He filled our glasses. I heard the measured sound of Bizarro’s horse at its feed. Presently my host stretched out his legs, and continued:
‘I gave yet another example of my care for Plácida one endless, soundless day, when, starting out of the bushes close at hand, two rough fellows accosted us with a show of violence. My timid horse trembled beneath me as though he would panic; and, fearing that Plácida’s might do the same, I seized the creature’s bridle, and we fled from the scene.
‘As soon as we were free of danger we slid from our horses; and when we were turning to sit on the wayside bank my sweetheart stood in front of me and stared into my eyes.
‘ “Would you have them rob us of our future?” I demanded. “This time there were two of them!”
‘ “Two cowards are sometimes weaker than one,” said Plácida, dropping her eyes.
‘I knew what she meant by that. It is true, señor—two cowardly fellows are weaker than one; for if one panics, then the other will panic too, and a double panic is disastrous. But—as I pointed out to her—although on that first occasion there was indeed only one bandit to take care of himself, while I had two persons to protect, and one horse, on this present occasion I had not only two persons to look after, but two horses instead of one, and a double panic amongst the horses might have proved the death of us. To this she remained silent, and I am not surprised, for the arithmetic of bravery was never in her line. Throughout Brazil, many a businessman far less intelligent than Plácida had been impressed by the clear thinking of a Calleja.’
Bizarro apologised. ‘I have troubled to recount all this because the incident caused me to be invited to the castle.’
‘You went to the castle!’ I exclaimed.
‘Let me tell you how it happened. On the following morning, who should come tapping at my door but Eulalia de Trastamara, bearing a note from Plácida. Bidding the lady be seated, I tore open the letter, and was enchanted to observe the tenderness of its message. Reading between those precious lines, I discovered how shaken a woman can be by rough passages; and I respected her desire to be left alone for a few days in order that she might restore her placidity.
‘In my happiness I turned to Eulalia. Taking her hand, I announced that the Callejas and the Trastamaras were kinsfolk —a pleasant fiction. Her face grew red and moist! She was carried away! She was in an ecstasy! In short, I could not have paid her a greater compliment.’
‘And as a result you went to the castle! What madness!’
‘No, I did not go to the castle. How could I, when there was Plácida’s safety to think of? Putting my head in the lion’s mouth . . . well, it was a thing that I wanted to do . . . but for Plácida’s sake! . . . But you are right, señor, some people are very vain. The lady could not keep her news to herself. I ought to have known it, who knows so much of women. I wrote to del Ronzuelos, sending him some subtle excuse, begging his acceptance also of a box of my famous cigars; and so the nearest that I ever came to the castle was in the reading and the handling of his letter, a beautiful piece of penmanship, a graciously flowing hand on the finest of paper, worthy of a Spanish grandee. Greatly did I wish that I could have talked and laughed with that great warrior of lean height, whose chest could have displayed to the utmost advantage all his medals had he so desired it; but, as it is with me, so it would have been with him—one does not parade these things in front of every human eye.’
The Marquis pulled himself out of his dream.
‘It was over a week,’ he resumed, in a solemn voice, ‘before I saw again my sweetheart looking down at me from her horse. “Heaven be praised,” I thought, “the upheaval is forgotten! All is serene!” But when she spoke, I hardly knew her for the same girl. After some conversation that might have passed between strangers, she became very talkative; ah, but talkative in a very strange manner!
‘ “We’ve got to come to the point!” That was how she began, with a rush of words. We must come down to earth!
‘ “Why are you telling me this?” I cried.
‘For answer, she swept her arm over the whole of Spain.
‘ “One day my father will pursue you. It is bound to come! Yes, Alonzo, you will be the one to suffer, not I! Gaspar will pursue you! Pursuit! From two quarters! How would you deal with that?”
‘ “I would stand at bay!” I cried, delighted.
‘ “Would you?” she said. “You would stand at bay?”
‘ “I love you, Plácida!”
