Chapter III (2)

And almost on that instant the youngster, who had fallen back disconcerted, sprang forward in a fresh fury and gripped his comrade by the arm, pointing excitedly towards a group of houses above the fortifications, whence from a high upper storey, deeply recessed between flanking walls, a light redder than the rest twinkled across to us.

"The proof!" cried he. "She knew you would be here, and that is the proof! _You_ at least I will kill before I leave this garden, as I came to kill you to-night."

In his new gust of fury he seemed to have forgotten his discomfiture--to have forgotten even the existence of Fuentes, who now faced them both with a smile which (unless the dusk distorted it) had some bitterness in its raillery.

"If I mistake not, Sirs, the light you were discussing signals to us from an upper chamber in the Lesser Street of the Virgins. It can only be seen from this garden and from the far end of it, where we now stand. I will not ask you who lights it now: but she who lit it in former days was named Luisa. Oh yes, she was circumspect--a good maid then, and no doubt a good maid now: in that street of the Virgins there was at least one prudent. Youth flies, _ay de mi_! But youth also, as I perceive to-night, repeats itself; and Luisa--who was always circumspect, though a conspirator--apparently repeats herself too."

"Luisa? What do you know of Luisa?" stammered the younger man. The name seemed to have fallen on him like the touch of an enchanter's wand, stiffening him to stone. Like a statue he stood there, peering forward with a white face.

"My friend"--Fuentes turned to me--"be so good as to unstrap the case yonder and hand me my guitar."

He laid his foil on the table, took the guitar from me, and, having seated himself on the bench, tried the strings softly, all the while looking up with grave raillery at the two young men.

"What do I know of Luisa? Listen!" Under his voice he began a light-hearted little song, which in English might run like this, or as nearly as I can contrive--

_My love, she lives in Salamanca
All up a dozen flights of stairs;
There with the sparrows night and morning
Under the roof she chirps her prayers.
They say her wisdom comes from heaven--
So near the clouds and chimneys meet--
I rather think Luisa's sparrows
Fetch it aloft there from the street!_

_What would you have? In la Verdura
All the day long she keeps a stall:
Students, bachelors buy her nosegays,
Given with a look and--well, that's all!
Go, silly boy, believe you first with her--
Twenty at once she'll entertain.
Why love a mistress and be curst with her?
Copy Luisa--love all Spain!_

He paused, still eyeing them. "You recognise the tune, Sirs? Does she play it yet? Well, then, I made it for her."

"_You?_ How came _you_ to make her that tune?" The younger man had found his voice at length. "No, Sir; coquette she may be, but that she ever was friends with such a one as Andrea Galazza I will not yet believe."

"And you are right. Sirs, you have not yet told me your names: but in your generous heat you have given me your secret--that you are two lovers of Spain, and even such a pair as my friend and I have travelled some distance to seek. In return you shall have mine. I tricked you just now. I am not Don Andrea, but his brother Eugenio--or, as some call him, Fuentes."

"Fuentes! _You!_"

"Upon my honour, yes." He pulled off his spectacles, meeting their incredulity with a frank laugh. "What proof can I give you?" The guitar still lay across his knees: he picked it up as if to play, but set it down after a moment with another laugh, hard and bitter. "Let us go together, gentlemen, to the Street of the Virgins, and ask Luisa if she remembers me."

It was agreed that the young men--who gave their names as Diego de Ribalta and Sebastian Paz--should not accompany us into the city, but wend their way back across the bridge, while we finished our wine and mounted our beasts at leisure. The officer at the bridge-end made no pother about our passports (borrowed, I need scarcely say, from the estimable Don Andrea, who, as his brother explained, was a careful man, and zealous in all dealings with the authorities); and by-and-by we were clattering up-hill through the ill-lighted streets of Salamanca. At the head of the first street our two friends stepped out of the shadow and joined us in silence. In silence, too, Fuentes regreeted them, and led the way--to an inn first, the Four Crowns, standing almost under the shadow of the Old Cathedral, where we stabled mare and mule; then, on foot, through a maze of zigzagging lanes and alleys, back into the depths of a waterside quarter. Once he was at fault--the lane we followed ending abruptly in an open space strewn with rubble-heaps, a broad area where the French had lately been at work. Among these heaps he blundered for a while in the darkness, and then, retracing his steps, took up the scent again and led us down one narrow street, across another; turned to the right, counting the houses as he went, and knocked at the twelfth door without hesitation. The knock was a peculiar one--five quick taps, followed, after a pause, by one distinct and heavy.

