Sir John Pleydell had been rather nonplussed by his encounter with Conyngham, and, being a man of the world as well as a lawyer, sat down, as it were, to think. He had come to Spain in the first heat of a great revenge, and such men as he take, like the greater volcanoes, a long time to cool down. He had been prepossessed in the favour of the man who subsequently owned to being Frederick Conyngham. And the very manner in which this admission was made redounded in some degree to the honour of the young Englishman. Here, at least, was one who had no fear, and fearlessness appeals to the heart of every Briton from the peer to the navvy.
Sir John took a certain cold interest in his surroundings, and in due course was recommended to spend an evening at the Café des Ambassadeurs, as it styled itself, for the habit of preferring French to Spanish designations for places of refreshment had come in since the great revolution. Sir John went, therefore, to the café, and with characteristic scorn of elemental disturbance chose to resort thither on the evening of the great gale. The few other occupants of the gorgeous room eyed his half-bottle of claret with a grave and decorous wonder, but made no attempt to converse with this chill-looking Englishman. At length, about ten o’clock or a few minutes later, entered one who bowed to Sir John with an air full of affable promise. This was Larralde, who called a waiter and bade him fetch a coat-brush.
‘Would you believe it, sir?’ he said, addressing Sir John in broken English, ‘but I have just escaped a terrible death.’
He shrugged his shoulders, spread out his hands, and laughed good-humouredly, after the manner of one who has no foes.
‘The fall of a chimney—so—within a metre of my shoulder.’ He threw back his cloak with a graceful swing of the arm and handed it to the waiter. Then he drew forward a chair to the table occupied by Sir John, who sipped his claret and bowed coldly.
‘You must not think that Madrid is always like this,’ said Larralde. ‘But perhaps you know the city—’
‘No—this is my first visit.’
Larralde turned aside to give his order to the waiter. His movements were always picturesque, and in the presence of Englishmen he had a habit of accentuating those characteristics of speech and manner which are held by our countrymen to be native to the Peninsula. There is nothing so disarming as conventionality—and nothing less suspicious. Larralde seemed ever to be a typical Spaniard—indolently polite, gravely indifferent—a cigarette-smoking nonentity.
They talked of topics of the day, and chiefly of that great event, the hurricane, which was still raging. Larralde, whose habit it was to turn his neighbour to account—a seed of greatness this!—had almost concluded that the Englishman was useless when the conversation turned, as it was almost bound to turn between these two, upon Conyngham.
‘There are but few of your countrymen in Madrid at the moment,’ Larralde had said.