MRS

MRS. KEITH'S CRIME

CHAPTER XIII

WHEN we go back to our rooms I look round them curiously. They are not so grand as Mrs. Greenside’s, but they will soon be cosy and homelike. The sitting room is large and pleasant (the bedroom leads from it); when my painting things are about, and the odds and ends from the bottoms of our trunks, and some cheap bright drapery that I saw in the shop window as we came here is put up, it will look pretty enough. It has a large balcony, with an awning of matting over it, and that alone gives the room a character. The window is open, and the bell over the way is not ringing, so we sit and listen to the faint sound of the piano in the café opposite the front of the hotel. In the evening we now and then catch the twanging of a guitar; and there is a chant, half Eastern it sounds, that is already ringing in my ears, and has been ever since we entered Spain. It is sung by the gipsies, I think, and they must have know it these hundreds and hundreds of years. We shall spend many hours sitting by this window, looking out at the mountains that rise up beyond the church. There are only a few houses on the open space to the left, but they and the sugar-canes and the esparto grass make up a foreground. Round the corner is the sea; when we are on the balcony we get a good view of it and the passing shops, though they are not many. There is a shady walk just above the beach, with seats beneath the trees. It will see us often, and Molly will drink in health as she breathes the balmy air; or, for a long walk, we can go to the place where the goats are kept, there Molly can rest awhile and have some milk. And when this does not content us, there are two or three rumbling flies, and we can drive out a mile or two toward the vega. All these things will make up our life in Spain. The doctor’s house is close by, too—a pretty house with shaded balconies around it and a garden full of orange trees. The house itself is simple enough, but contains plenty of books, and the rough old man who is both cook and housekeeper has orders to admit us whenever we like, and to let us take away as many books and oranges as we please.

Zahra is so different from Malaga; coming to it is like getting into another atmosphere. The doctor said the Moors were here, and they must have been, seeing how near it is to the cities that were their chief centres; but, as he said too, there are few traces of them. I have looked down every corner, up at every house, hoping in vain to see some sign or remembrance of them. Probably such irrigation as there is came from them, and what is left of vegetation here is owing to their first planting. Then the place has its name, which is surely Arabic; but for the rest all signs have vanished. I shut my eyes sometimes wondering if the street was here, and what it looked like hundreds of years ago in the days of the caliphs, and then in fancy I see it. There is a Moorish gateway at one end, and the horseshoe arch stands out clear and well defined; and, tall and erect and soft-footed, the conquerors come up the street, as if from a dream, and pass by into a dream again. I see the last gleaming whiteness of their robes, the last dark face with the turban above it vanish into the mist, and hardly realise even then that it is only my own foolish imagining. But here in Spain what strikes one most sadly of all is that the glory of the Moor is like a dream that was dreamed in Spain’s brightest day, and that vanishing, left only the darkest night behind. But whatever this place may have been, it is now entirely Spanish. Of other things and other peoples in the past it seems to have no remembrance, and of them in the present no consciousness; it is given up to itself. No one speaks a work of any language but Spanish. Outside the hotel, there is not a foreigner of any description in all Zahra, except the doctor. They are all Spaniards of the lower middle class, or peasants, indolent, narrow, and drowsy. The hotel itself is comfortable, and it is remarkable that there are only two women belonging to it, i.e. the landlady, and a woman who apparently comes in from her house a little way off, to act as chamber-maid in the morning and kitchen-maid in the afternoon. The landlady is a fat, vulgar, careless woman of five-and-forty, much taken up with her own flirtations, which are chiefly carried on with the proprietor of the tumble-down flies, a dirty-looking Spaniard known in the place as Don Carlos. However, luckily for her customers, Don Carlos is only able to devote the evening to her society, and during the rest of the day she looks fairly well after her business, which means that she laughs and scolds and bargains in the morning, and gossips and sleeps or walks along the promenade, with graceful lace on her head and well-developed figure, in the afternoon. With all this, however, we in the hotel are only amused. We get fair food and plenty of it, the rooms are kept fairly clean, and the rest is nothing to us. To me, in spite of the everlasting weariness and the occasional pain I cannot shake off, this life is almost happy, for in it there is the promise that Molly may get well. The idea has fastened on me that it will be so, and brightens every hour beyond all words to describe. And everything in the world seems to know it—the great hills and the sugar-canes, the blue sky and the sunshine, the sea and the clanging bell opposite, the trees along the walk above the beach, the flowers in the doctor’s garden; all these things jumbled up together and each one separately seem to know some happy secret concerning Molly, and the secret is that she will get well. Get well! It makes me laugh for joy to think it. Oh, my dear ones who are gone, you would not grudge me my happiness? It is not forgetfulness of you; it is the thankfulness that one of you is left. Just one, and in her shall you live to me too, and through her shall all my world be full of contentment. It may be only the re-action of all the fear and pain, the natural coming of the light after the darkness, on which there is only again the darkness to follow; I do not know, and I dare not think.