‘ “You love me,” she answered, looking down at me from the height of her horse, “but for how long, Alonzo, how long? Love can die, and I want to keep it forever; and how can I do that, unless I die with you?”
‘At first I misunderstood her. Did she wish to perish at her father’s hands? No, she said, her father loved the honour of his race more than he loved her. Why would he want to kill her? Then she told me that what she meant was suicide—a love pact!’ He finished his sherry at a gulp.
‘Bah! Women are so practical!
‘I protested against her proposal at once,’ he said indignantly. ‘I told her how much sweeter it was to live than to die. My lady told me that I was very worldly. I—worldly! Why, I had not even asked her the method by which we should leave the world!
‘ “What is there wrong with this?” I asked, sweeping my arm over the whole of Spain, as she had done. She smiled at me. I felt a sudden need for action. Leaping on to my horse, I began to trot along beside her, on her own level.
‘She was silent. “Plácida,” I said. “Plácida!”
‘ “O my dear!” she cried, “my sweetest love!” and I thought she was about to burst into tears. “I have been rough with you, rough! But we never can get any further, never—until we die!”
‘That night I considered deeply the problem while gazing into Señá Valdemoro’s moonlit patio. Plácida was many millions of years younger than moonlight; so was I, and in that respect I stood on an equal with her; but, let me tell you, señor, a man is always wiser than a woman.
‘On the next day we rode far into the country. Everything was quiet beneath the sun. A soft breeze hung in the air, as though waiting for something: one expected to see its shadow on the ground. Suddenly I lifted my hand: the tones of a guitar were coming down to us where we had paused beside the Guadalquivir.
‘We went towards the music and there we found a venta—an inn, señor—a small house as white as a snowdrop. Its red tiles were clustered with mignonette, and a honeysuckle clung between the fan-shaped windows. Also there were iron rings fixed to the walls, by which we could tie up our horses.
‘On beholding this convenient place I bade my love dismount, and we walked to a quiet part of the garden beside the inn, where we sat on rickety chairs at a table and drank manzanilla. Ah, how it all comes back to me! Still I can hear the strings being plucked by fingers out of sight, the lilting voice, the clapped hands beating the time, the gusts of girls’ laughter! I lifted my head and sang my beautiful song, driving all else from my ears:
“O Plácida Lola Dolores. . . !”
‘Seizing her hands, I showered them with kisses. Then after a time I put them down on the table, and said in a very heartfelt manner: “I am greatly relieved that you have changed your mind—how can we ever leave this!” and I swept my arm over the scene.
“I have not changed it,” she said immediately in a low voice. “We die together.”
‘“How?” I snapped.
“We ride to our death,” she said, looking towards our beasts.
‘After that we led our horses away and we went and sat by the rushes. I said nothing to Plácida. Always, to the very end, she had no feeling for business. It would have been useless for me to try to make her understand that as a cavallero, dedicated to her protection, and as a businessman, who had no thought for any undertaking that was not useful, I had two reasons for rejecting her impossible suggestion.
‘During these musings I fixed my eyes on the river flowing sluggishly to its destined bo
urne. I could still hear at moments the distant guitar, and presently my dear girl began to tell me what she intended to do—my rich imagination had already foreseen it—she intended that we should reach some precipitous place, mount our horses, and cast ourselves into eternity.
‘How quickly one changes one’s mind, señor! This, let me tell you, is especially the case when one wears a cloak, a great hat, a trimmed beard, and carries oneself with an air, for such things enable one to step from grave to gay, and vice versa, at a moment’s notice, and with the proper grace. Many an honoured deed has through such means been recorded in the annals of the Callejas! It has needed but the twitch of a cloak, the setting of the foot in the right direction—and behold, another illustrious name that will live forever! As soon as Plácida, by her earnest demeanour, had convinced me that she intended to carry out her side of the bargain, the rhythm of the wild guitar happened to blow towards me, and I found no difficulty in putting words to it at once: “Yes! let us mount our steeds! Yes! let us hurtle on! Yes! Let us die!” I was no longer a cavalier for Plácida nor a man of business, but an accomplice—an accomplice in the cause of love himself!’
