CHAPTER VI
A STRANGER COMES TO BURGOS
He was a slender, distinguished man, and dressed in black, which is the colour of Spain.
Seeing him, on windy days, when bleak, icy airstreams poured down from the circling Sierras, and made life in Madrid insupportable, one might have marked him down as a Spaniard. His black felt hat and his velvet-lined cappa with its high collar would show him to be such from a distance, while nearer at hand his olive complexion, his delicately aquiline nose, and slightly upturned black moustache, would confirm the distant impression.
He had come to Burgos from Madrid by an express, and had travelled all night, and yet he was the trimmest and most alert of the crowd which thronged the Calle de Vitoria, a crowd made up of peasants, tourists, and soldiers.
He made a slow progress, for the crowd grew thicker in the vicinity of the Casa del Cordon, where the loyal country-folk waited patiently for a glimpse of their young king.
The stranger stood for a little while looking up at the expressionless windows of the Casa, innocent of curtain, but strangely clean. He speculated on the value of life—of royal life.
"If I were to kill the king," he mused, "Europe would dissolve into one big shudder. If, being dead, I came forward offering to restore him to life for fifty million francs the money would be instantly forthcoming on the proof of my ability. Yet were I to go now to the king's minister saying—'It is easy for me to kill the king, but if you will give me the money you would spend on his obsequies, I will stay my hand,' I should be kicked out, arrested, and possibly confined as a lunatic."
He nodded his head slowly, and as he turned away he took a little note-book from his pocket, and inscribed—"The greatest of miracles is self-restraint." Then he rolled a cigarette and walked slowly back to the Café Suizo in the Espolon.
A clean-shaven priest, with a thin, intellectual face, was stirring his coffee at one of the tables, and since this was the least occupied the stranger made for it. He raised his hat to the priest and sat down.