The old priest came into the room wiping his brow with simple ill manners.
‘You have been hurrying and have no regard for the sun,’ said Estella.
‘You need not find shelter for an old ox,’ replied Concha, seating himself. ‘It is the young ones that expose themselves unnecessarily.’
Estella glanced at him sharply but said nothing. He sat, handkerchief in hand, and stared at a shaft of sunlight that lay across the floor from a gap in the jalousies. From the street under the windows came the distant sounds of traffic and the cries of the vendors of water, fruit, and newspapers.
Father Concha looked puzzled, and seemed to be seeking his way out of a difficulty. Estella sat back in her chair, half hidden by her slow-waving, black fan. There is no pride so difficult as that which is unconscious of its own existence, no heart so hard to touch as that which has thrown its stake and asks neither sympathy nor admiration from the outside world. Concha glanced at Estella and wondered if he had been mistaken. There was in the old man’s heart, as indeed there is in nearly all human hearts, a thwarted instinct. How many are there with maternal instincts who have no children; how many a poet has been lost by the crying need of hungry mouths! It was a thwarted instinct that made the old priest busy himself with the affairs of other people, and always of young people.
‘I came hoping to see your father,’ he said at length, blandly untruthful. ‘I have just seen Conyngham, in whom we are all interested, I think. His lack of caution is singular. I have been trying to persuade him not to do something most rash and imprudent. You remember the incident in your garden at Ronda—a letter which he gave to Julia?’
‘Yes,’ answered Estella quietly, ‘I remember.’
‘For some reason which he did not explain I understand that he is desirous of regaining possession of that letter, and now Julia, writing from Toledo, tells him that she will give it to him if he will go there and fetch it. The Toledo road, as you will remember, is hardly to be recommended to Mr. Conyngham.’
‘But Julia wishes him no harm,’ said Estella.
‘My child, rarely trust a political man and never a political woman. If Julia wished him to have the letter she could have sent it to him by post. But Conyngham, who is all eagerness, must needs refuse to listen to any argument, and starts this afternoon for Toledo—alone. He has not even his servant Concepçion Vara, who has suddenly disappeared, and a woman who claims to be the scoundrel’s wife from Algeciras has been making inquiries at Conyngham’s lodging. A hen’s eyes are where her eggs lie. I offered to go to Toledo with Conyngham, but he laughed at me for a useless old priest, and said that the saddle would gall me.’