Mr. Fortune (28 page)

“No.”

“Poor darling!”

She laid one hand on his shoulder, with the finger-tips of the other softly, pensively smoothing the lilac-dusky skin under his eyes. He blinked, and drew back, wriggling.

“To bed,” she insisted; and then, sauntering across the room, uncovered the billiard table.

“Alfredo! One little game.”

Now I am the odd man out, he thought, watching them as they circled about the heavy table. The thought was without rancour, indeed he was glad to be left alone, respited from the incessant scrutiny, antagonism, and mistrust of those black eyes. Grandmother and grandson...but somehow the relationship of youth and age had become counterpointed by its inversion, the boy's nervous slenderness and resolve parenting the maturity of the woman, as the bud, thrust sharply and alertly from the bough, parents the ripened, heavily-dangling fruit. Two cats playing with three mice, he thought, as he watched their play. And I, a stranger in the land, am the fourth mouse, passed from claw to claw. Instantly he reproached himself, recalling all the kindness shown to him by Angustias, her loyal hospitality of this very evening. But the reproach was swept away with the next click of the balls, and wandering on the edge of sleep he continued to watch them moving around their green battlefield, where the upshot of the contest must, so it seemed to him, settle his own fate.

“Oh, the devil take it!” she exclaimed, stepping back from the table with a rippling gesture of despair. “I am dead out of practice, I can do nothing, I am no match for the little wretch. Will you not play for me?”

“I'm sorry. But I do not know how to play.”

The boy smiled scornfully and went on with the game.

His eyes were heavy with sleep, his thoughts were almost a dreamer's, lumbering round in a dreary whirl of all lost and all gone wrong. When they came from the table he forgot to ask who had won. Angustias yawned and stretched, the boy looked past him with a glare; the indifference of the one and the hatred of the other propelled his body up the stairs. With downcast eyes he walked to his bedroom door and put out his hand to the latch. Only then did he see Alfredo standing there before him, making ready to enter the room.

“Oh, I must beg your pardon,” the boy said, speaking slowly, swaying himself to strike again and not miss, this time. “I am mistaken. It seems, then, that you sleep
here
.”

The head dipped a little, the black eyes, so close, slanted past him and regarded the door of the room where Angustias slept.

“You are asleep already, my child,” she said, suddenly interposed between them. “You cannot tell one door from another. That is your room. Come, I will take you there.”

And with disdainful emphasis of her usual placid amble she drove him down the passage, and talking of a hot-water bottle went in with him, and shut the door.

It was but a few moments after when he heard her emerge, and walk past, singing to herself. He knew the tune well, for she had often hummed it as she pottered through the unkempt garden or rummaged her storehouses. It was a lullaby, she had said. But he would never hear it again, for on the morrow he would go. It would, it should, be easy to botch up some excuse; it being so clear that he had no reason to depart on one day rather than another, he could go when he willed, leaving this kind house as fortuitously as he had come to it. And suddenly remembering the rhea that lay now under this cold moonlight, with all the indifferent hoary landscape round, and the rats perhaps even now flitting out to feed upon it, he decided that this was the sign and reason of his departure, and fell asleep.

The cocks were crowing when he awoke, but it was still night. I will light a candle, he thought, get up, and pack. Then I can leave immediately upon saying that I must go. Or shall I start at once, creeping from the house with no good-byes, like a thief? For that is what I seem to the boy, a thief and an interloper. When we stood in the garden she said, He loves this place, he comes whenever he can. And coming, he finds me here, at ease in the house he thinks of, already, as his own; me, a man from nowhere, a foreigner, a parasite. No wonder he hates me, and has set himself to drive me out. He is proud as only the young are proud, and his pride must stumble over me, old, dull, living on charity. For so I am, now that I come to think of it.

A finger of candlelight crossed the dark floor, and shambling slippered footsteps crept softly up the stairs. It was Quita, he knew her tread. Presently he heard a rubbing noise, and faint grunts. Those sounds too he could interpret, so long in the house that he was like one of the family, he thought, pricking himself with scorn. Quita, on her knees, was polishing the boards. Queer old witch, what an hour to choose for that! But such behaviour was typical. So old a servant, so long-standing a tyrant, she had long ago outgrown the fences of law and order, and did the whim move her to bake at midnight, wash the dog at dinner-time, no one said her nay. After a while a door opened, and the two voices mingled, hers and Alfredo's. Whispering, they flowed together without any splash of greeting. So might two conspirators converse, meeting by appointment.

