The Velvet Glove

by Henry Seton Merriman

The man looked cautiously into the vine-clad shed. It was empty. He crept towards the boat and found no one there. Then he examined the chain that moored it. There was no padlock. In Spain to this day they bar the window heavily and leave the door open. To the cunning mind is given in this custom the whole history of a great nation.

He stood upright and looked across the river. He was a tall man with a clean cut face and a hard mouth. He gave a sharp sigh as he looked at Saragossa outlined against the sky. His attitude and his sigh seemed to denote along journey accomplished at last, an object attained perhaps or within reach, which is almost the same thing, but not quite. For most men are happier in striving than in possession. And no one has yet decided whether it is better to be among the lean or the fat.

Don Francisco de Mogente sat down on the bench provided for those that await the ferry, and, tilting back his hat, looked up at the sky. The northwest wind was blowing--the Solano--as it only blows in Aragon. The bridge below the ferry has, by the way, a high wall on the upper side of it to break this wind, without which no cart could cross the river at certain times of the year. It came roaring down the Ebro, bending the tall poplars on the lower bank, driving before it a cloud of dust on the Saragossa side. It lashed the waters of the river to a gleaming white beneath the moon. And all the while the clouds stood hard and sharp of outline in the sky. They hardly seemed to move towards the moon. They scarcely changed their shape from hour to hour. This was not a wind of heaven, but a current rushing down from the Pyrenees to replace the hot air rising from the plains of Aragon.

Nevertheless, the clouds were moving towards the moon, and must soon hide it. Don Francisco de Mogente observed this, and sat patiently beneath the trailing vines, noting their slow approach. He was a white-haired man, and his face was burnt a deep brown. It was an odd face, and the expression of the eyes was not the usual expression of an old man's eyes. They had the agricultural calm, which is rarely seen in drawing-rooms. For those who deal with nature rarely feel calm in a drawing-room. They want to get out of it, and their eyes assume a hunted look. This seemed to be a man who had known both drawing-room and nature; who must have turned quietly and deliberately to nature as the better part. The wrinkles on his face were not those of the social smile, which so disfigure the faces of women when the smile is no longer wanted. They were the wrinkles of sunshine.

"I will wait," he said placidly to himself in English, with, however, a strong American accent. "I have waited fifteen years--and she doesn't know I am coming."

He sat looking across the river with quiet eyes. The city lay before him, with the spire of its unmatched cathedral, the domes of its second cathedral, and its many towers outlined against the sky just as he had seen them fifteen years before--just as others had seen them a hundred years earlier.

The great rounded cloud was nearer to the moon now. Now it touched it. And quite suddenly the domes disappeared. Don Francisco de Mogente rose and went towards the boat. He did not trouble to walk gently or to loosen the chains noiselessly. The wind was roaring so loudly that a listener twenty yards away could have heard nothing. He cast off and then hastened to the stern of the boat. The way in which he handled the helm showed that he knew the tricks of the old ferryman by wind and calm, by high and low river. He had probably learnt them with the photographic accuracy only to be attained when the mind is young.

The boat swung out into the river with an odd jerking movement, which the steersman soon corrected. And a man who had been watching on the bridge half a mile farther down the river hurried into the town. A second watcher at an open window in the tall house next to the Posada de los Reyes on the Paseo del Ebro closed his field-glasses with a thoughtful smile.

It seemed that Don Francisco de Mogente had purposely avoided crossing the bridge, where to this day the night watchman, with lantern and spear, peeps cautiously to and fro--a startlingly mediaeval figure. It seemed also that the traveler was expected, though he had performed the last stage of his journey on foot after nightfall.

It is characteristic of this country that Saragossa should be guarded during the day by the toll-takers at every gate, by sentries, and by the new police, while at night the streets are given over to the care of a handful of night watchmen, who call monotonously to each other all through the hours, and may be avoided by the simplest-minded of malefactors.