The Spanish dancer : being a translation from the original French by Henry L. Williams of Don Caesar de Bazan (25 page)

He had some hard riding to do over short cuts from roads to roads, and some of those tortuous rivulets to *oss which fed the headwaters of the Tagus. He reveled ki the pace, however, since it distracted his mind.

No one accosted so desperate a rider. The peasants saluted; the forest-rangers flung themselves back not to be ridden down, and the petty constables simply withdrew into the bushes until he had swept by.

If he had been challenged, he meant to call out: "Er-fand of the king!" which had power to clear the high-

way. As for the other sort of detainers, the vagrants and gypsies, he was in possession of the charms to drive them afar. A word that he was going to get help for "their sister," the dancing-girl, would have sufficed.

It was thus that he covered over twenty miles, which had brought out the good qualities of the Barb.

Then pity seized him; he left the animal at a post-house, declaimed his quality as Count of Garofa, and demanded of the postmaster, on royal service, his besr horse. He was bearing a message from the king to the queen at Aranjuez.

His costume was so rich that in spite of its being soiled and reduced to shreds, the postmaster believed the plea, and "charged it to the crown." With a fresh 'horse he traveled the rest of the journey without delay. He stopped at the old bridge on the Tagus, and, taking to walking, proceeded toward the palace.

It was impregnable to an army. It was terribly imposing and forbidding. It was, then, on a high land, little dominating over the deeply wooded country, bristling with fir-trees and pines, which had succeeded the oaks and chestnuts felled for its timber-work.

The vales had been deepened by the extraction of stones for the walls and towers; these quarries were half-filled with water, in which crawled monstrous reptiles. All was repellent; the turrets, carrying brass culverins, loopholes for guns, ramparts with wall guns, iron portcullis, turning-spikes on the copings, wide moats flooded with black water, and sentinels at every point; to say nothing of patrols which continually made the circuit and appeared here and there where there was a connecting bulwark.

'Tloly Mary, I shall never scale these walls of Baby-Ion!" he groaned, despairingly.

'Like a wolf, he began to prowl around the circumval-lation, growling and snarling like one.

"I wager that Don Jose has been before me and put the watch on the qui vive! It is guarded as though the French had crossed the Duero! Oh, if only he had the key to that gate, and its possession was on the point of his or my sword !"

Speaking of swords, at that moment his own, borrowed without thought of how the belt would fit him, loosened itself like a snake and, assisted by his stumbhng, jumped out of the casing and not only fell on the ground, but rebounded and continued the flight like a living thing.

Inanimate objects have these provoking traits at times.

It slipped along and downward, and he feared for a ispace while he pursued, that it w^ould disappear in the ditch.

Luckily or unluckily, it met with a hole, such as the monster rats bore in such moist hillocks, and vanished, as if a kobold's hand gripped it and pulled it into this burrow.

"By my life; what a disaster!'*

Unarmed, a swordsman is not a tithe of a man. He dropped on his knees and thrust his hand and arm into the cavity, at risk of being stung by some venomous thing.

But at the pressure of his knees, the edge of the pit began to give way. Before he could catch at anything to restrain his following the blade, which still eluded him, he was standing waist deep in a hole, wet and slimy.

"My clothes have stood a deal, but they are finished this time!" he humorously moaned.

But he spied, by a gray beam of light, the sword lying on brick pavement, a little below where he had been Ghecked._^.-

"O'h, it is a subterranean passage!" said he, not sure whether he ought to rejoice or not. "I must have my sword anyway, whether it is the abode of an imp or Gnaw-well, the rat king!"

On stooping to pick up the weapon, he perceived that it was on the floor of a tunnel stretching before him some twenty feet.

It was large enough for him to walk througth, if he bent nearly double.

Here was no mystery; it was simply one of those covered ways which, bored under the moat, enabled a forlorn sortie to be made by a garrison if driven to that extremity.

Time and a late inundation from the mountains had scraped and washed off the earth from the surface and bared it so that the least shock, such as his step had given, revealed the secret.

The vaulting was excellently done, for the cement, of Roman make, had prevented the least drop trickling through from the moat overhead.

He could walk up to the palace walls without being wet-footed.

He advanced, after girding on the sword more securely.

He was in the castle wall now. The masons had simply perforated it at this point and filled up the gap with two impenetrable iron doors.

"Much be my gain!" muttered he, for this seemed a block to any further progress.

Indeed, it would be a poor commander of a fort who, having a secret egress in case of the worst or to execute a sortie, should let his mode of communication set his defenses at naught, by falling into the knowledge of the foe.

He was so sure that he had no power to shake- tiie

shield that he did not so much as lay his hand uipon the iron.

But looking up with that appeal to the powers above habitual to the Christian, he perceived that above his head the vault was greatly high.

The dark accumulated here and gave the altitude increased scope.

"It is the bottom of a well—a dry well," he thought. "This is singular."

His eyes, accustomed to the gloom, then could distinguish that the upper portion of this vault was an oblong inclosure of marble, white, but looking gray.

"It is miuch like a sarcophagus!"

He began to reflect on what he had heard of the palace.

He had never been in it; his comrades of the guard and court had brought back no reminiscences of the mountain, refuge.

"It is a retiro without a story!" bewailed he. "I am in no man's land."

Suddenly the great box overhead became illumined softly. The eflfect was beautiful; the chest was not of marble, but of alabaster. The pellucid gleam was soothing to the eye after so much lack of light.

He could discern that the object over him was an empty tomb of colossal proportions, sculptured finely within. The slab was set without cement and closed iwith its weight, so that no light could penetrate the crack.

