“It’s cold. It’s beginning to drizzle.”
The railway station was in a nearby village. Manuel knew the way. The three of them strode along amid low hillocks; they met nobody. Kate was still somewhat upset.
“We must look pretty queer,” said the baroness.
About an hour and a half after having left the village, suddenly, around a bend in the road, they sighted the semaphore of the railroad,—a white disc that looked like a gaunt spectre. A barely perceptible breeze was blowing. Soon they heard from a distance the shrill whistle of the locomotive; then came gleams of the red and white lanterns on the engine, which grew rapidly in the darkness; the earth trembled, the cars thundered by with an infernal roar, a puff of white smoke rolled up, shot through with luminous incandescencies, and fell in a shower of sparks to the ground. The train sped on, leaving two lanterns, one red and the other green, dancing in the gloom of the night, until they, too, were engulfed in the darkness. By the time they entered the station the three were exhausted. They waited several hours, and on the morning of the following day they arrived in Madrid.
The baroness was worried. They went to a lodging-house; they were asked whether they had any luggage; the baroness answered no, and could find no pretext or explanation. They were told that they could not be accommodated without luggage, unless they paid in advance, and the baroness left in shame. Thence they proceeded to the house of a friend, but she had moved away. Neither did they know Horacio’s whereabouts. The baroness was compelled to pawn Kate’s watch and the trio took rooms in a third-class hotel.
On the fourth day their money gave out. The baroness had lost her self-composure, and her features betrayed her weariness and discouragement.
She wrote a humble letter to her brother-in-law, begging hospitality for herself and daughter. The answer was slow in coming. The baroness hid from Kate, to cry her fill.
The proprietress of the hotel presented their account; the baroness entreated her to wait a few days until a certain letter should come, but the landlady, who would not have been perturbed by the request made in some other form, imagined from the tones employed by the baroness that deception was afoot, so she answered that she would not wait, and that, if on the next day she were not paid, she would notify the police.
Kate, seeing that her mother was more troubled than ever, asked her what was the matter. The baroness explained the dire straits in which they found themselves.