The Spanish dancer : being a translation from the original French by Henry L. Williams of Don Caesar de Bazan (18 page)

"By Jimenez!" exclaimed the mule-driver, half alarmed about his beast having a broken back, and half proud at its being able to resist this weight, "the mule might well be born with a cross on its back! It has crosses to bear worse than humanity."

Nevertheless, the brute, bred and reared in the dale of Andorra to walk under loads which would have brought Sam.son to his knees, sustained the double cargo with fortitude, and slowly, but steadily, trudged over to the outer gate. Here the chief monk showed a pass, to which the gateman nodded, and the little party emerged into the street.

This led tortuously to the Escurial palace gate, whence they took the road over the ruggedness toward the hills along the Alberche River.

Pedro, whose journeys often took him to the seacoast, lit a short pipe, such as seamen called "nose-warmers/* and silently smoked.

The monk, on foot, walking on the side of Don Caesar, steadied the ghastly, sheeted head as the mule slipped and lurched.

"What are you moping over, Anselmo?" asked the one riding, half lulled by the movement, which had become fairly regular.

"Oh, you have awaked, ehr I was just i-egretting that this, our load of sin, was not still more in the market?"

"In what end?"

"Instead of carrying him so far as our convent, we might, if a fourth bidder—even the Prince of Darkness— appeared, strike a bargain with him "

"Useless; he will have him any way!"

"Oh, he will, will he?" murmured Caesar. "Not if I ta'n spite him; but if he did come at the nick, I believe he would sweep all the dice into his cap. You are as deserving a niche in his oven as poor me, and as for this pagan of a mule-thrasher, by the oaths he uses in profusion, I pronounce that he has dast away his last hope of salvation."

"Did he not die penitent?" asked the walking monk.

"He died as he lived, flirting with women. The priest of the Corregidor, who ought to have known better, used up all his wind in the marriage service over this profligate in lieu of the burial one."

"Married and shot? it was a h'asty snuffing of that candle called a man 1"

"They just gave him time to swallow a drop of wine at the wedding feast. Oh, it was one of those formal weddings to give some harridan who had passed seventy years without an offer, reasons to bear the name of Countess of Garofa for a couple of years, when she will take the same road as he!"

"I hope the road will be impassable!" muttered Csesar.

"I doubt that every woman, young or old, had gypsy, family and surgeon, contending for her legitimate prey!"

"Pedro, Pedro, you are plunging into the defile by EI Molino del Rey—do you think we want to grind this poor scrag's bones at the king's mills?"

"Scrag, in your teeth!" muttered Don Caesar, put out of his usual equable temper by the jolting and jerking,

Facing the Firing Line.

and having to play the dumb man for so long a time. "I may not weigh as much as this paunch in the other scale, but 1 would It were that of justice if I do not carry more flesh than you, you splinter!"

"We take it," replied the thin friar, "not to embarrass Brother Gregorio, who is on the south road, in his negotiation with the gypsy king— ■ —"

"Relics of Compostella! I learned in m.y studies that man has tv.'o souls, the good and the bad, but granting two geniuses, from what volume of the fathers do you draw that he has two bodies, unless he is twins ?"

"He is hoaxing you," said the muleteer, filling his pipe again and stopping to light it from a tir.der-box.

"Not at all, not my brother!" slaid Omfrio, indignantly. "It is meet to deceive those arch-deceivers, the sons of the Nile and Niger. They want to redeem their Joseph out of the pit? Well, we sell them a pig in a poke! At the carriers' halt, at Yniesta, the messengers of this wiseacre, the Duke of Egypt—I may say, the dupe! await the body of their dear Csesar to be passed over to them for incineration, according to their belief, they should anticipate their papa, the unmentionable, for the consideration of forty or fifty pilfer-dollars!"

"Forty? For selling an impenitent Christian's re-mams to the infidels! I never would consent to that! Fifty, or he should be wasted in his own family-vault!"

"It is the abbot who thought to beguile the brown-skins. They will not see the substitution till daylight, and they may do what they like with the pauper carcass which died in the homeless ward of the Hospital of the Queen's Bounty!"

"How timely to enable the Gitanos to be duped!" laughed the friar.

"It is to be borne in mind," continued Omfrio, who decidedly saw the humorous side of things, "that the out-

!a\\rs will not apply to the minister of police to have the fraud rectified."

"Omfrio, I thought to die of a surfeit of anchovy, which is my sole frailty, but you will be the death of me by laughing!"