"But I must ask these gentlemen to do what remains," said he, turning and addressing our companions. "Luisa has doubtless changed the password since my time."

"Willingly, Señor Fuentes," agreed de Ribalta. "You will not, of course, object to be blindfolded?--a formality, merely, in your case."

The porter, having received the password in a whisper through the grille, unbolted to us, and opened the door upon a pitch-dark passage. Here we submitted to have our eyes bandaged, and Sebastian Paz took my hand to guide me. Eight flights of stairs we mounted before the hubbub of many voices and the tinkle of a guitar saluted my ears; two more, and the hubbub grew louder; another, and it grew obstreperous, deafening. At the head of the twelfth flight one of our guides rapped on a door; the noise died down suddenly; a bolt was shot back and the bandage dragged from my eyes.

I found myself blinking and staring across a room filled with tobacco-smoke, and upon a company which at first glance I took for a crew of demons. They were, in fact, a students' chorus--young men in black, with black silk masks covering the upper half of their faces. All wore the same uniform--black tunic, short black cloak, knee-breeches, and stockings. Some squatted on the floor, two lolled on a divan by the window--each with a guitar across his knees. The man who had opened to us held a tambourine, and he alone wore a little round cap. The others wore black cocked hats, or had flung them off for better ease. In a deep armchair beside the fireplace sat a stiff-backed, middle-aged woman in black--a duenna evidently--who regarded us with eyes like large black beads, but did not interrupt her knitting. In the corner behind the door stood a bed, with a crucifix above it: and on the bed, between two crates, the one of them heaped with flowers, sat a young woman dangling a pretty pair of feet and smoking a cigarette while she made up a posy.

In spite of their masks one could tell that all the men were young--mere lads, indeed. And if this were Luisa, Fuentes had slandered her sorely. She seemed scarcely eighteen--and we had taken her, too, at unawares, when a woman forgets for a moment her endless vigilant parry against Time. She tossed her posy into the half-filled basket, clapped her hands, and sprang off the bed.

"Two new recruits! Bravo, Sebastianillo!"

With that, as she stepped gaily forward, her eyes fell on Fuentes, and she swayed and fell back a pace, catching at the foot of the bed.

"Don Eugenio!"

"Your servant, Señorita." He bowed elaborately and coldly. "You keep the lamp burning, and I accepted its invitation. Your cheeks, too, Señorita, keep the old colour. I congratulate you--and you, Doña Isabel." He bowed to the old lady. "To live with youth--that is the way to live always young."

She had moved forward again, as if to take him by both hands: but faltered. "Yes, we have kept the lamp burning, Don Eugenio," she answered with a voice curiously strained. "My friends"--she turned to the young men--"rise and salute our guest of guests, Don Eugenio Fuentes!"

"Fuentes!"

"What are you telling us, Luisa? _The_ Fuentes? But it is impossible!"

"Impossible! Fuentes comes no more to Salamanca."

Nevertheless all had sprung to their feet, and Fuentes comprehended them all in an ironical bow.

"That is the name by which I call myself, Sirs, since leaving the University."

Luisa made a dumb signal, and one of the youths handed him a guitar. He struck but one chord to assure himself of its tune--

"_There's one that lives in Salamanca
All up a dozen flights of stairs;
There with the sparrows, night and morning,
Under the roof she chirps her prayers.
They say her wisdom comes from heaven_--

Will you not take a guitar, Señorita, and help me with the old song?

