So the ladies were bundled into a room where they might get rid of the dust, and the men into another; clean rooms, with whitewashed walls, bare save for a pictured saint or two in lurid colours; floors covered with coarse, bright matting; and iron beds with lace-frilled and embroidered pillows.
In a quarter of an hour everyone was ready for dinner, but five out of fifteen minutes I had given to the hasty scribbling of a pencilled note for Monica. I hoped to slip it into her hand in the dining-room, but she was closely under guard; and Carmona annexed four seats at the head of the long table, by which manœuvre he secured isolation for his party. It was safe from any sortie of ours, as there was a scattered contingent of commercial travellers already earnestly engaged in dining on either side of the table. Two polite men on the left, and three on the right, all with napkins tucked under their chins, rose, offering to move rather than divide friends; but Carmona assured them that the sacrifice was unnecessary. As they were all paralysed by Monica's beauty, of a type so different from any to which [pg 181]they were accustomed, they had not the self-command to protest; and as dinner went on (in many courses of which the landlord was evidently proud), they could scarcely do justice to their merluza served with grilled lemon and minced red Spanish pepper; their tortilla of eggs, potatoes, peas, and ham; their pigeons with olives, or even their freshly baked maccaroni, for gazing languorously at the vision of pink and white and gold.
Such charms as Pilar's, though unsurpassable of their kind, went for nothing with these ardent gentlemen; and even the landlord's son, daughters, and nieces who waited upon their guests, forgot half their duties in abject admiration. “An angel!” “a saint!” “a princess of fairyland!” were a few of their whispered adjectives; and when the object of their worship was snatched away by her mother and the Duchess, before the goats'-milk cheese had been brought round, a gloom fell upon the room. The commercial travellers galloped through the remainder of the meal, and went out, hoping perhaps, if they promenaded the street, to have the joy of seeing a light in the radiant being's window. The pretty girls of the household vanished with murmured excuses, leaving us at the mercy of the boy, who sighed grievously, dropped a sugar bowl, and spilled coffee within an ace of the Cherub's shoulder.
Pilar presently disappeared also, leaving her three men alone at the table, observed only by a few dozen eager faces pressed against the iron bars protecting the open window.
Soon we heard peals of laughter from the patio; the pretty girls were sallying forth on a foraging expedition in search of a warming-pan to heat the beds of the three great ladies, who feared dampness. In twenty minutes they came back, and we arrived in the patio in time to see the triumphal entrance of four or five charming creatures, bearing among them a long-handled brass vessel which had probably existed since the days of Philip the Second. But this was only the beginning of the fun; and we made an excuse of our cigarettes to linger, and hear what we could not see.
[pg 182] It was not a beautiful patio; and the public still surged outside the iron-grated door in the hope of further insight into the private lives of the travelling menagerie; but our luggage had been carried to the rooms which were now ready (thanks to the complaisance of the dazzled commercial gentlemen), and there were garden seats, on which we settled ourselves in spite of the chill in the evening air.
From the rooms above we heard laughter and ecstatic cries. Evidently the warming-pan was making a sensation as it went its round, or something else had happened; and when at last the girls trooped downstairs from the balcony, I beckoned them to come our way. They skipped to us, wild with delight at the prospect of pouring out their hearts to an appreciative audience.
The great warming-pan, stuffed with embers that glowed and paled, was laid on the tiled pavement while the girls wove themselves into a group, with interlacing arms.
“Why are you so happy?” I asked
“Happy? We have been in paradise, with the angels,” replied the prettiest girl with crimson roses stuck in a bank of copper hair.