An instant reply from half a dozen throats showed that the coach was already well filled. A minute later we had insinuated ourselves into the places kept for us by the door, and the coach rolled off into the gloom.
It was the hush before the dawn. The moon had long set. A few pale stars sprinkled the sky. Beyond the town the gloom was less impenetrable, and the road became a dim, grey ribbon slowly unwinding behind us. The trees and mountains were black, undistinguishable masses. The air was soft and very still. Within the coach all was silent. No one moved. Then, as the miles gradually slipped away, the sky began to lighten, and even the deep gloom of the interior became less tangible. In the farther corner dull white lines proclaimed a collar and shirt-cuffs while the sun-tanned flesh they encircled was yet unseen.
As the daylight crept in, our fellow-travellers gradually became visible. Two men, vague entities, had left the coach when half-way we changed horses. There now remained a couple of quiet, respectable market women, a lovely little girl, and a strapping young man.
At the foot of a steep ascent the conveyance stopped, and following the custom of able-bodied passengers the men got out to take the short cut, and rejoined the lightened diligence on the farther side. Glancing from the back window, as they passed up the heath slope, I noticed that the owner of the brown hands and the white cuffs had already entered into conversation with my men-folk. And when, a quarter of an hour later, they re-entered the coach, all three were on terms of unexpected intimacy.
"This señor," the Boy explained, with an introductory wave of the hand, "is the father of that clever baby. You remember, mother. The one we saw yesterday on the way to the port. He sat in a basket and said 'Bon di tenga.'"
The father, a strapping, clean-limbed Majorcan, fairly beamed with parental pride as he acknowledged the imputation. The boy, he told us, was now nearly three years old, but he had spoken as well ever since he was two. His own excellent Spanish he accounted for by saying that, like so many Andraitx young men, he had been a sailor, and had voyaged for several years to and from Cuba. Then, having saved some money, he had returned to his native town, had married, and was now farming his own bit of land. This morning he was journeying to Palma to collect the rent of a house he owned there.
The sun was up when the diligence stopped before the consumos station at the entrance to Santa Catalina, and we alighted. It was only as we returned to more sophisticated surroundings that I realized that since leaving Palma on Thursday I had not seen a single hat upon a feminine head. No wonder we were stared at in Secoma!
Half an hour later we were sitting at breakfast in the sunshine at the Casa Tranquila. We had arrived at Andraitx in the dusk, and had quitted it in the dusk, so it seemed as though all that had happened during our stay there had been but a pleasant dream.