_So near the clouds and chimneys meet_--
I _rather think Luisa's sparrows
Fetch it aloft there from the street!_"

Above all things women suspect and fear irony: it is not one of their weapons. Luisa glanced at Fuentes doubtfully, I could see, and with some pain in her doubt. But it was the old song, after all, and he was singing it _de bon coeur_. She caught up a guitar and chimed in with the second verse, taking up the soprano's part, while he at once obeyed and dropped from treble to alto--

_Which will you have? In la Verdura
Pretty Luisa keeps a stall:
Hands you a rose for your peseta,
Nothing to pay but a thorn--that's all!
King of her love, with no Prime Minister,
Lord of an attic blithe I'd reign.
But_ ay de mil! _from here to Finisterre
Pretty Luisa loves all Spain_.

His eyes, as he sang, were fastened on young Sebastian Paz, and she, noting them, played the verse to its ringing close, turned abruptly, and laid the guitar on the bed between the flower-baskets.

"But I think it is business brings you here, Don Eugenio."

He had stepped to the open lattice, and with an upward glance at the lamp, burning steadily in the windless air, leaned on the sill and looked out over the city. Somewhere below by the waterside a dull noise sounded--the thud of a falling beam. The French down there were working by lantern-light, clearing away the houses from their fortifications.

"Yes, I come on business, and from Lord Wellington. The good citizens in Salamanca have ceased to write."

"And small blame to them," one of the young men answered.

"Small blame to them, I agree. And yet they must send news--this time to Lord Wellington, who knows better than to print it."

His eyes interrogated Luisa, who raised hers at length to meet them.

"That will not be easy," said she, with a pucker of her pretty forehead. "They are scared and afraid for their heads: nevertheless, Don Eugenio might bring back their confidence, if only we can bring him face to face with them." She seated herself on the bed's edge and mused awhile with her hands in her lap.

"You know where to find them?" asked Fuentes, addressing the company in general.

"Oh, yes, Señor--assuredly we know where to find them!" answered one or two.

"Then the whole thing is very simple. You must let me join your choir, gentlemen."

"Yes, yes, _that_ is simple enough," put in Luisa impatiently: "the more so, as our chorus is popular not only in the taverns, but at the French officers' messes. But these spies of ours are slow and dull to a degree: I think sometimes it takes a quite special clumsiness to be a clerk of the arsenal or to swindle the country in the military stores. We can get you into communication with them, Don Eugenio: but how are they to pass their information to _you_? They are born bunglers, and the French begin to use their eyes." She pursed her lips for a moment. "Is your friend new to this work?" she asked, suddenly turning toward me a gaze of frank inspection.

Fuentes smiled. "You would not say so, Señorita, were I free to tell you his name."

"As for that," said I, "where Señor Don Eugenio entrusts his secret I may not hesitate to entrust mine. My name is Manuel MacNeill, Señorita, and I kiss your hands and am at your service."

Luisa rose and dropped me a very stately curtsey. "Happy were I, Don Manuel MacNeill, to welcome you, even if you did not solve our difficulty. You are clever at disguises, I have been told. Well, I have a disguise for you--though not, to be sure, a pleasant one."

"I take the downs with the ups," said I.

"Well, then, Don Diego here is an artist. He can paint you a bunch of grapes so that the birds come to peck at it: moreover, he has studied at the hospital. We must find you a suit of rags, Sir, and Don Diego shall paint you as full of sores as Lazarus."

"And after that?"

"After that you will go to the porch of the New Cathedral, to the shady side of it--look you how I study your comfort--facing on the Square of the Old College: and there you shall collect the alms of the charitable. Many things, I am told, find their way into a beggar's hat."

"Señorita," said Fuentes gravely, with a glance up at the lamp, "it was a good star that led us here to-night."

"The star, as you call it, has not failed in all these years," she answered, with a look of timid appeal which hardened to one of defiance.

"Nay," answered he coldly and lightly, "I never doubted it would--while there was oil to feed it."

