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Travelling Thirds

<h2 class='c007'>XII</h2></div> <div class='c005'> <ANTIMG class='drop-capi' src='images/i-p116.jpg' width-obs='150' alt='' /></div> The upshot of the conference was the decision that on the following morning the Moultons should conspicuously enter a third-class carriage of the train bound for Baeza, and while Captain Over, on the platform, talked with Catalina in the doorway, they should slip out of the opposite entrance, cross the track, and take the train for Alcazar. The Alcazar train, the landlord assured them, left two minutes earlier than that for Baeza, so that Catalina, in the confusion of the last moments, could join her relatives unobserved. It was the habit of Jesus Maria to saunter down late, and even then to engage in conversation on the platform. Catalina had told him they intended to spend the following night at Baeza, and he was under the impression 117they were bound for Seville. Captain Over would take Catalina’s place in the doorway, covering her retreat, and await the rest of his party in Baeza. It was a programme little to the taste of any of them, but Over heroically proposed it, and it seemed to be the only feasible plan. In Spain there is apparently no law against crossing the tracks, nor in leaving a train on the wrong side. On the following morning Catalina, having reserved a first-class compartment on the train for Alcazar, the six members of the party, portmanteaus in hand, filed down to the station and entered a third-class carriage on the southern train. In a few moments Over descended leisurely and lit a cigarette. Catalina leaned forward to chat with him, then stood up, her bright, amused glances roving over the country people who were bound for a fair in a town near by. The peasants were interested in themselves and contemptuously indifferent to strangers. The Moultons, including the mystified and angry Lydia, descended and crossed the track unobserved. Catalina, one hand on her portmanteau, was ready 118to make a dash the moment she heard the familiar drone, “Viajeros al tren.” It might be expected within the next five minutes, and it might be belated for twenty. “There he comes!” she murmured. “If he should take it into his head to enter the train before it starts! We will tell him the others are late. What a pity you don’t speak Spanish; you could engage him in conversation! He is looking—glowering at me! Do you suppose he suspects?” “It is not like you to lose your nerve,” began Over, but at the same moment his glance moved from the Catalan’s face to hers, and he smiled. She looked, if anything, more impassive than usual. “My knees are shaking,” she confided to him, “and my heart is galloping. It is rather delightful to be so excited, but still—thank Heaven!” Jesus Maria had met an acquaintance. They lit the friendly cigarito and entered into conversation. “They are walking down the platform,” said Catalina, anxiously, a moment later, “and the other train is not so far back as this; however, Cousin Lyman will no doubt 119keep the door shut. There, he’s turning. I’d better make a bolt. Good-bye. Au revoir—” “Tell me again exactly what I am to do. I don’t want to run any risk of missing you.” Catalina glanced over her shoulder. There was such a babble, both in the car and on the platform, that it would not be difficult to miss the singsong of the guard. The other train was still there. “Do not go to the town. It is miles from the station; there is sure to be an inn close by. If we don’t arrive to-morrow night, of course, you will have a telegram; in any case, don’t wait for us, but go on to Granada. You can amuse yourself there, and we are sure to turn up sooner or later. Have you that list of Spanish words I wrote out?” He looked forlorn and homesick, and Catalina laughed outright. “Better go straight to Granada,” she said. “Viajeros al tren!” “Take my place—quick!” whispered Catalina. She let herself down on the other side, dragged her heavy bag after her, and ran. 120She had a confused idea that the northern train was closer than it had been, but did not pause until she came to the first-class carriages. Then she saw that the train was empty. At the same instant she heard a whistle, and glancing distractedly up the track saw a train gliding far ahead. There was not a moment to be lost. It was the guard of the southern train that had sounded his warning cry, and she ran back, dragging the heavy portmanteau—it held the day’s lunch, among other things—and almost in tears. It had been an exciting morning, and she had slept little the night before. She stopped and gasped. The train was moving—slowly, it is true, but far too rapidly for a person on the wrong side with a heavy piece of luggage. She dropped the portmanteau and, drawing a long breath, called with all the might of lungs long accustomed to the ranch cry: “Captain Over! Captain Over!” The door of a carriage was opened instantly. Over took in the situation at a glance, leaped to the ground and ran towards her, 121caught up the portmanteau, and, regaining his compartment, flung it within. Catalina followed it with the agility of a cat, and in another moment they were panting opposite each other. Catalina fanned herself with her hat; she would not speak until she could command her voice. “How was any one to know they would run another train between?” she said, finally. “Poor Cousin Lyman! He must be frantic. Cousin Miranda, no doubt, is delighted. It is my fault, of course—no, it is yours; you should not have engaged me in conversation at the critical moment.” “I will take the blame—and the best of care of you, besides.” She was looking out of the window at the moment, and he glanced at her curiously. She was quite unembarrassed, and what he had dimly felt before came to him with the force of a shock. With all her intellect and her interest in many of the vital problems of life, she was as innocent as a child. She might not be ignorant, but she had none of the commonplace inquisitiveness and morbidness 122of youth, and he recalled that she had grown up without the companionship of other girls, had read few