“Doubtless he is in the next car, or he may have jumped off when he discovered the exodus.”
He searched the other cars when the train stopped again, and returned to report that Jesus Maria was missing. Catalina shrugged her shoulders. “We did our best,” she said, “and I, for one, am not going to bother. We’ll have them again soon enough.”
The great, sunburned, dusty plains were behind them to-day, and the train toiled upward through tremendous gorges, brown, barren, the projecting ledges looking as if they had but just been rent asunder, so little had time done to soften them. In the defiles were villages, or solitary houses, poor for the most part; now and again a turn of the road closed the perspective with a line of snow-peaks. The air was clear and cool; there was little dust. Their car gradually gave up its load, until by lunch-time only one man was left, and he gratefully accepted of their superfluous store. He looked, this old Iberian, like the aged men who sit in the cabin doors in Ireland; the same long, self-satisfied upperlip, the small, cunning eyes, the narrow head of the priest-ridden race. He had done nothing, learned nothing, in his threescore and ten, braced himself passively against the modern innovation, and could be cruel when his chance came to him. He cared no more for what the priests could not tell him than he cared that Spain could not make the wretched engines that drew her trains. On the whole, no doubt, he was happy. At all events, he was extremely well-bred, and took no liberty that he would not have resented in another.
But Catalina forgot him in the grand and forbidding scene, and she leaned out of the window so recklessly that more than once Over, as if she were a child, put his hand on her shoulder and drew her in. He began dimly to understand that Catalina had something more than the mere love of nature and appreciation of the beautiful common enough in the higher civilization. She tried, but not very successfully, to express to him that the vague desire to personify great mountains, the trees, and the sea, which haunts imaginative minds, the deathless echo of prehistoric ancestors, whose only revenge it is upon time, was doubly insistent in one so recently allied to the tribe of Chinigchinich, whose roots were in Asia.
Of immemorial descent, with the record in her brain, perhaps, of those ancestors who personified and worshipped the phenomena of nature before the evolution of that first priesthood on the Ganges and the Euphrates, the Nile and the Indus, she had rare moments of primal exaltation. It is a far cry from those marvellous first societies and the vast orderly and complicated civilization, worshipping mysterious and unseen gods, that followed them, to the Chinigchinich Indians of Alta California; and yet, crushed, conquered, almost blotted out, these remnants, in their very despair, reverted the more closely to nature. The beautiful Carmela was the child of Mission Indians who fled back to their mountain pueblos and savage rites when the power of the priests in California was broken. Every inherited instinct had waged war against the Christianity which, in nine cases out of ten, was pounded into them with a green-hide reata. They called the child Carmela, after the Mission of Carmel, merely because they liked the name; but she grew up a pagan, and a pagan remained during the few years of her life. And she was as pure and good, as loyal and devoted, as any of the women descended from her, heedful of the wild inheritance in their blood lest it poison the strong and bitter tide of New England ancestors. Catalina was the first to feel pride in that alien strain which did so much to distinguish her from the million, and was conscious that she owed to it her faculty to see and feel more in nature than the average Anglo-Saxon.
Over, in the almost empty car, lit by a solitary and smoking lamp, listened attentively as she groped her way through the mysterious labyrinths in her brain, expressing herself ill, for she was little used to egotistical ventures. It cannot be said that he understood, being himself a typical product of the extremest civilization that exists in the world to-day; but he saw will-o’-the-wisps in a fog-bank, and thought her more interesting than ever.
XIII
The train was two hours late. It crawled into the dark little station of Baeza, and Over and Catalina sat down at once in the restaurant, leaving the problem of the night until later. But, hungry as the Englishman was, that problem dulled the flavor of a fair repast. How was he to protect the girl from curiosity and speculation, possibly coarse remark; above all, from self-consciousness? It would be assumed at the inn, as a matter of course, that they were a young couple, and he turned cold as he pictured the landlord conducting them upstairs to the usual room with a bed in each corner. He heartily wished it was he who spoke the Spanish language and that his companion was afflicted with his own distracting ignorance; but he must interpret through her, and to discuss the matter with her beforehand was, to him, impossible. For the first time he wished she were with the Moultons in Alcazar.
Catalina did not share his embarrassment. With her hat pulled low that she might attract the less attention, she was eating her dinner with the serenity of a child. As he seemed indisposed to conversation she did not utter a word until the salad was placed beside them, and then she met his disturbed and roving eye.