TWO ON HORSEBACK

Now, Manvers was under fire; for the enemy, reinforced by stragglers from the town, had unmasked a battery of stones, and was making fine practice from the ruins of the wall. He was hit more than once, his horse more than he; both were exasperated, and he in particular was furious at the presence of spectators who, comfortably in the shade, watched, and had been watching, the whole affair with enviable detachment of mind and body. With so much to chafe him, he may be pardoned for some irritability.

He dismounted as coolly as he could, and led his horse about to cover her from the stones. “Come,” he said, as he stooped to touch her, “I must move you out of this. Saint Stephen blessed young man has forestalled this particular means of going to Heaven. Oh, damn the stones!”

He used no ceremony, but picked her up as if she had been a dressmaker’s dummy, and set her on her feet, where, after swaying about, and some balancing with her hands, she presently steadied herself, and stood, dazed and empty-eyed. Her cheek was cut, her ear was bleeding; her hair was down, the red handkerchief uncoiled; her dusky skin was stained with dirt and scratches, and her bosom heaved riotously as she caught for her breath.

“Take your time, my dear,” said Manvers kindly. And she did, by tumbling into his arms. Here, then, was a situation for the student of Manners; a brisk discharge of stones from an advancing line of skirmishers, a strictly impartial crowd of sightseers, a fidgety horse, and himself embarrassed by a girl in a faint.

He called for help and, getting none, shook his fist at the callous devils who ignored him; he inspected his charge, who looked as pure as a child in her swoon, all her troubles forgotten and sins blotted out; he inquired of the skies, as if hopeful that the ravens, as of old, might bring him help; at last, seeing nothing else for it, he picked up the girl in both arms and pitched her on to the saddle. There, with some adjusting, he managed to prop her while he led the horse slowly away. He had to get the reins in his teeth before he had gone ten yards. The retreat began.

It was within two hours of noon, or nothing had saved him from a retirement as harassing as Sir John Moore’s. It was the sun, not ravens, that came to his help. Meantime the girl had recovered herself somewhat, and, when they were out of sight of the town and its inhabitants, showed him that she had by sliding from the saddle and standing firmly on her feet.

“Hulloa!” said Manvers. “What’s the matter now? Do you think you can walk back? You can’t, you know.” He addressed her in his best Castilian. “I am afraid you are hurt. Let me help ” but she held him off with a stiffening arm, while she wiped her face with her petticoat, and put herself into some sort of order.

She did it deftly and methodically, with the practised hands of a woman used to the public eye. She might have been an actress at the wings, about to go on. Nor would she look at him or let him see that she was aware of his presence until all was in order her hair twisted into the red handkerchief, the neck of her dress pinned together, her torn skirt nicely hung. Her coquetry, her skill in adjusting what seemed past praying for, her pains with herself, were charming to see and very touching. Manvers watched her closely and could not deny her beauty.

She was a vivid beauty, fiercely coloured, with her tawny gold hair, sunburnt skin, and jade-green, far-seeing eyes, her coiled crimson handkerchief and blue-green gown. She was finely made, slim, and in contour hardly more than a child; and yet she seemed to him very mature, a practised hand, with very various knowledge deep in her eyes, and a wide acquaintance behind her quiet lips. With her re-ordered toilette she had taken on self-possession and dignity, a reserve which baffled him. Without any more reason than this he felt for her a kind of respect which nothing, certainly, in what he had seen of her circumstances could justify. Yet he gave her her title which marks his feeling.

“Senorita,” he said, “I wish to be of service to you. Command me. Shall I take you back to Palencia?”

She answered him seriously. “I beg that you will not, sir.”

“If you have friends ” he began, and she said at once, “I have none.”

“Or parents ”

“None.”

“Relatives ”

“None, none.”

“Then your ”

“I know what you would say. I have no house.”

“Then,” said Manvers, looking vaguely over the plain, “what do you wish me to do for you?”

She was now sitting by the roadside, very collectedly looking down at her hands in her lap. “You will leave me here, if you must,” she said; “but I would ask your charity to take me a little farther from Palencia. Nobody has ever been kind to me before.”

She said this quite simply, as if stating a fact. He was moved.

“You were unhappy in Palencia?”

“Yes,” she said, “I would rather be left here.” The enormous plain of Castile, treeless, sun-struck, empty of living thing, made her words eloquent.

“Absurd,” said Manvers. “If I leave you here you will die.”

“In Palencia,” said the girl, “I cannot die.” And then her grave eyes pierced him, and he knew what she meant.

“Great God!” said Manvers. “Then I shall take you to a convent.”

She nodded her head. “Where you will, sir,” she replied. Her gravity, far beyond her seeming station, gave value to her confidence.

“That seems to me the best thing I can do with you,” Manvers said; “and if you don’t shirk it, there is no reason why I should. Now, can you stick on the saddle if I put you up?”

She nodded again. “Up you go then.” He would have swung her up sideways, lady-fashion; but she laughed and cried, “No, no,” put a hand on his shoulder, her left foot in the stirrup, and swung herself into the saddle as neatly as a groom. There she sat astride, like a circus-rider, and stuck her arm akimbo as she looked down for his approval.

