(1/3) Go Saddle the Sea (7 page)

There was total silence as he limped along, and for a moment I felt great fear. Suppose the muttering crowd were to fall on him and stone him to death? Burn his daughter as a witch? Oh, what have I done? I thought. It was impossible to judge their mood.

Then somebody shouted, "Why does not the child walk? If she has been healed in the church, why is she still in the cart? Let her walk!"

And they all cried out, "Yes, let her walk! Let the child walk!"

I trembled.

Her father said to her in a low, pleading tone, "Can you walk, Nieves?" But not as if he expected that she would. He halted, however.

And then, in the middle of the silence, she whispered, "I will try."

Slowly she stretched up a hand to him. He took it. And she began, inch by inch, little by little, to drag herself upright, with the slow, unaccustomed movements of somebody who has been lying still for years. I was astounded when I saw how tall she was—no wonder she had seemed so heavy coming down the hill! Why, she must be almost my own age! I had thought her a child of six or seven.

At last she was standing, balanced perilously on her thin legs, holding her father's hand, while he gazed at her, his mouth open, almost petrified with fear and astonishment, it seemed.

I thought she might fall when she swayed and, as no one else seemed ready to help her, I went forward to take her other hand, saying in as matter-of-fact a voice as I could muster, "Come along then, Nieves, you must be hungry! I will help you walk to your aunts house."

Though heavy in the cart, she seemed now, balanced on her stick-like legs, as light as a flower of angelica. Guided by her father and me, she moved along slowly—but she was walking herself, we were only helping her to keep her balance.

A kind of sigh came from the crowd, and grew
louder and louder, until by the time we reached the
venta
they were cheering their heads off, shouting, "
Olé, Olé!
" throwing their hats in the air, embracing each other, and weeping. Dozens of candles were lit, people ran to their houses and fetched stools and chairs and bottles of wine; there was a feast in the street; you would never have guessed that half an hour before every man in the place had cherished the notion of tossing the father of Nieves over a cliff.

In the
venta
Nieves was given a bowl of milk. Very soon a dignified white-haired man came busding in. He wore a suit of black and a three-cornered black hat; he, it seemed, was the doctor, much esteemed in the village. He expressed great interest in the recovery of Nieves but said, "She should rest; all this excitement will be bad for her. Let her pass the night at my house. My housekeeper will look after her."

This being agreed to, he asked for three helpers to carry her in a chair to his house, which was at the opposite end of the village. Being close by Nieves at the time, I was chosen for one of the helpers, and we walked with her slowly and carefully. The moon had gone down by now, but people were dancing in the street, which was lit from end to end by candles and rush lights.

I heard the doctor muttering to himself as we walked along:

"Eh, well, the feud is over, and
that
is a good thing—though no doubt they will find some other excuse for killing each other soon enough."

He sounded like a man who had lived too long to believe that people would easily change their ways.

I thought that the doctor's house was most likely the best in the village, for it was stone-floored, furnished with chairs and tables and bookcases, a great contrast to the earth floor and piles of straw in the
venta.

"You may sleep in my shed if you wish, boy," said the doctor, noticing, I suppose, my wistful glance around his room. "You'd get little enough sleep along
there;
they'll keep on drinking till daybreak, very probably."

"Thank you, señor. That is kind of you."

While his housekeeper was heating bricks for the bed and fetching a bowl of whey with warm wine in it for Nieves, the doctor asked a few questions.

"How long is it, my child, since you were able to walk and talk?"

"I don't know, senor," she said. "I feel as if I had been asleep a long, long time."

"I believe it was three years," said I, remembering what the girl's aunt had said, for the father, abashed by the grandeur of the doctors house, had gone back to the
venta.

"And what was the last thing you remember?" asked the doctor.

"I saw my mother and my little sister washed away when the river came down in flood. Oh, it was dreadful!—the snow and the black water and the trees toss
ing like sticks." Her eyes were huge in her thin white face as she remembered.

"And since then you could neither move nor speak?"

"I—I suppose not, señor."

