“Is he goin’ to try it?” Mr. Keegan repeated witheringly. “Ain’t you ashamed, what’s been three years with him, for that there remark?”
The master-at-arms puffed at his cigarette in silence, and evidently felt the force of the rebuke.
“Yes, Chimmy,” Mr. Keegan went on in a milder tone, “he is going to try it;” and then he added, with an air of great secrecy, “He is leavin’ a good deal of the particulars to you and me.”
Whereupon he unfolded a plan to the master-at-arms, who could not but wonder at its wisdom and completeness. It would almost seem as if Mr. Keegan had conducted a similar elopement on his own account. Mr. Keegan’s powers of locution were not great, but he had a remarkable knack of conveying his meaning, the more remarkable because his face was absolutely without expression, and he never used any gestures. Perhaps one of the secrets of his ability to express himself lay in the fact that he alternated in his methods of explanation, now putting his hearers to shame at their stupidity, now leaving out a palpable conclusion, that they might give themselves credit for unusual perception. In any case, he never said any more than he had to.
“Now,” he concluded, when he had gone into every detail, “you have got your sailin’ orders, Chimmy. Get your friend, the senhora, to tell the young lady what I told you. We can’t take no big trunks—nothin’ but a small kit. I’ll be makin’ sure of a boat and a sky-pilot, and be here at two bells.”
The master-at-arms went out into the Plaza, and hired a bulla-carta. A bulla-carta is in reality a covered sled, provided with curtains, and drawn by two oxen. For the proper management of these vehicles, according to Portuguese ideas, two men are necessary. One goes ahead, in order to check any ambitious intentions on the part of the oxen, and apparently does the guiding. The duties of the other are harder to define: he receives the fare incidentally, and urges on the oxen in those plaintive, wailing tones which he who has been to Madeira can never forget, and which incline him to believe that the Portuguese language is one of lamentation. As Mr. Keegan tersely remarked, everything is “on skates” in Madeira. The streets of Funchal are paved with small lava blocks, set on end, and polished to a degree that makes walking dangerous to people who wear the shoes of civilisation. Hence the owners of the bulla-cartas do a thriving business with foreigners, especially up the slope, where a false step is fraught with no inconsiderable consequences.
“He sat back behind the curtains of his ‘bulla-carta.’”
It was up the hillside, or rather up the first slopes of the mountain, that the villa to which the master-at-arms was going was situated. Few visit Madeira who do not take that delightful ride up the mountain on horseback, and experience the delirium of the coast down, over the polished stones, in a wicker sled. Ascending, the traveller looks from his saddle over the high yellow walls on each hand into inviting gardens of tropical luxuriance, their shade trees often completely arching the way over his head. But the master-at-arms cared nothing about looking into the gardens, and had a sailor’s prejudice against horses; he discreetly preferred the bulla-carta. Even the picturesque procession of wine-growers which he met coming down the mountain, with skins slung over their shoulders, made no more of an impression on him than if they had been a draft of new hands. He sat back behind the curtains of his bulla-carta, and smoked brown-paper cigarettes, and meditated on the gravity of his mission; and he wondered whether the senhora would look with favour on the plan. Only once, when he had to turn out for a fat ecclesiastic from the convent above, was he aroused from these reflections. The priest was descending at a pace which would have defied a trolley-car, but sat in his sled with as much equanimity as if he were pronouncing a benediction, his guide deftly balanced on the runners behind.
“He’s sure swift for a holy father!” the master-at-arms exclaimed aloud, lifting the curtains in order to obtain a better view of the vanishing figure; “but Dennis ain’t hirin’ him for the ceremony—you can’t trust them Dagos even for splicin’.”