“Señor,” announced Colonel O'Donnel, grieved at Dick's distress; “no entiendo.”
“Habla usted español?” asked the girl. “No Inglees, we, [pg 70]much.” And she smiled a dimpled smile, straight at Dick, with one side glint for me.
Dick was, to use against him a favourite word of his own, flabbergasted. “Then you're not Colonel and Miss O'Donnel?” said he. “I though you couldn't be, but—”
“Si, si,” the Cherub reassured him, nodding. “O'Donnel. Aw—right.” He laughed so contagiously that we laughed too; and I found my heart warming to these unexpected, surprising friends of Angèle de la Mole's.
“Me María del Pilar Inés O'Donnel y Alvarez,” the girl introduced herself. “Angèle de la Mole, mi—mi fren.” Having wavered so far, between Spanish and English, she flung herself headlong into her native tongue. This was the signal for the Cherub also to begin fluent explanations, both fluting Andaluz together, and so fast, that Dick (painstakingly taught a little Castilian by me in leisure moments) found himself at sea, and drowning.
I had to translate for him such facts in the O'Donnel family history as I could unravel from the tangled web. The mystery of Angèle de la Mole's Spanish-speaking Irish friends (which she must have refrained from explaining in order to play a joke upon Dick) was solved in a sentence. An O'Donnel grandfather had fought in Spain under Wellington in the Peninsular War, and stayed in Spain because he loved a Spanish girl who had many acres. The Cherub's father was born in Spain, and spoke little English. The Cherub himself spoke none, or but a word or two. He was a colonel in the Spanish army, now retired. That was all; except that his son and daughter had once studied an English grammar, until they came to the verbs; then they had stopped, because life was short and full of other things. “But,” said Miss O'Donnel proudly, “me know, two, three, word. Lo-vely. Varry nice. Aw raight. Yes.”
When she thus displayed the store of her accomplishments, punctuated with dimples, any man not head over ears in love with another girl, would have given his eyes to kiss her. I was [pg 71]sorry for Dick. As for me—I found myself longing to tell Doña María del Pilar Inés O'Donnel y Alvarez all about Lady Monica Vale, with the conviction that her help would be of inestimable value.
Such is the power of a girl's eyes upon weak man, even when he adores a very different pair of eyes; and already it was strange to remember my stiff disclaimer of a wish to know the O'Donnels. I had called them “extraneous.” What a dull ass!