On the morrow, then, I took up my station by the porch of the Cathedral, with a highly artistic wound in my left leg, a shade over my right eye, and beside me a crutch and a ragged cap. The first day brought me coppers only: but late on the second afternoon a stout citizen, pausing on the steps and catching his breath asthmatically before entering the Cathedral, dropped a paper pellet in with his penny. On the third day it began to rain pellets, and I drank that night to the assured success of our campaign.

I saw nothing of Fuentes. It had been agreed between us that I should play my part in my own fashion, and I played it so thoroughly as to take lodgings in the beggars' quarter, in a thieves' den--it was little better--off the Street of the Rosary. It was enough for me that, however Fuentes went about the sowing, the harvest kept pouring in. As for the Street of the Virgins, I had been brought to it and had quitted it in the dark, and it is a question if by daylight I could have found it again. At any rate, I did not try.

But on the fourth day, at about five in the afternoon, as the day's heat began to grow tolerable, I caught sight of Luisa herself picking her way towards the Cathedral porch along the pavement under the façade of the University. Before entering the great doors she paused on the step beside me, bent to drop a coin into my cap, and whispered--

"When I come out, follow me."

She passed on into the Cathedral and did not reappear for a quarter of an hour, perhaps. In this time I had made up my mind that, whatever the risk of my obeying her, she had probably weighed it against some risk more urgent, and perhaps brought the message direct from Fuentes. So when she came forth, and after pausing a moment to readjust her mantilla, tripped down the steps and away to the left down the street leading to the Porta del Rio, I picked up my crutch, yawned, shook the coppers in my wallet, and hobbled after her at a decent distance.

All the way I kept my eyes open and my ears too. In the streets around the Porta del Rio the city's traffic was beginning to flow again after the day's siesta: but I made pretty sure that we were not being tracked. Through half-a-dozen streets she led me, and so to one which I supposed to be the Street of the Virgins, and to a door which I recognised for that to which Fuentes had brought me four nights ago.

She had already knocked and been admitted: but the door opened again as I came abreast of it, and I stepped past the porter into the passage. Luisa stood half-way up the first flight of stairs under a sunny window and beckoned, and aloft I climbed after her to her attic. With her hand on the latch of her own door, she turned.

"You will find your clothes within," she said, and opened the door for me to pass. "Dress--dress with speed--and find Don Eugenio. Your work is done, and you must both be beyond the bridge before sunset."

"Is there treachery, Señorita?" I asked.

"There is treachery of a kind, but not of the kind you guess. It is important that Don Eugenio should be beyond the bridge to-night. Your beasts at the Four Crowns are ready saddled. Find your friend, and help him to go with all speed."

"But where shall I find him, Señorita? I have not set eyes on him for three or four days."

"Yet he has done his work surely, has he not?"

"Far better than I could have hoped."

"You ask where he is to be found? But where else than by the Archbishop's College, near by where the French have pulled down his own College of San Lorenzo, and are destroying more? You men!" She broke out into sudden passionate contempt. "The past is all you have eyes for--the poor, wild, blundering past. You have no eyes for the present, and with the past you poison its living joy. We women cannot be always seventeen: yet because we are not, you kill us--you kill us, I say!" Then, while I stared at her in downright amaze, "Go, dress!" she cried, thrusting me into the room. "In your coat you will find two letters. That without address you will give to Don Eugenio when you find him: that which is marked with a cross you will hand to him when you shall have passed the bridge--on no account before. And now be quick, I beseech you: for this one room is all my house."

Almost she thrust me within, and closed the door gently upon me. When I emerged, in my right and proper clothes, it was to find her yet waiting there upon the landing.

"I thank you for your speed, Señor Don Manuel; for I, too, am in haste to change my dress: and my dress will require care to-night, since I go to a masquerade." She gave me her hand. "Farewell, friend!" she said.

I found Don Eugenio behind the College of the Archbishop, seated on a mound and watching the French sappers at their work. I gave him Luisa's letter.

"The wench," said he calmly, having read it, "is a born conspirator. She cannot be happy unless she has a card hidden even from her fellow-plotters. Still, it is usually safe to follow her advice. Our work is pretty thoroughly done, I fancy?"

I nodded.

"We will see to our beasts then."

