Sir John Pleydell read the card, and had himself in such control that his face hardly changed. His teeth closed over his lower lip for a second; then he rose. The perspiration stood out on his face—the grey of his eyes seemed to have faded to the colour of ashes. He looked hard at Conyngham, and then, taking up his hat, went to the door with curious, uneven steps. On the threshold he turned.
‘Your insolence,’ he said breathlessly, ‘is only exceeded by your—daring.’
As the door closed behind him there came, from that part of the room where General Vincente sat, a muffled click of steel, as if a sword half out of its scabbard had been sent softly home again.
CHAPTER XVII
IN MADRID
‘Some keepeth silence knowing his time.’
‘Who travels slowly may arrive too late,’ said the Padre Concha, with a pessimistic shake of the head, as the carrier’s cart in which he had come from Toledo drew up in the Plazuela de la Cebada at Madrid. The careful penury of many years had not, indeed, enabled the old priest to travel by the quick diligences, which had often passed him on the road with a cloud of dust and the rattle of six horses. The great journey had been accomplished in the humbler vehicles plying from town to town, that ran as often as not by night in order to save the horses.
The priest, like his fellow-travellers, was white with dust. Dust covered his cloak so that its original hue of rusty black was quite lost. Dust coated his face and nestled in the deep wrinkles of it. His eyebrows were lost to sight, and his lashes were like those of a miller.
As he stood in the street the dust arose in whirling columns and enveloped all who were abroad; for a gale was howling across the tableland, which the Moors of old had named ‘Majerit’—a draught of wind. The conductor, who, like a good and jovial conductor, had never refused an offer of refreshment on the road, was now muddled with drink and the heat of the sun. He was, in fact, engaged in a warm controversy with a passenger. So the Padre found his own humble portmanteau, a thing of cardboard and canvas, and trudged up the Calle de Toledo, bearing the bag in one hand and his cloak in the other—a lean figure in the sunlight.
Father Concha had been in Madrid before, though he rarely boasted of it, or indeed of any of his travels.
‘The wise man does not hang his knowledge on a hook,’ he was in the habit of saying.