It was she who did most of the talking, at each interruption launching herself upon a new recital. No muffle of caution could disguise her inflexions of dramatic narrative. And suddenly, as though his door had become transparent, he saw the pair, Quita crouched on her knees, still polishing the same space of boards, her eyes flashing amid the ruins of her face, the boy standing near, his youth scorning her decrepitude, his passion of rage compelled to wait upon her power of gossip. Of course she has hated me all this time, he thought. Now she has found a hearer.

Angry with himself for eavesdropping he flounced over in bed, deafened himself with a pad of pillow, and began, resolutely, to recall Wordsworth sonnets learned by heart in his youth.

For the fifth time he attacked the sextet. But still it was not day, and still the voices continued, and still he had not found a sufficient pretext for leaving the Salutation; for now he saw plainly that he could not vanish like a thief. That would not be dealing justly by Angustias, who had dealt so generously by him. Still tormented, he fell asleep again, and dreamed that he was back on the island, where Quita, shrunken to a piece of gnarled wood, was an idol. Suddenly the earth rocked under his feet, and a palm-tree crashed down beside him. Out of its swaying plumage jumped Alfredo, who ran to the idol, knelt before it and, pulling out a flute, played with contorted desperate face, as though his squeaking music were a prayer. Still the earth heaved, as a carpet does when a draught runs beneath it; and then, slowly opening, it swallowed the idol, who, as she sank, became flesh again, and spoke, saying, Remember Endor. And he was left alone with the boy, who, moving unscathed among the collapsing palm-trees, advanced on him in fury, still playing upon his flute.

He awakened to broad day. Frost flashed from the landscape, the fan of the wind-pump clanked thoughtfully upon a light breeze. How beautiful this place is, he thought, staring with farewell from his window, how romantic this citadel of humankind set in the austere and sleeping plain. No wonder he loves it so deeply, this boy who, even playing here as a child, knew that it would one day be his own, whose love, doubled with possessiveness, must have riveted into his mind the scythe hanging on its wooden peg, the creaking note of the pump, the cobwebbed bottle of liniment that stands on the windowsill of the harness-room, the very bounds which the shadow of the poplar-tree shall not pass. Well, he will be happy when I am gone, for today I go. Large as a sea these plains lie before me. There is room for a shipwreck there, and today I set forth to find my end; for this place has granted me my sorrow, and now I have no obligation to keep alive. As for Angustias, wise creature, she will accept my going as she accepted my arrival. I shall slide easily from her kind idle lap, to be remembered, perhaps, among the uncles and eccentrics, when next the mood takes her for an evening's reminiscence.

He went downstairs in what he felt to be a very respectable settled frame of mind, as though all his resolutions were packed, and the lid closed upon them. Like this, he could meet the boy's abashing malevolence, and not waver before it, nor need to shelter, as he had done overnight, in his hostess's skirts. In five minutes, maybe, he would be telling Angustias that he must take his departure. It was but a matter of finding a suitable opportunity; and her leisure was all opportunities.

But descending the stairs he saw that the moment was not yet. Angustias, Quita, and the boy were grouped in the entry below him, too much involved in some affair of their own to notice his appearance, or that, taken aback by their demeanour, he had involuntarily stopped halfway down the flight of stairs, to watch from a safe distance. Whatever the matter might be, it was between Angustias and Quita that it was being debated. The boy stood a little apart, his head averted, his expression at once contemptuous and uneasy. He was playing with one of the puppies, or rather trying to; but the puppy, limp in his hold, turned its goggling eyes upon the two women, and dropped its tail, and quivered as though in some uncomprehended disgrace.

They were talking at once, the other two, so loudly and angrily that at first he could not understand what they disputed. Quita, with tears running down her face, seemed to be at once excusing and justifying herself, invoking the saints to witness her innocence, railing, threatening, and cajoling. Her fists rattled upon her bony chest, she stamped, and the tears bounced off her chin. Angustias, pale with rage, harangued her. Her indignation flowed on like a river, unstayed by the gibbering creature on its brink.