“Bravo,” said Manvers. “You have been a-horseback before this, my girl. Now you must make room for me.” He got up behind her and took the reins from under her arm. With the other arm it was necessary to embrace her; she allowed it sedately. Then they ambled off together, making a Darby and Joan affair of it.

But the sun was now close upon noon, burning upon them out of a sky of brass. There was no wind, and the flies were maddening. After a while he noticed that the girl simply stooped her head to the heat, as if she were wilting like a picked flower. When he felt her heavy on his arm he saw that he must stop. So he did, and plied her with wine from his pocket-flask, feeding her drop by drop as she lay back against him. He got bread out of his haversack and made her eat; she soon revived, and then he learned the fact that she had eaten nothing since yesterday’s noon. “How should I eat,” she asked, “when I have earned nothing?”

“Nohow, but by charity,” he agreed. “Had Palencia no compassion?” She grew dark and would not answer him at first; presently asked, had he not seen Palencia?

“I agree,” he said. “But let me ask you, if I may without indiscretion, how did you propose to earn your bread in Palencia?”

“I would have worked in the fields for a day, sir,” she told him; “but not longer, for I have to get on.”

“Where do you wish to go?”

“Away from here.”

“To Valladolid?”

She looked up into his face her head was still near his shoulder. “To Valladolid? Never there.”

This made him laugh. “To Palencia? Never there. To Valladolid?
Never there. Where then, lady of the sea-green eyes?”

She veiled her eyes quickly. “To Madrid, I suppose. I wish to work.”

“Can you find work there?”

“Surely. It is a great city.”

“Do you know it?”

“Yes, I was there long ago.”

“What did you do there?”

“I worked. I was very well there.” She sat up and looked back over his shoulder. She had done that once or twice before, and now he asked her what she was looking for. She desisted at once: “Nothing” was her answer.

He made her drink from the flask again and gave her his pocket handkerchief to cover her head. When she understood she laughed at him without disguise. Did he think she feared the sun? She bade him look at her neck which was walnut brown, and sleek as satin; but when he would have taken back his handkerchief she refused to give it, and put it over her head like a hood, and tied it under her chin. She then turned herself round to face him. “Is it so you would have it, sir?” she asked, and looked bewitching.

“My dear,” said Manvers, “you are a beauty.” Shall he be blamed if he kissed her? Not by me, since she never blamed him.

Her clear-seeing eyes searched his face; her kissed mouth looked very serious, and also very pure. Then, as he observed her ardently, she coloured and looked down, and afterwards turned herself the way they were to go, and with a little sigh settled into his arm.

Manvers spurred his horse, and for some time nothing was said between them. But he was of a talkative habit, with a trick of conversing with himself for lack of a better man. He asked her if he was forgiven, and felt her answer on his arm, though she gave him none in words. This was not to content him. “I see that you will not,” he said, to tease her. “Well, I call that hard after my stoning. I had believed the ladies of Spain kinder to their cavaliers than to grudge a kiss for a cartload of stones at the head. Well, well, I’m properly paid. Laws go as kings will, I know. God help poor men!” He would have gone on with his baiting had she not surprised him.

She turned him a burning face. “Caballero, caballero, have done!” she begged him. “You rescued me from worse than death and what could I deny you? See, sir, I have lived fifteen, seventeen years in the world, and nobody nobody, I say has ever done me a kindness before. And you think that I grudge you!” She was really unhappy, and had to be comforted.

They became close friends after that. She told him her name was Manuela, and that she was Valencian by birth. A Gitana? No, indeed. She was a Christian. “You are a very bewitching Christian, Manuela,” he told her, and drew her face back, and kissed her again. I am told that there’s nothing in kissing, once: it’s the second time that counts. In the very act for eyes met as well as lips he noticed that hers wavered on the way to his, beyond him, over the road they had travelled; and the ceremony over, he again asked her why. She passed it off as before, saying that she had looked at nothing, and begged him to go forward.

Ahead of them now, through the crystalline flicker of the heat, he saw the dark rim of the wood, the cork forest of La Huerca for which he was looking, and which hid the river from his aching eyes. No foot-burnt wanderer in Sahara ever hailed his oasis with heartier thanksgiving; but it was still a league and a half away. He addressed himself to the task of reaching it, and we may suppose Manuela respected his efforts. At any rate, there was silence between the pair for the better part of an hour what time the unwinking sun, vertically overhead, deprived them of so much as the sight of their own shadows, and drove the very crows with wings adust to skulk in the furrows. The shrilling of crickets, the stumbling hoofs of an overtaxed horse, and the creaking of saddle and girth made a din in the deadly stillness of this fervent noon, and, since there was no other sound to be heard, it is hard to tell how Manvers was aware of a traveller behind him, unless he was served by the sixth sense we all have, to warn as that we are not alone.

Sure enough, when he looked over his shoulder, he was aware of a donkey and his rider drawing smoothly and silently near. The pair of them were so nearly of the colour of the ground, he had to look long to be sure; and as he looked, Manuela suddenly leaned sideways and saw what he saw. It was just as if she had received a stroke of the sun. She stiffened; he felt the thrill go through her; and when she resumed her first position she was another person.