"She tells me they are ready saddled."

"Saints! She is in a hurry, that girl! Ah, well, then let us go and ask no questions."

We found our mare and mule, paid our reckoning, and rode forth from Salamanca. At the bridge-end we showed the passports, and were bidden to go in peace. As we climbed the hill beyond, I handed Fuentes Luisa's second letter.

"She bade me deliver it here," I explained.

He read it, turned in his saddle, and looked back towards the twilit sky. "A likely tale," said he, crushing the letter into his pocket.

* * * * *

Scarcely a year later--to be precise, on the 17th of June, 1812--the Allied forces crossed the fords above and below Salamanca, and invested the fortifications which still commanded the bridge. In the suburbs and outlying quarters the inhabitants lit up their houses and, cheering and weeping, thronged the streets to press the hands of the deliverers.

On the 27th the forts fell, and these scenes were renewed. I was passing through the Plaza Mayor that night, about eight o'clock, when a man plucked me by the sleeve, and, turning in the light of a bonfire, I confronted Fuentes. I had not seen him since our return to Lisbon: and his face, in the bonfire's glare, seemed to me to have aged woefully.

"The shells may have spared her house," said he. "Do you care to go with me and see what remains of it?"

He linked his arm in mine. We dived into the dark streets together.

The Street of the Virgins had suffered from the Allies' artillery, and we picked our way over fallen chimney-stacks and heaps of rubble to the remembered door. It stood open, no porter guarding it: but a lamp smoked in the stairway, and by the light of it we mounted together.

On the topmost landing all was dark, but here within the half-open door a light shone. Fuentes tapped on the door and pressed it open. From a deep armchair beside the empty fireplace a woman rose to greet us. It was the duenna, Doña Isabel. Behind her in the open window a lamp shone within a red shade, swaying a little in the draught.

"I give you welcome, Sirs," quavered the old lady in a voice that seemed to flicker, too, in the draught. "By the shouting I understood that the forts have fallen and for some while I have been expecting you.... It is dull up here, and a poor welcome for young gentlemen since my darling died. But on such a night as this----"

She gazed around her, resting both hands on the arms of her chair.

"Luisa! Where is Luisa?" cried Fuentes sharply.

"They come very seldom now," pursued the old woman, not hearing or not comprehending. "It is dull, you understand. You, Sir, are Don Eugenio, are you not?" She nodded palsywise toward the white bed, where a broken guitar lay between two baskets of withered flowers.

"I was to tell you----" She broke off and lifted a hand half-way to her brow, but let it drop. "I was to tell you, if you came, that her letter was true, and always the lamp had been lit for you only. It burns still, you see. She loved you, my little one did; and she was good--always, though she laughed, she was good."

Fuentes stepped to the bed and took the guitar in his hands. Some blow had broken in the sounding-board, and one of the strings had snapped.

"There is no blood upon it," went on the old woman in the same tone that seemed pitilessly striving not to hurt. "The little one scarcely bled at all. But Don Diego struck hard, and somehow the guitar was broken, yet it may have been with her elbow as she fell. It was not treachery, you understand. At first she believed that in his jealousy he meant to betray you, but he meant only to murder. And she, discovering this, dressed herself in your clothes and took your place in the line that night: I heard her playing down the stairs: they were all playing 'My love, she lives in Salamanca'--that was the tune--your own tune, Don Eugenio--and she, with her mask on, singing bravely, the third in the line. She was short, you remember--oh, perhaps a head and shoulders shorter than you!--but Don Diego, outside the door in the darkness, could not see well, or maybe he was misled by your guitar. And, afterwards, Don Sebastian ran him through. They brought her upstairs to me and laid her on the bed. She was breathing yet, but for a very little while: and I was to tell you--I was to tell you----" She broke off again, seeking to remember.

"Was it something about the lamp, Doña Isabel?"

"Yes, that was it--but I have told you already, eh? Only for you she had ever lit it: for years, yet always and only for you...."

He crept past me, the guitar beneath his arm, and I followed. He went like a blind man, groping between the stair-rail and the wall.

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