After Jack returned home, with the understanding that the disclosure of his holiday occupation should await his brother’s return, and after the Stanforths had also left Seville, Alvar and Cheriton spent several weeks there without any adventures to disturb their tranquillity. Alvar was a good deal with his grandfather, whose health was not at this time good, but who had evinced great curiosity as to the details of their detention on the mountains. He used also to go to the different clubs and meet acquaintances, where they talked politics and scandal, and played at cards, dominoes, and billiards. It was an aimless existence, and Cheriton sometimes fancied that Alvar grew restless under it, and would not be sorry to return to England. This, however, might have been owing to Cheriton’s own decided dislike to the young Sevillanos, who struck him as almost justifying his grandmother’s preconceived theory of Alvar’s probable behaviour.
“Ah, they do not suit you, that is not what you like,” Alvar said cheerfully; but he never said, “It is not good, this sort of life does not make a nation great or virtuous.”
Manoel was of another type, and perhaps a more respectable one; but they saw very little of him. Cheriton liked the ladies, who were kind, and possessed many domestic virtues; and at Don Guzman’s country place there was something exceedingly pleasant in the cheerfulness and gaiety of the peasants. He would have liked to have found out something of the working of the Church, of the views of the clergy, and how far they differed, not only from those of an Anglican, but of an intelligent Roman priest in more civilised countries, but on these subjects no one would talk to him. He heard mutterings of hatred towards the priests in some quarters, and a good deal of chatter about processions and ceremonies from the young ladies, but nothing further. He did not want for occupation. He could now read and speak Spanish easily; and although the Cid, Ferdinand and Isabella, the Armada, and the Inquisition had been about the only salient points in his mind previously, he made a study of Spanish history, without much increase of his admiration for the Spaniards. He was able, also, to do much more sight-seeing than at first, and of the cathedral he never tired, and never came to the end of its innumerable chapels, each with some great picture, which Mr Stanforth had taught him how to see; never ceased to find something new in the mystery and solemnity of its aisles with their glory of coloured lights.
These quiet weeks formed a sort of resting-place, during which he was able to think both of the past and of the future; he could dare now to look away from the immediate present. Cheriton’s eyes were very clear, his moral sense very keen, and he saw that he had been under a delusion, that Ruth and he were as the poles asunder, that her deliberate deception, her want of any sense of honour, had marked a nature that never could have satisfied his. Love in his case was no longer blind, but it was none the less passionate, and, whatever else life might hold for him, the memory of all his first, best hopes could never bring him anything but pain. This pain had been as much as he could bear, but others, he thought, had suffered as keenly, and had led lives that were neither ignoble nor unhappy. Because one great love had gone out of his life was nothing else worthy or dear? “Nothing” had been the answer of his first anguish, but Cheriton’s nature was too rich in love for such an answer to stand. The help for which he had prayed had been sent to him, and it came in the sense that home faces were still dear—how dear his late alarm had taught him—home duties still paramount, that he could be a good son and brother and friend still. And he thought with a sort of surprise of the many pleasant and not unhappy hours he had passed of late; how much, after all, he had “enjoyed himself.” He hardly knew that his quick intelligence was a gift to be thankful for, or that his unselfish interest in others brought its own reward. On another side of his nature, also, he resisted the aimlessness of his lost hopes. The thought of Ruth had sweetened his success at Oxford, but he would not be such a coward as to give up all his objects in life, he would make a name for himself still, and show her that she had not brought him to utter shipwreck. This motive was strong in Cheriton, though it ran alongside with much higher ones.
One picture in the cathedral exercised a great fascination over Cheriton’s mind. It hangs in the Capella del Consuelo, over a side altar, dedicated to the Angel de la Guarda, and is one of the many masterpieces of Murillo to be found in Seville. It represents a tall, strong angel with wide-spread wings, and grave, benevolent face, leading by the hand a child—a subject which has been of course repeated in every form of commonplace prettiness. But in this picture the figure of the angel conveys a sense of heavenly might and unearthly guardianship which no imitation or repetition could give. It is called the “Guardian Angel;” but Cheriton had been told by one of the priests that the name given to it by the painter himself was “The Soul and the Church,” which for some reason or other had been changed by the monks of the Capuchin Convent, to whom the picture had originally belonged. It was a thought and a carrying out of the thought which, seen among such surroundings, was full of suggestion, how and why that Divine Guidance seemed here in great measure to have gone astray, how the great angel’s finger had not always pointed upward, and yet how utterly helpless and rudderless the nation was when it cast off the Guide of its fathers. Then his thoughts turned to his own life and to the Hand that held it, to the Guidance that was sometimes so hard to recognise, so difficult to yield to, and yet how the sense of a love and a wisdom above his own, speaking to him, whether in the events of his own life, the better impulses of his own heart, or in the visible forms of religion, was the one light in the darkness.
“O’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent, till
The night is gone.”
As he murmured the words half aloud a hand touched his shoulder. He looked up and saw Alvar standing beside him.
“Mi querido, I have been looking for you. Will you come home? I want you,” he said.
“There is something the matter,” said Cheriton quickly, as he looked at him. “What is it?”
“Ah, I must tell you!” said Alvar reluctantly. “It is bad news, indeed. Sit down again—here—I have received this.” He took a telegraph paper out of his pocket and put it into Cherry’s hand.