At last everything is unpacked, I have bought the chintz and made some hangings, there are flowers from the doctor’s garden in cheap pottery on the table, and easel is put up, the favourite books we brought and all the knick-knacks are put about. I look round at what is to be our home, and lift Molly up and kiss her and laugh, for all looks bright and sunny and pretty. I carry her to the window, and we sit down on the shady balcony to watch the people beneath and the little group of beggars around the church door opposite.

‘Poor man,’ Molly says; ‘poor old man. Do give him a penny, mammy dear. Throw him my penny.’ So Molly’s penny goes out to the brown old beggar man; and then we shift a little so as to see the street in front of the hotel, for, looking up to the right, we can see a good deal that is going on in it. This place serves as an excuse for a holiday to the people in the ugly, dusty one we have left, so twice a day we see the dirt omnibus from Malaga arrive. It rattles down the wide street, past the hotel, and farther on it stops at a little posada and stays a long time before its doors, till the tired bony horses, harnessed together with rope, seem unable to fidget any more, and stand quite still, unheeding even the flies. This omnibus helps to give Zahra its air of festivity, for it is a happy, gay little place, and the water-carriers, with barrels decked with green boughs on their backs or slung on mules a pace or two in front of them, must drive a good trade or they would not call out as lustily as they do day after day.

I know all the people in the hotel by sight now, except Lord Bexley, who started on an expedition the day before we came, nearly a week ago now. So evidently Ralph Bicknell is not here, or I should have come across him, or, at any rate, have heard of him through Mrs. Greenside. Considering how small a party we are in the hotel, I wonder we have not made some acquaintance before this. One thing that keeps me apart from the rest of the visitors is that I never go down to dinner, but always sit during the evening in my own room; so that, except during the luncheon-hour or out on the walk above the beach, I seldom come across them. Moreover, Mrs. Greenside has been so intent on getting intimate with every one, that I gave rather hung back. I see the Vincents every day at luncheon. We have arrived at bowing to each other as we take our seats at table, but they are some distance from me, and I have not had the courage to make my cousin’s knowing them an excuse for forcing my acquaintance on them. They consist of a tall, grey-haired papa, a rather French-looking grey mamma, and a pretty daughter. A very pretty girl is May Vincent. It is no wonder if Ralph Bicknell is in love with her. She is rather tall, and has a slight, round figure, supple and easy, as though she lived much out-of-doors. She has a sweet oval face, and soft eyes—blue, I think, though I can hardly tell for the changing light that is in them, and for the dark lashes that shade them—and she has dark brown hair that waves a little and droops low over her forehead as Clytie’s did. She makes me think of Clytie, though the dimples in her face give it an air of sauciness that was quite unknown to Clytie’s. There is something proud and strong about her, something in the light step and the graceful walk that first struck Mrs. Greenside—that suggests a character and a courage that will prevent her life from being either tame or colourless. I never look at her without wondering what her future will be like, what manner of man she will marry, and whether he will be Ralph Bricknell. And yet withal she looks very soft and womanly, and as if she had the blindness and tolerance of most loving women; probably her life will be circumscribed as their lives mostly are. You have only to see her once to know that she possesses one thing—the unconscious courage of utter truthfulness. I have looked at her pretty head every day since we came but never without feeling how easy it must be to love her; and when she turns her face towards Molly, there is an expression on it that makes my heart go out to her.

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