Chapter Sixteen.
A Night Alarm.
Having heard Mama Elisa’s story, the next thing I wanted was, naturally, to see Don Luis and thank him for his extraordinary kindness to me, a stranger, and more than that, an enemy. Accordingly, upon being informed of my desire, and learning from Mama Elisa that I was now well enough to receive a visitor, my host presented himself at my bedside that same evening, and expressed the very great pleasure he felt at finding me making such good progress toward recovery. He accepted my expressions of gratitude with much graciousness, professed himself happy to have been the means of saving the life of a fellow creature, begged me to regard himself, his house, and everything that belonged to him as entirely at my service for as long as I might be pleased to make use of them, and then said he would be glad to learn how I came to be in the plight in which Tomasso had found me, if I felt equal to the task of telling the story. I thought that, for a moment, he looked a trifle disconcerted when I mentioned the fact that I was a British naval officer; but, if so, the expression was quickly suppressed, and he listened with deep attention and much sympathy to my story of our falling in with and boarding the Santa Brigitta, our subsequent fight with the pirate schooner, and the foundering of the Wasp during the gale.
Somewhat to my surprise, he was quite a young man, scarcely more than thirty years of age. I had somehow got it into my head that, being the owner of so fine an estate as Bella Vista, he must of necessity be at least a middle-aged, if not an elderly man; but I understood when he explained that the estate had originally been purchased, and afterwards developed, by his father, who, I now learned, had perished in the insurrection of 1791.
At length, after we had been chatting together for fully an hour, Mama Elisa intervened, protesting that I had been sufficiently excited for one day, and quite unceremoniously ordered her master out of the room; upon which Don Luis, laughing heartily at his favourite servant’s brusqueness, shook me cordially by the hand, hoped I should soon be well enough to quit my sick chamber, and informed me that he would now do himself the pleasure to visit me for a few minutes daily, if only for the purpose of assuring himself that Mama Elisa had not poisoned me with any of her vile concoctions. After which parting shot at Mama he effected a masterly retreat.
From this time onward I mended rapidly, and on the sixth day after Don Luis’s first visit I was well enough to rise from my bed and leave my room for an hour or two. And now I should have been in a ludicrous difficulty in the matter of clothes—for the scanty garments in which I had come ashore were not only ruined by long immersion in sea water, but were also in rags—had it not been for the fortunate circumstance that Don Luis and I were, as nearly as possible of the same height, which enabled him generously to place his wardrobe at my disposal. But while Don Luis was a fine, square-shouldered, well-built fellow, I had shrunk to little more than a skeleton, so that although the clothes fitted me well enough as to their lateral dimensions, in other respects they made me look pretty much of a scarecrow, and I could not avoid seeing the ghost of a smile flickering in Don Luis’s eyes when, upon my first appearance in public, so to speak, he presented me in due form to his wife, Doña Inez. But there was no smile on that sweet lady’s lips, nor in her eyes as they fell upon me and noted the evidences of suffering in my hollow cheeks and wasted form; on the contrary, she was at once all commiseration and sympathy as she expressed her gratification that it had fallen to the lot of one of her people to find me in the hour of my need, and to bring me to the shelter of her roof instead of leaving me to perish, as might very well have happened had the fisherman who found me been any other than Tomasso.
She was quite a young woman, not more than twenty-five, I thought; a typical Spaniard, with dark melting eyes shaded by very long, curving lashes, an immense quantity of black glossy hair, a clear colourless skin, petite, handsome, and exceedingly graceful in her every movement; but, even better than all that, she was kind, gentle in her manner, tender-hearted and sympathetic, and appeared to be absolutely idolised by every man, woman, and child upon the estate.
She received me in her drawing-room, a fine, lofty, spacious apartment occupying approximately half the width of the front part of the house, the other half being occupied by the dining-room, between which and the drawing-room there was a fine hall, roomy enough to be used as a lounge, and very cool and pleasant, since the house stood on the slope of a hill, facing north, and overlooking the sea, while the wide front door stood always open, freely admitting the sea-breeze. The drawing-room was a really handsome room, the floor being of some very beautiful native wood, polished to the brilliancy of a mirror, and covered here and there with mats, rugs, and skins; the walls, of polished satin-wood, arranged in panels, were hung with a few very fine pictures; a few small tables, loaded with miniatures and native curiosities, were arranged apparently haphazard about the room; there was a large, low couch, and about a dozen lounging chairs, and a piece of fancy work and a very handsome guitar lay upon the couch.
The large French casement was wide-open, giving access to a wide gallery reaching right athwart the house from side to side, and shaded from the direct rays of the sun by an overhanging veranda; and into this gallery I was taken, inducted into a low, spacious basket chair, well equipped with cushions, and made thoroughly comfortable: the Señora seating herself on one side of me, and Don Luis establishing himself on the other, each of them obviously doing their utmost to make me feel thoroughly at home. And oh! it was good to sit out there feeling the soft, warm breeze playing about me, to drink in the perfume-laden air, and to gaze abroad upon the sun-bathed, gently sloping lawns interspersed here and there with neat, symmetrically shaped flower-beds, gay with luxuriant, rainbow-tinted blooms, to watch the tall palms swaying as the wind swept through their clashing fronds, to note the magnificent butterflies and the brilliant-plumaged birds flitting hither and thither, with the blue foam-flecked sea, mottled with rich purple cloud shadows, stretching away to the far horizon. I was allowed to sit there for two hours, drawing in renewed health with every breath; and then Mama Elisa and Teresita, her lieutenant, swooped down upon me, declaring that I must not be further fatigued, and marched me back to my room, put me to bed, gave me a dainty little meal of broth and the breast of a roasted chicken, administered a stiff dose of some new concoction, characterised chiefly by its superlative nastiness, and then left me to go to sleep, which I did with amazing promptitude.