After the light appeared, no sound followed.

He drove his sword into the interstices of the stone blocks and mounted on the handle, clinging to the asperities of the masonry as best he could.

Thus his head was within the toimb; he could make sure that his conjecture was correct.

He was startled by hearing close to the marble, but istiil invisible, the hard breathing of a man who was pur-

suing some labor to which by his panting he vas protn ably unused.

He was digging with a spade in the earth, at one end of the structure.

"What idiot is this ? Making a grave w^hen there is a tomb already to his hand which would hold a family!"

It is needless to say that his curiosity did not induce him to put an inquiry to this grave-digger.

CHAPTER XIX.

THE traitor's doom.

Our hero had prudently pulled up his legs and propped himself within the sepulcher, and it was none too soon. The delver, assisted by the ground being tenacious and giving way in a lump, dropped it almost in a block. At the foot of the alabaster tomb, a great gap appeared, the dirt falling to the bottom, whence Caesar had lifted himself in time.

The digger looked in and down, and sighed with de-' light at the success of his undertaking.

"Abund'ant," said he, laughing under his breath.

"Great powers!" thought the hearer, "it is my precious cousin."

This sufHced to seal his lips. His desire to pierce this mystery was sharpened.

Don Jose, satisfied with his work, shaped the orifice a little regularly, patted it to firm it with the flat of the spade, and proceeded to cover the whole with some planks. The light came through their crevices, however, and Caesar began to believe that he should not be longer in the dark, at least.

"There it is," murmured the plotter, easily; "the queen may come now and I will engage to hurl her down the hole if she assumes the virtuous and indignant tone with me, and does not accept my proposition in its entirety."

He went away, leaving the light, and Caesar dwelt in horrible perplexity.

Nevertheless, assured by the quiet and conceiving that the treacherous minister had gone to conduct the queen hither, he ventured all upon one die.

He worked his way to the hole, as a chimney-swee|> moves, with elbows and knees, and removing one of the planks, b Idly risked his head through the aperture he made.

He looked up and around in one of those imitations of classical round temples which had their vogue under the artistic Popes.

Columns and pilasters, some antique, others modem, upheld a very good vault in the style of the ancient "lanterns."

All was still; a rope torch burnt steadily in an iron socket by the open doorway. Caesar climbed out and replaced the plank.

The tomb was not used as such; it served as a table for an immense group of marble, partly antique, partly restored.

A giant with merely a lion's hide wrapped round his loins was struggling with the several heads and arms of a monster, which might have been the sculptor's idea of an octopus; at the back and side, seahorses and mermen struggled, too, but which was friend and which foe to the wrestler was disputable.

Garofa's classical lore was not stupendous; he examined the statues without interest, and said:

"Hercules and the Hydra, I think."

Truth to tell, he was thinking of the struggle which he felt to be impending.

"I am in the grotto, and my devilfish is returning!"

He went and concealed himself in the creepers and woodbine which formed a screen between two of the columns.

He heard voices in the darkened gardens, at the far end of which the castellated walls arose; the gleams of light from the torch streaked the darkness as they were emitted between the stone uprights.

In one of these long rays the watcher saw two figures approaching.

"It is my cousin, and he is leading the queen by the hand! The Santarems are in the lead, still, by Jove!"

With all show of deference, almost humility, the marquis led the great lady within the artificial temple.

The latter was not wasted, or blighted; passion had warmed and enlivened; she, perhaps, had a more animated expression since jealousy stirred, than since she had discovered that her husband was false.

She pretended a heedlessness to her risky position of according interviews of this private, ruinous nature which bewildered the count, one who with all his levity and scorn of conventionalities, had the Spaniard's esteem for rigidly constraining women.

"Your lordship could not have chosen a fitter spot for our meeting," said she, with a sad smile; "for this is the remains gf the Temple of Fidius, god of treaties, disinterred in the ruins of Tusculum. The Pope Clement sent the pieces hither as a present to King Philip; but as they did not arrive until after the king's death, the fragments remained in their packings, until his successor, a Medici, fond of the arts, sent to Philip the Fourth this group, representing Hercules and the Hydra, or a sea monster, which was set up here under the restored fane by the Grand Duke of Florence's own sculptor, Piero Lacca."

Jose had listened without more than glancing at the rehcs.

"The Grand Duke Ferdinando had better have attended to his ov/n realm falling into ruins than set his artists to repairing those of old!" said he, incisively. "His estate, between the empire, France and the internal dissensions, was in the same dianrer as overhang us."

"You said that you bore news concerning my gypsy protegee?" said she, disoonnectedly,

"Oh, that is a minor matter! Anything to obtain this serious interview! Your majesty knows by the gazettes which I forwarded to you by a safe hand in what misery this kingdom ferments?"

"It is Hke that strong man in the many arms of the Hydra, but, take patience, it is strong and it will surmount them!"

"Not without aid! Hercules did pretty well, but he was but a demi-god—it would require the gods to relieve tis of our foes! Instead of this prince, becoming young again by his turn of the tide, beguiled by necromancers and their agents, we must have a leader whose hand will strike powerfully, and not let a woman hang on it! Hercules at the feet of Omphale! Faugh !"

"Omphale! Not Dejanira? Not his wife? Do you mistake?"

"I mean, my lady, that Carlos is enthralled with a woman whom he is going to meet, going to a house out of the way, without attendants, alone!"

He paused to give this dose of acid time to scorch its way in, to the bone.

"You will conduct me there!" said she. "At once!"