Chapter Thirty Two.
Don Juan.
“I wonder if the spring-tide of this year
Will bring another spring both lost and dear;
If heart and spirit will find out their spring,
Or if the world alone will bud and sing.”
It was a bright sunny day in December, fresh enough to make the Sevillanos pull their picturesque cloaks over their shoulders out of doors, and light scraps of wood-fire in their sitting-rooms, but with the sun pouring down in unveiled splendour over quaint painted relics of a bygone world, when the Moor employed his rich fancy in decorating the city, and over dark Gothic arches and towers that seemed to tell of a life almost equally remote from nineteenth-century England. It was a very new sort of Christmas weather for Jack Lester as he tried to find his way from the railway station to Don Guzman de la Rosa’s house. He soon discovered that he had lost it, and stopped by a fruit-stall piled with grapes, oranges, and melons to ask the brown, skinny old woman in a gay handkerchief who kept it, for some directions, hoping that she would at least understand the name of the street. So she did, but it seemed to him that she pointed in every direction at once, and Jack stared round bewildered as a young lady stepped across the street towards the fruit-stall. Jack looked at her and she looked full at him from under her straw hat, with a pair of eyes dark as any in Andalusia, but direct and clear, level and fearless, as her face broke into a smile just saved from a laugh.
“If you are looking for Don Guzman de la Rosa’s,” she said in distinct and comprehensible English, “I can direct you; but your brothers, Mr Lester, are much nearer, at my father’s, Mr Stanforth’s. Will you come there with me when I have bought some fruit?”
“Oh, thank you immensely! I—I thought I would walk up, and I couldn’t find the way. Thank you,” said Jack, colouring and looking rather foolish.
“They did not expect you to be here till to-morrow. What have you done with your things?”
“I’ve lost them, Miss Stanforth,” said Jack; “I can’t think how. You see no one understands anything, and the stations coming from Madrid are so odd.”
“Oh, I think you will get them; we had one box detained for ages. Thank you,” as he took her basket of fruit. “Shall we come?” and then, looking up at him, “Your brother is so much better.”
“I—I am very glad of that,” said Jack, in a sort of inadequate way.