novels, and little subjective literature of any sort. She had never looked younger, more utterly guileless, than as she sat fanning herself slowly, her hair damp and tumbled, the flush of excitement on her cheek. Over felt as if he had a child in his charge, and drew a long breath of relief. He knew many girls who would have carried off the situation, but their very dignity would have been the signal of inner tribulation, and made him miserable; with Catalina he had but to have a care that she was not placed in a false position; and, after all, the time was short, and they were unlikely to meet any one who even spoke the English language. She met his eyes, and they burst into laughter like two contented and naughty children. “I’m so happy to get rid of them I can’t contain myself,” announced Catalina. “So are you, only you are too polite to say so. I could have done it on purpose, but am rather glad I failed through too much zeal. 123Do you understand Lydia?” she asked, abruptly. “I don’t waste time trying to understand women,” he replied, cautiously. “I thought perhaps she confided in you last night. She has tried to unbosom herself to me, but I have not been sympathetic. I don’t understand her. I am half a savage, I suppose, but I could go through life and never even see a man like that.” “I can’t make out if she loves him.” “Oh, love!” Catalina elevated her nose the higher as the word gave her a vague thrill. “You can’t be in love with a person you can’t talk to—outside of poetry. Would you call that sort of thing love?” “No. I don’t think I should.” “I fancy it is a mere arbitrary effort to feel romantic.” She stood up suddenly and looked over the crowded car, then turned to Over with wide eyes. “He is not here!” she said. “Doubtless he is in the next car, or he may have jumped off when he discovered the exodus.” He searched the other cars when the train 124stopped again, and returned to report that Jesus Maria was missing. Catalina shrugged her shoulders. “We did our best,” she said, “and I, for one, am not going to bother. We’ll have them again soon enough.” The great, sunburned, dusty plains were behind them to-day, and the train toiled upward through tremendous gorges, brown, barren, the projecting ledges looking as if they had but just been rent asunder, so little had time done to soften them. In the defiles were villages, or solitary houses, poor for the most part; now and again a turn of the road closed the perspective with a line of snow-peaks. The air was clear and cool; there was little dust. Their car gradually gave up its load, until by lunch-time only one man was left, and he gratefully accepted of their superfluous store. He looked, this old Iberian, like the aged men who sit in the cabin doors in Ireland; the same long, self-satisfied upperlip, the small, cunning eyes, the narrow head of the priest-ridden race. He had done nothing, learned nothing, in his threescore and ten, braced himself passively against the modern innovation, 125and could be cruel when his chance came to him. He cared no more for what the priests could not tell him than he cared that Spain could not make the wretched engines that drew her trains. On the whole, no doubt, he was happy. At all events, he was extremely well-bred, and took no liberty that he would not have resented in another. But Catalina forgot him in the grand and forbidding scene, and she leaned out of the window so recklessly that more than once Over, as if she were a child, put his hand on her shoulder and drew her in. He began dimly to understand that Catalina had something more than the mere love of nature and appreciation of the beautiful common enough in the higher civilization. She tried, but not very successfully, to express to him that the vague desire to personify great mountains, the trees, and the sea, which haunts imaginative minds, the deathless echo of prehistoric ancestors, whose only revenge it is upon time, was doubly insistent in one so recently allied to the tribe of Chinigchinich, whose roots were in Asia. Of immemorial descent, with the record 126in her brain, perhaps, of those ancestors who personified and worshipped the phenomena of nature before the evolution of that first priesthood on the Ganges and the Euphrates, the Nile and the Indus, she had rare moments of primal exaltation. It is a far cry from those marvellous first societies and the vast orderly and complicated civilization, worshipping mysterious and unseen gods, that followed them, to the Chinigchinich Indians of Alta California; and yet, crushed, conquered, almost blotted out, these remnants, in their very despair, reverted the more closely to nature. The beautiful Carmela was the child of Mission Indians who fled back to their mountain pueblos and savage rites when the power of the priests in California was broken. Every inherited instinct had waged war against the Christianity which, in nine cases out of ten, was pounded into them with a green-hide reata. They called the child Carmela, after the Mission of Carmel, merely because they liked the name; but she grew up a pagan, and a pagan remained during the few years of her life. And she was as pure and good, 127as loyal and devoted, as any of the women descended from her, heedful of the wild inheritance in their blood lest it poison the strong and bitter tide of New England ancestors. Catalina was the first to feel pride in that alien strain which did so much to distinguish her from the million, and was conscious that she owed to it her faculty to see and feel more in nature than the average Anglo-Saxon. Over, in the almost empty car, lit by a solitary and smoking lamp, listened attentively as she groped her way through the mysterious labyrinths in her brain, expressing herself ill, for she was little used to egotistical ventures. It cannot be said that he understood, being himself a typical product of the extremest civilization that exists in the world to-day; but he saw will-o’-the-wisps in a fog-bank, and thought her more interesting than ever. <div class='chapter'> 128 <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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