Miranda of the Balcony: A Story

by A. E. W. Mason

San Roque is a wayside station; the village lies a mile away, hidden behind a hill. Charnock and Warriner alighted amongst fields and thickets of trees, but nowhere was there a house visible, and worst of all, there was no carriage in the lane outside the station. The station-master had ordered one, and no doubt one would arrive. He counselled patience.

For half-an-hour the incongruous companions, united by a common passion and a mutual hate, kicked their heels upon the lonely platform of San Roque. Then at last a crazy, battered, creaking diligence, drawn by six broken-kneed, sore-backed mules, cantered up to the station with a driver and a boy upon the box, whooping exhortations to the mules with the full power of their lungs.

Charnock and Warriner sprang up into the hooded seat behind the box, the driver turned his mules, and the diligence went off at a canter, along an unmade track across the fields.

It was now close upon a quarter to seven, and nine miles lay between San Roque and the gates of Gibraltar. Moreover, there was no road for the first part of the journey, merely this unmade track across the fields. The two men urged on the driver with open-handed promises; the driver screamed and shouted at his mules: "Hi! mules, here's a bull after you!" He counterfeited the barking of dogs; but the mules were accustomed to his threats and exhortations; they knew there were no dogs at their heels, and they kept to their regular canter.

Charnock longed for the fields to end and for the road to begin; and when the road did begin, he longed again for the fields. The road consisted of long lines of ruts, ruts which were almost trenches, ruts which had been baked hard by the summer suns. The mules stumbled amongst them, the diligence tossed and pitched and rolled like a boat in a heavy sea; Charnock and Warriner clung to their seats, while the driver continually looked round to see whether a wheel had slipped off from its axle. At times the boy would jump down from the box, and running forward with the whip in his hand, would beat the mules with the butt-end; the lash had long ceased to influence their movements.

"The road's infernal," cried Warriner.

"It will be when we get to the sea," replied the driver, and Charnock groaned in his distress. There was worse to come, and Miranda was ill.

The diligence lurched between two clumps of juniper trees, swung round a wall, and instantly the wheels sank into soft sand. The huge, sheer landward face of Gibraltar Rock towered up before them as they looked across the mile of neutral ground, that flat neck of land between the Mediterranean and the Bay. They saw the Spanish frontier town of Linea; but to Linea the sand stretched in a broad golden curve, soft and dry, and through that curve of sand the wheels of the diligence had to plough. The mules were beaten onwards, but the Levanter blew dead in their teeth. The driver turned the diligence towards the sea, and drove with the water splashing over the wheels; there the sand bound, and the pace was faster.

It was still, however, too slow; Gibraltar seemed still as far away. The travellers paid the driver, leaped from their seats, and ran over the soft clogging sand to Linea. They reached Linea. They passed the sentinel and the iron gates, they stood upon the neutral ground. They had but one more mile to traverse.

A cab stood without the iron gates. They jumped into it and drove at a gallop across the level; but the gun was fired from the Rock, while they were still half-a-mile from the gate, and the cabman brought his horses to a standstill.