"Well—well, it is a very interesting case," the doctor muttered to himself. "Hysterical, without a doubt."

Now the housekeeper took Nieves off to a back room and I slipped away to the shed. The doctor was eyeing me too attentively for comfort. I certainly slept better on his hay than I would have at the inn, where, to judge from the sound, every soul in the village drank and sang till daybreak.

Next morning I was up early and went along to feed and tend my mule, for I wished to set forth. Not another soul was abroad; looking through the open door of the
venta,
I saw it layered with snoring bodies, fowls roosting on the rafters, a baby asleep in a horse trough, even a man lying outside, sunk in slumber, with his goat tied to his leg. Potato sacks, pumpkins, and even pigs were being used for pillows.

But at the back, when I fetched the mule, I found the aunt of Nieves, talking to her brother.

She must have come to some conclusions during the night, for when I offered to pay for the mules stabling, she put her arms round me and nearly squeezed me to death.

"Take money off you? Not if I had eaten my last
crust! I would
give
you some if I had any—I do not know what you did, but I am sure it was you who—"

"Hush, señora!" We both glanced round, but nobody had heard us. I added modestly, "It was nothing—a trifle! But still, if you had an old saddle bag—"

"That you shall have!" And she fetched a pair of
alforjas,
and placed in them bread, cheese, fruit, and a bottle of wine.

José, her brother, on learning that I was traveling northward, suggested that we should go together, since that was his direction also. He wished to return to his other children as soon as might be, and I, too, wished to leave without delay. So, having saddled the mule, we returned to the doctors house to pick up Nieves.

The doctor came out in his nightcap to say good-bye, and gave me a very keen look.

"Where are you from, boy?" said he. "By daylight your face seems familiar—though I can't call to mind where exactly—"

"Oh, my grandfather has a farm at Los Nogales," said I very fast—for now it came back to me that he had been called in to cure my great-aunt Barbarita of a quinsy when the doctor at Villaverde was away on a visit. I hoped he would not remember where he had seen me, and made haste to drag away Nieves in her little cart.

Luckily at that moment his housekeeper screeched from indoors that the chocolate was hot and it would
spoil if he did not come directly, so he gave us a wave, thrust a couple of coins into José's hand, and left: us.

It had been arranged between us that we should take turns to ride the mule and pull the handcart; so, without more ado, José mounted and we left the village.

I was happy to have the company of José López and his daughter on my journey that day: firstly, because the weather was foggy and the way confusing, all set about with precipices and chasms, so that the mule and I would almost certainly have been dashed to destruction had we traveled without, a guide; but even more because Don José, when the cloud of his fear and trouble was lifted from him, proved to be a very kind, wise man, with whom it was a pleasure to converse. He was a miller, I learned, and had two more children back at home, % boy, Mario, older than Nieves, and a girl, Anita, some years younger. Being a widower, he had felt much distress in his mind as to what might become of Nieves if he should die, and had therefore undertaken this dangerous pilgrimage as a last hope of curing her dumbness and paralysis.

When we had gone several leagues from Cobenna (which was the name of the village where we had spent the night) José inquired of me, "Tell me, my boy, was
it not you who threw down those boulders on the assassins?"

(For, during the festivities of the previous evening, he had easily discovered what had come to pass before he arrived at the church.)

"Yes, Don José, it was I, and I also shouted threats at the men through the lining of my hat. I will not show you just now how I did it, for fear of frightening the mule," said I—for we were at that moment skirting the rim of a fearsome precipice—"but at all events it served to scare off those villains, and I am heartily glad of that."

"God's ways are mysterious," he said. "I daresay if the people of Cobenna had learned this morning that it was you who threw the stones, and not San Antonio himself, they would have changed their minds about the miracle and torn us to pieces, all three; yet I see it as God's will which brought you to that place at that time."

Looking at the matter in this light, I thought he was probably right, and I felt very friendly disposed toward God, who had put this notion of scaring off the murderers into my head, and who must have enjoyed the joke as much as I had. It now struck me that Father Tomás, who told me so often that God hated my wicked ways, very likely had a wrong notion of God altogether; and I wondered this had not occurred to me before, since Father Tomás had been wrong on many other points. And it struck me, too, how often
a dark, dismal, and frightening idea is believed above a cheerful and hopeful one. Why this should be, I cannot say.

