[23] "Daybreak in Spain."
CHAPTER XXXIV.
GLAD TIDINGS.
It was with an expression of amusement and surprise on his heavy features that Mr. Passmore read a note inviting him to pass an evening at the house of Don Alcala de Aguilera, some little time after the events related in the preceding chapters. Peter Passmore turned the paper over with his thick, short fingers, and laughed aloud.
"I shall take care to fortify myself by a good dinner beforehand—ho! ho! ho!—lest the entertainment prove as unsubstantial as the Barmecide's feast!" said the manufacturer to himself. "But there is something extraordinary after all in this Spanish clerk or caballero. If he's mad, 'there's method in his madness,' as Walter Scott would have said. It was frantic folly to stand the onslaught of a bull to please some silly señorita; scarcely better to get thrown into prison for the sake of reading a book. I thought Aguilera insane when he went forward to meet a mob that looked ready to dash out the brains of any man who stood in their way; but somehow or other this Quixote has contrived to get through all his adventures with credit, if not always with success. He subdued all those blood-thirsty ruffians with a few sentences uttered in his sonorous Spanish, better than a squad of their alguazils could have done with bludgeons and pikes. And certainly the dwelling of this Aguilera looks more fit to lodge a grandee of Spain than a clerk of the firm of Passmore and Perkins. A man has not time to look about him as he would at an exhibition when a set of howling ragamuffins are battering the door, and he expects soon to have his throat cut with their horrid long knives, but it seemed to me as if the place in which I stood was a palace. It might not answer our notions of English comfort, for we Islanders like to have a roof over our sitting-rooms, and don't care for gardens in the middle of 'em; and I confess to preferring a well-stuffed arm-chair to the finest seat carved in marble. But it gave an idea of grandeur. Well, well, I should like to see more of this Spanish palace, and I will certainly accept the invitation of Don Alcala de Aguilera, even at the risk of coming in for another adventure."
So, on the appointed evening, Mr. Passmore, dressed more carefully than usual, but wearing with indifferent grace his gay neck-tie and tight-fitting gloves, made his appearance in the patio of the house in the Calle de San José. Aguilera received his guest with the refined courtesy natural to Spanish gentlemen, and introduced him to Donna Inez.
The patio was lighted up for the occasion, if not with the brilliancy which Teresa desired, yet sufficiently well to display the beauty of the delicate Moorish architecture, the graceful columns and horse-shoe arches, the exquisite carving, and the rich hues of flowers clustering around the fountain, no longer silent, nor bearing the marks of decay. Passmore looked around him with admiration, but with something of the feeling of the boor in the story who found that the stranger to whom he had shown scant courtesy was a prince in disguise. Aguilera making up accounts at the desk, and Aguilera doing the honours of his noble mansion, seemed to the manufacturer to be two different beings. Peter Passmore was not at his ease, and all the less so because of his imperfect knowledge of the language of his entertainers. His Spanish was seldom correct and never fluent, and the manufacturer was not devoid of that shyness which belongs to our national character, and which makes the Briton fear to compromise himself by committing some breach of etiquette in a foreign land, with whose customs he is but imperfectly acquainted. Passmore greatly missed his usual interpreter Lucius.