The Grey Lady

by Henry Seton Merriman

The city of Palma is but a few miles away, in its strong thirteenth-century restriction within high ramparts. It has its cathedral, its court-house - all the orthodox requirements of a city, and, moreover, it is the capital of the whilom kingdom of Majorca. King Jaime is dead and gone. Majorca, after many vicissitudes, has settled down into an obscure possession of Spain; and to the old-world ways of that country it has taken very kindly.

But with the unwritten history of Majorca we have little to do, and we have much with the Casa d’Erraha and the owner thereof--a plain Englishman of the name of Challoner--the last of his line, the third of his race, to own the Casa d’Erraha.

Edward Challoner lay on his bed in the large room overlooking the valley and the distant sea. In the House of Repose he lay awaiting the call to a longer rest than earthly weariness can secure. The grave old Padre of the neighbouring village of St. Pablo stood near the bed. Eve Challoner had sent for him, with the instinct that makes us wish to be seen off on a long journey by a good man, of whatsoever creed or calling.

At times the old priest gently patted the hand of Eve Challoner as she stood by his side.

Climate and country and habit have a greater influence over the human frame than we ever realise. Eve Challoner had been subject to these subtle influences to a rare extent. Tall and upright, clad in black, as all Spanish ladies are, she was English and yet Spanish. Of a clear white, her skin was touched slightly by the sun and the warm air which blows ever from the sea, blow which way it may across the little island.

Romance tells of Andalusian beauty, of Catalonian grace--and in sober British earnest (a solid thing) there are few more beautiful women than high-born Spanish ladies. Eve Challoner had caught something - some trick of the head--which belongs to Spain alone. Her eyes had a certain northern vivacity of glance, a small something which is noticeable enough in Southern Europe, though we should hardly observe it in England, for it means education. In the matter of learning, be it noted in passing, the ladies of the Peninsula are not so very far above their duskier sisters of the harem farther east.

The girl’s eyes were dull now, with a sort of surprised anguish, for sorrow had come to her before its time. The man lying on the bed before her had not reached the limit of his years. Quite suddenly, twelve hours before, he had complained of a numb feeling in his head, and the voice he spoke in was thick and strange. In a surprisingly short time Edward Challoner was no longer himself--no longer the cynical, polished gentleman of the world--but a hard-breathing, inert deformity, hardly human. From that time to this he had never spoken, and Heaven knew there was enough for him to say. Death had caught him unawares as, after all, he generally does catch us. There were several things to set in order as usual; for it is only in books and on the stage that folks make a graceful exit, clearing up the little mystery, forgiving the wrongs, boasting with feeble voice of the good they have done--with lowering tone and soft music slowly working together to the prompter’s bell. It is not in real life that dying men find much time to prattle about their own souls. They usually want all their breath for those they leave behind. And who knows! Perhaps those waiting on the other side think no worse of the man who dies fearing for others and not for himself.

In Edward Challoner’s paralysed brain there was a great wish to speak to his daughter, but the words would not come. He looked at those around him with a dreary indistinctness as from a distance, almost as if he had begun his long journey and was looking back from afar.

And so the afternoon wore on to the short southern twilight, and the goat-bells came tinkling up from the valley--for nature must have her way though men may die, and milking-time rules through all the changes.

While the light failed over the land two men were riding through it as fast as horse could lay hoof to the ground. They were on the small road running from the Soller highway up to the Val d’Erraha, and he who led the way seemed to know every inch of it. This was Henry FitzHenry, and his companion, ill at ease in a Spanish saddle, was the doctor of Her Majesty’s gunboat Kittiwake.