However, Don José, having achieved the cure of his daughter, was now as cheerful and hopeful as a man could be, and enlivened the way by telling me about the work of his mill and the people of his village. I asked how it had come about that the two villages of Cobenna and San Antonio were at such deadly feud; he said the original cause was now lost in the mists of thé past, but he himself thought it might be because the natives of the two towns were descended from different races: He believed the men of Cobenna had as forefathers the Moors, who had once overrun the whole land of Spain; whereas the people of San Antonio were descended from the Goths.

"You saw how dark and scowling the folk were in Cobenna; but in San Antonio they are fair and gray-eyed, and much taller."

Don José asked me about myself, why I traveled alone at my age, and where I was bound. Having taken such a liking to him, I wàs loath to tell him a lie, and so said frankly, "Señor, I have left my home, which was not a happy one; my parents are dead, and my grandfather disliked me; so I am on my way to England to seek my father's kin there, for he was English. But I will not tell you my grandfather's name, or mine, in case he sends out men searching for me. Then, if they should come your way, you will be able to say that you know nothing about me."

"But," said Nieves, lifting up her head from the cart, where she had lain sleeping for the first part of our journey, "if we do not know your name, what shall we call you?"

I thought a moment and said, "A friend at my home used to call me Little Tiger."

"
Bueno;
we will call you that. And it suits you well," said Don José, "for your hair is just the color of a tigers belly fur."

"And his face is round, like a tiger's," said Nieves, laughing.

By daylight I could see that she was not a bad-looking girl, although her skin was so pale, through having lain indoors on a bed for the last three years, that she was well suited to her name of Snows (from Our Lady of the Snows); but her hair was a beautiful glossy brown, and her eyes, now that she was awakened, sparkled with interest at all she saw. I was curious about the long silence through which she had lived, while she had been dumb, and asked her if she could remember nothing of that time.

"No, friend Tiger; or not in a way that I could make plain in words. I can remember colors—which were like sounds; and scents and tastes that I seemed see; and music that touched me like a wind; it was a long, strange, dreamlike time."

"Thank God you are awakened from it," said her father.

Now she wanted permission to walk, saying we should not have to pull her, since she was cured; but
this he forbade, because the way was so dangerous, and she so newly recovered, her legs still weak and thin; so she remained on the cart. Indeed, at times we were obliged to fasten her to it with a leather thong, along the worst parts of the way, for fear she would be thrown off; and José pulled her then, saying that he was more accustomed to the mountains than I; it was true that sometimes I was obliged to turn my gaze from the giddy edge lest my head should begin to swim and I topple headlong over. José made me ride the mule, who, like all her kind, cared nothing for the heights by which we passed, ambling on her way without the least objection, often treading so close to the brink that, if I had dared look past my foot in its stirrup, I should have seen nothing below it for thousands of feet.

Nieves, like the mule, seemed unaffected by the precipices; she felt sure, she told me, that she had not been woken from her silence only to fall down a cliff. She had a simple, plain way of speaking—like that of a much younger child—which pleased me greatly. Yet she could be thoughtful, too.

"Tell me about England!" she said.

I was obliged to admit that I had never been there; yet related all that I could remember from Bob's tales.

"They eat their meat half raw; beer and cider are drunk mostly, for wine is very dear; the bread is abominably bitter; the hedges are mean and insignificant, being full of nettles, thistles, and thorns, instead of our oak and vine; they burn a black, shining stone every
where instead of wood; their candles are made of tallow, very coarse and stinking, for wax is too dear; their clothes are not gay or colorful, as in Spain, but mainly gray or brown; there are no goats in England; they have no aqueducts or wayside fountains; their streets are wide, for the sun never shines, and so they need no shade; their night watchmen cry out every half hour all through the night, telling the state of the weather—a needless service, for it is always raining..."