Here the Marquis rolled the sherry round his tongue, holding the antique, delicate glass against the light during the proceeding, and at the same time I caught the smell of cooking on the air, the merest whiff. While I was still trying to put a name to it my host began to tell me the particulars of what I supposed would be the final passage of his tale.
‘For days I thought of nothing but our great plan. It was in my dreams when I slept. I watched the ground rushing up to me as I dropped, I felt the wind in my mouth, and, thinking I was being pulled down by the horse, I wanted to detach myself from his back! Yes, señor, I could hear nothing, for everything was too loud, yet I saw through Plácida’s eyes. Pursuit! Pursuit! Yet how one likes to linger on the very verge of immortality! Few were the days of respite when I rode again in the company of my beloved. The livelong hours were gone. With each cigar I felt the approaching end.
‘How fearless, how cruel, is a woman in love! It is then that she approximates the magnitude of a man! One day I asked her: “Should we not think of the horses?”—it was my desire to make certain that she had forgotten nothing, you understand. She answered: “It will be over so soon. And, señor, she had forgotten nothing! The very precipice from which we were to cast ourselves—even that she had found in good time . . . yet I like to think of it as somewhere come upon by chance—an adventitious climb one early dawn to some high place above the mists. We stood outside a little grove of mountain trees, I remember, and looked ahead into the sky beyond the brink of the precipice. How the scenes of life come back to us, at such moments! Pernambuco—Nicaragua—sugar, tobacco, wool, coffee. . . . Ah, well: “Tomorrow,” as your Milton says, “Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new!” That was the attitude I struck as I flourished the cloak about my shoulder.
‘We took our horses from their feed, and mounted them. The animals stood side by side. We leant from our saddles, and kissed. Oh, but every moment was too long for us! I tweaked my cloak again and in the end I let her go. She hurtled to destruction, and I was left behind.
‘Bah! Women are so theatrical!’
He flicked his ash on to the floor.
III
I turned in my chair and looked at him and then I looked down the bright length of the room. The utter silence of the bungalow overwhelmed me as though with a prolonged shout; and in the large and awesome stillness—held, as it were, in its place by the gorgeously-glowing objects that it contained—Bizarro’s quiet, prosaic words, when he spoke again, came as a true relief: they absolved me from the task of my trying to think of something ‘hurt’ to say to him, something to add to the ‘But, Marquis—’ that I vaguely remembered uttering as a singularly feeble protest.
‘I rode off at once from the scene of the pact. I stabled the horse, and sat at home for the rest of the day, reading, writing, cutting the leaves of books. In the morning came Donna Eulalia de Trastamara, looking very bedraggled and with eyes red from weeping. I told her gently that such tragedies must often be expected where love pacts are concerned . . . that at the crucial moment blood often congeals . . . but she heard me not. She fell to weeping bitterly but in silence. I patted her hands as they lay on my shoulders, then bid her depart. As she went, she handed me a parcel. In it I found two spurs.
As Bizarro paused, I noticed that the moon had risen over the larch wood, for the place was full of shadows instead of the earlier shade.
‘There was a letter too—a letter,’ he said dispassionately; and he began to quote it word for word. ‘ “If you come with me, I shall know it all the time we are falling, and my last moments on earth will be triumphantly happy; and if you fail me at the very brink—as I think it is in your nature to do, either for the sake of prudence, or for the good name of your family, or for the sake of your business undertakings—then my unhappiness will be shortlived; for without you in another world, how could I go on living?
‘ “Should you fail me through cowardice, then, since pity is akin to love, I would love your cowardice. I have gone, and you are reading this. I have sent you two spurs. One day, perhaps, you will know what to do with them. You will ride on—ride on—ride on—you who have served in seven garrisons.
‘ “Plácida.” ’
Bizarro was lying back in his chair with his legs extended, looking down at his feet from which he had not removed the spurs; and before he spoke again I listened to the woman’s low-pitched singing voice that for some time past had been coming to me on that penetrating and puzzling odour of cooking.
