‘That is well,’ he cried, ‘I knew we could safely rely upon your good sense. Kiss me, Julia—that is well! Come, Estella—we must not keep the horses waiting.’
With a laugh and a nod he went towards the door. ‘Blown over, my dear Concha,’ he said over his shoulder.
A few minutes later the priest walked down the avenue of walnut trees alone. The bell was ringing for vespers, but the Padre was an autocratic shepherd and did not hurry towards his flock. The sun had set, and in the hollows of the distant mountains the shades of night already lay like a blue veil.
The priest walked on and presently reached the high road. A single figure was upon it—the figure of a man sitting in the shadow of an ilex tree half a mile up the road towards Bobadilla. The man crouched low against a heap of stones and had the air of a wanderer. His face was concealed in the folds of his cloak.
‘Blown over,’ muttered the Padre as he turned his back upon Bobadilla and went on towards his church. ‘Blown over, of course; but what is Concepçion Vara doing in the neighbourhood of Ronda to-night?’
CHAPTER XII
ON THE TOLEDO ROAD
‘Une bonne intention est une échelle trop courte.’
Conyngham made his way without difficulty or incident from Xeres to Cordova, riding for the most part in front of the clumsy diligencia wherein he had bestowed his luggage. The road was wearisome enough, and the last stages, through the fertile plains bordering the Guadalquivir, dusty and monotonous.
At Cordova the traveller found comfortable quarters in an old inn overlooking the river. The ancient city was then, as it is now, a great military centre, and the headquarters of the picturesque corps of horse-tamers, the ‘Remonta,’ who are responsible for the mounting of the cavalry and the artillery of Spain. Conyngham had, at the suggestion of General Vincente, made such small changes in his costume as would serve to allay curiosity and prevent that gossip of the stable and kitchen which may follow a traveller to his hurt from one side of a continent to the other.
‘Wherever you may go learn your way in and out of every town, and you will thus store up knowledge most useful to a soldier,’ the General had said in his easy way.