reply to the rebuke, uttered in a low tone, 'Oh, Motey, we've been waiting for you such a long time.' Instead, she turned to the Spaniard. 'My lady is tired, sir. Surely you've showed her enough by now.'
He bent his head, silently opening again the glazed door and waiting for them to pass through, as his only answer.
But Penelope's nerve had gone. She was clutching her old nurse's arm with desperate tightening fingers. 'I can't go through there, Motey, unless'—she spoke almost inaudibly—'unless you can make him walk through first.'
Mrs. Mote was quite equal to the occasion. 'Will you please go on, sir? My mistress is nervous of the dark passage.'
Again the Spaniard silently obeyed the old servant, and Penelope never saw the look, full of passionate humiliation and dumb craving for forgiveness, with which he uttered the words—though they brought vague relief—explaining that he was leaving his groom to drive her and her maid back to the hotel alone.
During the moments which followed, Mrs. Robinson, looking straight before her, spoke much of indifferent matters, and pointed out to Mrs. Mote many an interesting and characteristic sight by the roadside; but both the speaker's knee and the hands clasped across it trembled violently the while, and when they were at last safely back again in the hotel, after Mrs. Robinson had said some gracious words to Don José Moricada's English groom, and had given him more substantial tokens of her gratitude for the many pleasant drives she had taken with his noble master, a curious thing happened.
Having prepared the bath which had been her mistress's first order when they found themselves in their own rooms, Motey, now quite her stolid self again, on opening the sitting-room door, found her mistress engaged in a strange occupation. Mrs. Robinson, still standing, was cutting the long grey silk cloak, which she had been wearing but a moment before, into a thousand narrow strips. The maid's work-basket, a survival of Penelope's childhood—for it had been the little girl's first birthday-gift to her nurse—had evidently provided the sharp cutting-out scissors for the sacrifice.
To a woman who has done much needlework there is something dreadful, unnatural, in the wanton destruction of a faithful garment, and Mrs. Mote stood looking on, silent indeed, but breathing protest in every line of her short figure. But Penelope, after a short glance, had at once averted her eyes, and completed her task with what seemed to the other a dreadful thoroughness.
Then the relentless scissors attacked the charming hat. Each long white plume was quickly reduced to a heap of feathery atoms, and the exquisitely plaited straw was slashed through and through. 'You can give all the other things I have worn to-day to the chambermaid,' Mrs. Robinson said quickly, 'and Motey—never, never speak of—of—our stay here, in Madrid I mean, to me again. We shall leave to-night, not to-morrow morning.'
And now, looking down below, seeing the moving figures pacing slowly all together, then watching two of the shadowy forms detach themselves from the rest, and wander off into the pine-wood, then back again, down the steps which led to the lower moonlit terraces and so to the darker sea-shore, Mrs. Mote felt full of vague fears and suspicions.
Again she felt as if she were standing behind a door, barred away from her mistress. But, alas! this time it was Penelope who had turned the key in the lock, Penelope pursuing rather than pursued, and longing for the moment of surrender.