‘Bacon and fried bananas,’ Bizarro murmured, wrinkling his nose.
That was it! A Spanish dish that I had not tasted for years. . . .
‘It is tragic,’ said Bizarro, ‘when one has to flee one’s country.’
‘So you did feel that?’
He shot me a glance from the corner of his eye.
‘What else could I do, when Plácida had gone? I went to Pontevedra, the town where I was born. I found my aunt mooning through the galleries; and although she looked very old, enough to drive one away, yet I knew that if I stopped in my native country for the rest of my life I would return to the mansion and find her older; and when I shook out my uniform I knew that one day I would try to put it on. The tragedy of that humiliation—imagine it!—the humiliation of knowing that a scion of an ancient Galician family had felt the urge to quit his native shores because he was, as you say, “at a loose end!” ‘
‘You could have gone to Brazil.’
Bizarro rejected the thought. ‘I would have had to call on Van Cuyp’s daughter first, and I had no wish to do a thing like that. It is impossible for me to explain to you, señor, all the—the shades of feeling and circumstance that brought me here at last to your northern clime. Fifteen, twenty years I have lived in this bungalow, perhaps longer. A young woman from the village attends to me daily, just as her mother did before her. She sweeps my floors and cooks my meals and polishes my brass. It is pleasant down there in the village, and I often wonder what has made me come up here to live amongst the larches.’
‘Perhaps, Bizarro, it was because of the adjacent precipice,’ I murmured, just loud enough for him to hear. ‘Tomorrow to fresh woods. . . .’
‘You cannot think that I was wrong, señor? She wanted to die!’
‘Since you ask me,’ I said, ‘I am bound to admit that what you did was rather—rather reprehensible.’
He jumped to his feet. He was hurt to the quick! He stormed, and strode about. Going up to the divan, he stood and faced the glowing picture of the toreador on the wall, and told me that he had no words for me.
‘Really, Marquis, you forget that you are my host.’
‘I forget nothing! I forgive nothing!’ He whipped round. ‘Allow me to ask you—who showed the greater love?’ His eyes fluttered ceaselessly over the room.
‘Surely it’s hardly necessary—
’ I said softly.
‘Plácida wanted to drag me to death while her love lasted!’ His every word was aflame with a fearful indignation. ‘She revealed to me the shortness, the shallowness of her love!’
Fool! (I thought) you are trying to build up a case for yourself! Leave it alone, Bizarro! Much good it will do you!
‘Would not Plácida be very old if she were here now, señor? Spanish women age very quickly. Yet I am still nursing in my heart those summer days when a soft wind was forever shaking the fig-trees! With the most perfect care I have bred from the horse that she gave me then the horse that you now see here! She should be pleased with that! Such care! Such love! Such everlasting—’
‘Cowardice!’
I spun round in my chair at the intense, low-pitched voice, and at the same moment I heard Bizarro catch his breath on the edge of a word. At the far end of the room, beyond the piano, but wholly visible, a woman was standing. Her arms hung rigid at her sides, and her hands were clenched. Large and young, she looked with scorn beneath her thick, dark brows at Bizarro, while the strong light added its own great stillness to her full-blown dignity and to the bronze, fantastic creature with a twisted tail that rose from the little table beside her.
I remember my astonishment at seeing her in the room: she spoilt the artistic plan; but whether I should call her presence near the end of Bizarro’s love-story right or wrong appeared to me a matter of small concern when compared with my sudden realisation that everything had now been taken happily out of my hands; there was no further need for me to pass judgment on my host.
He had turned to face her at once. Now at last Bizarro was standing at bay! Yet he shrank before the black depths of her eyes. I think she wanted to see him put up a fight—to see him try to brazen things out in front of me with at least a show of bravery. On other occasions, no doubt, she had allowed him to get away with it; but tonight he replied with anger—and Bizarro’s anger was very weak: it was scarcely more than self-pity.
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