He would say to himself that, so far as he was concerned, no harm had been done, even if no good had been accomplished; for if the banished passenger were indeed Casa Triana, he had done well to get rid of him. If, after all, his quick suspicion had been too far-fetched, and he had caused the arrest of an innocent tourist, that tourist would never know to whom he owed his adventure, and would be powerless to trouble the Duke of Carmona. As for Ropes, when the photograph taken of me years ago by the police in Barcelona should reach the police in Irun, it would be seen that two young men who are twenty-seven, tall, slim, and have dark moustaches, do not necessarily resemble each other in other details. Mr. George Smith would be generously pardoned for having occupied the attention of the police in place of the Marqués de Casa Triana, and he would be free to rejoin his fellow-travellers.
[pg 051] During the three or four minutes of discussion we had had before making the “quick change” which transformed master into man, we had arranged to communicate with Ropes by means of advertisements in La Independencia. We would forward money in advance to that journal, enough to pay for several advertisements, and could then telegraph our whereabouts at the last minute, whenever the movements of Carmona's car gave us our cue.
This was the best arrangement we could make in a hurry, and when we had time to reflect, it did not seem to us that, in the circumstances, we could have done better.
And so, come what might, the outlaw had crossed the border, and was in the forbidden country of his hopes and heart.
In spite of compunction on Ropes' account, I was happy, desperately happy. I was free to watch over the girl I loved and who loved me; and I was drinking in the air of the fatherland. It did actually seem sweeter and more life-giving than in any other part of the world.
Dick laughed when I mentioned this impression, and said I ought to try the climate of America before I judged; but he admitted the extraordinary, yet almost indefinable individuality of the landscape as well as the architecture, which struck the eye instantly on crossing the frontier.
It was easy to classify as peculiarly Spanish the old Basque churches, the long, dark lines of sombre houses bristling with little balconies, and sparkling with projecting windows, whose intricate glass panes gave upward currents of air in hot weather. All this, and much more was obvious in town or village; but Dick and I argued over the distinctive features of the landscape without fathoming the mystery which set it apart from other landscapes.
What was so peculiar? There were hedges, and poplars, and other trees which we had seen a thousand times elsewhere. There was a pretty, though not extravagantly pretty, switchback road of fair surface stretching before us, roughly parallel with [pg 52]the sea, giving glimpses here and there of landlocked harbours with colliers and trampships at anchor. There was a far background of snow mountains and a changing foreground of spring grass and spring blossoms; interlacing branches embroidered with new leaves of that pinky yellow which comes before the summer green.
There ought to have been nothing remarkable, save for the moving figures which here and there rendered it pictorial; dark, upstanding men in red waistcoats, driving donkeys; velvet-eyed girls, with no covering for their heads but their shining crowns of jet-black hair, and none at all for their tanned feet and ankles, though they carried shoes in their hands; black-robed priests; brown-robed monks; smart officers; soldiers with stiff, glittering shakos, and green gloves; oxen with pads of wool on their classic, biscuit-coloured heads. Nevertheless, Dick agreed with me in finding the landscape remarkable.
At last we began to wonder if the difference did not lie in colouring and atmosphere. The sky effects were radiant enough to set the soul of an artist singing, because of the opal lights, the violet banks of cloud with ragged, crystal fringes of rain, the diamond gleams struck out from snow peaks; and yet, despite this ethereal radiance, there was a strange solemnity about the wide reaches of Spanish country, a rich gloom that brooded over the landscape with its thoughtful colouring, never for a moment brilliant, never gay.