During the days that followed his arrival at Ronda and release from the prison there, Frederick Conyngham learnt much from his host and little of the man himself, for General Vincente had that in him with which no great leader in any walk of life can well dispense—an unsoundable depth.
Conyngham learnt also that the human heart is capable of rising at one bound above differences of race or custom, creed and spoken language. He walked with Estella in that quiet garden between high walls on the trim Moorish paths, and often the murmur of the running water which ever graced the Moslem palaces was the only sound that broke the silence. For this thing had come into the Englishman’s life suddenly, leaving him dazed and uncertain. Estella, on the other hand, had a quiet savoir-faire that sat strangely on her young face. She was only nineteen, and yet had a certain air of authority, handed down to her from two great races of noble men and women.
‘Do all your countrymen take life thus gaily?’ she asked Conyngham one day; ‘surely it is a more serious affair than you think it.’
‘I have never found it very serious, señorita,’ he answered. ‘There is usually a smile in human affairs if one takes the trouble to look for it.’
‘Have you always found it so?’
He did not answer at once, pausing to lift the branch of a mimosa tree that hung in yellow profusion across the pathway.
‘Yes, señorita, I think so,’ he answered at length, slowly. There was a sense of eternal restfulness in this old Moorish garden which acted as a brake on the thoughts, and made conversation halt and drag in an Oriental way that Europeans rarely understand.
‘And yet you say you remember your father’s death?’
‘He made a joke to the doctor, señorita, and was not afraid.’
Estella smiled in a queer way, and then looked grave again.