With the gesture of a tragic actress she lifted her arm and pointed to the door.

“Go, then!” she said. “You have stayed under this roof too long, it seems. After all these years, after all I have done for you and your miserable family, after all my trust, you prove yourself vile, you whisper and scandalise, you dare to plot and gossip behind my back. You forget yourself. Go!”

“Yes, after all these years,” retorted the other. “After I have tended you as a child, dressed you for your wedding, nursed your children and your grandchildren, after the devotion of a dog, you would turn me away. And why, ungrateful heart? Because I, old now, worn out, am still your good servant, care for your welfare, for your honour, I say, for the good name of this house, for...”

She stopped. Her passionate grimaces were sponged out by a look of intense astonishment. She fell on her knees, threw her apron over her head, and rocked to and fro.

“I have told you to go. Go now.”

“And the dinner, who will cook it? And Rosa, poor innocent, what will she do without her aunt? She will pine.”

“Rosa will go with you. You, Rosa, Vincente, Conchita—you will all go, the whole pack of you. The car will take you to the village in an hour's time. Go and get ready.”

Still muffled under her apron, Quita stumbled to her feet, shrugged her shoulders, and hurried to the kitchen. A hubbub of voices greeted her there, and once again she began to weep and rail. Angustias smoothed her white hands together, turned to the two listeners, and said in her voice of every day,

“They will all go. As we cannot stay here without servants, we will go too. We will go to town, and stay at a hotel, go to the Cathedral for Corpus Christi, and see the fireworks. It will be a little holiday for us all.”

Destiny has its own ideas as to the lot of man. He had seen a volcano in eruption, the funeral of Queen Victoria, the death of a whale; but till now he had never seen a deeply-angered woman. The display of her anger he had witnessed without flinching, but he could not face out this powerful serenity, the glutted sultry contentment that had followed as upon a tropical storm. The dog, at last freeing itself, had run out through the half-opened door. He followed it. The boy came too, and side by side, in a unanimity of feeling that was almost amity, they walked to the arbour. As usual, a hen flew out with a squawk, and the puppy plunged after it, casting off its fear in the pleasure of frightening something else, he thought; but for the human animal it was not so easy. He glanced at the boy, whose profile, steadfastly turned, showed him compressed lips and eyelashes lowered over the livid scars of a sleepless night. Embarrassment, if not compassion, drove him to speech.

“Do you often have fireworks in this country?”

The pinched mouth quivered and twitched. With a burst of hysterical laughter Alfredo looked him in the face.

“In this family, yes.”

Sobering himself, he added,

“There are firework displays for any ceremony. For Saints' days, and feasts of the Church. It is customary.”

“In England there are always fireworks upon the fifth of November, upon a day called Guy Fawkes' Day.”

“Indeed. Why?”

“He tried to blow up the English Houses of Parliament with gunpowder.”

Religion was always an impediment. For all he knew, in this country Guy Fawkes might be entitled to fireworks as a saint and martyr. He should have thought of this before. Yet it would be a pity to let the conversation drop, and he sought for some other opening. He was about to inquire if Alfredo could remember a bird in the bird-cage when instead he found himself saying,

“It is only little boys in the street who trouble about the custom now. They have a rhyme they sing,

“Oh. I do not care for English poetry. It lacks passion and melody.”

It was too late for the bird-cage now. And presently Alfredo, having recovered his antagonism, walked off.

He continued to stroll about the garden, shivering. The morning sun was gone. Clouds that must contain snow had crept over the sky, and now drooped lower and lower, weighted with their cold burden. The plain flattened itself beneath them. Every vertical line was a slight shock to the eye. The air had become perfectly still. Presently he heard the Ford being wound in the garage. It also was feeling the cold; each exasperated jerk of the starting-handle was followed by a cavernous silence. He had listened to this for some time, teased with the thought that it should remind him of something, what, he could not recollect, before he remembered with a start that he must immediately leave the Salutation, and that Angustias had yet to learn of this. But even as he turned towards the house the car began to roar, and burst out of the garage; and at the same moment, with wailings and lamentations, Quita and her party, the women wearing their best black clothes, came out to meet it. Amidst tears they argued as to the bestowal of their luggage; and when they were all in the car, and the car under way, a shriek from Quita arrested it.