Omfrio settled down again, and, what was more, pillowed his head upon the almost dislocated neck of Don Caesar, cut in twain by the edge of the basket coming up to his armpits.

If Don Caesar could have written his adventures, being of the nature which formed the "picaroon" novels of the mode, he would have set this one as the most singular of the collection.

From a wedding feast, to be trussed, enwrapped, used as a bolster, drawn along between two body-snatchers— for he did not believe them true, holy men—it was too abrupt a transition.

He would—at another and highly different time—per-h'aps smile at the double play upon his friend, the Duke of Egypt, but no tide of laughter set in as he was borne to he did not dare to guess what culmination.

If they had been genuine priests, he might have raised his voice in entreaty, but as it was it was not wise even to raise his aching shoulders in disgust.

"The bad point is," mused he, flattened under the dozing friar, "that this hideous proximity crushes out of me all my religion! What kind of mock monks are these which furnish their abbot!—Abbot of misrule! with stock in trade to sell to Gitanos, surgeons and weeping relatives ?"

CHAPTER XIII.

TRICKING A TRICKSTER.

In the eagerness to arrive at the goal, the hah wad short at the wayside cross, three uprights to commemorate a triple murder by fobtpads. The cavaUer, packed like a ham, was tormented by what tantahzing stimulus was in the gurgling of a huge leather bottle from which the muleteer and the monks drank to the peace of the immolated three.

His throat was so dry that the smoke from the mule-driver's pipe irritated it till refraining from coug'hing was a herculean task.

To him they had been journeying an age, but three ho'urs might cover the distance, when a fair stop came.

The beast of burden gave a profound grunt of relief as the fat friar was helped out of the basket by the summary process of the girth being unbuckled and the panniers spilt on the grass. He set to stamping his feet, before a humble inn door. Don Caesar could wish that he was free to leap out and lay about him with the muleteer's whip, but he was so cramped that he had no feeling below the neck.

A gleam of light and a whifT of hot air came out. The host, a squat man like a gnome of the mountain mines, waddled forth, bearing a bag at a time, of which he deposited three next the mule.

"These are sorted, fathers," said he. "Those two are fit to sell at the Rocsalinas mart, and the other for your abbot's own table! The much broken victuals I have kept for my larder. But hnlloa! what are yoti smuggling in the other pannier? Wine, again? or giame

out of the king's 1111111, for I heard Senor Don Carlos was O'Ut 'with the gun. You are surely more clever than the Indians who, I have been told, weight t'other side of a wheelbarrow with a huge stone when their load is onesided.

"That," replied Omfric, who had dis-benumbed his legs, "that is a small wax taper, of one hundred and thirty pounds' weight, given by the devoitt worshipers of our St. Francis, to burn for his glorification in his own chapel in our monastery!"

The host laughed, and playfully buffeted the en-fwrapped head of the prisoner.

"Without setting fire to your taper," said he, "I stake my money box, which is empty at the moment, that its wick is human hair, and such as the wicked Roman emperor set up to light his garden withal, which is painted to the life on the wall of your cloisters."

All laughed and the mule, refreshed slightly by cropping a delicious clump of burrs, added a short guffawlike bray to the mirthful burst.

Hyaenas in a graveyard would not, to Don Caesar's judgment, probably prejudiced, have had more bloodcurdling notes.

The fresh filling of the void basket failed to counterbalance him, and he was fated to be kept awake by the stones which jutted out of the goat's path, striking the basket bottom now and then. The ascent was noticeable and the pace was slow. The fat monk puffed and panted and if the results he visited the boughs with, which lashed his sweating cheeks had come to pass, their way would have been marked by withered bushes.

Anselmo, lagging behind him, every little while grabbed at the mule's tail to give him a tug, and each time the mule gave a jerk, which almost drove Caesar's heart and liver into one.

"If I was allotted only one prayer for fulfillment,*' thought the latter, "it should be that this asinine Christopher should dash out that villain's brains with a lash out of both hoofs."

Sooner than he hoped, they reached the final pause.

A heavy gate was clumsily banged open and the mule, though no stranger, was so tired as to blunder up against the oak and iron. The ofif-pannier was nearly smashed against the panel.

"A murrain on the beast!" vociferated Omfrio, "do you want to make a pancake of the comestibles! might you not as well have borne to the other side, lout, and bruised the carrion, not the wholesome meats!"

Not at all gently, but sourly and violently, the fatigued two unloaded the mule which Pedro had to hold, since it at last revolted, and they laid Don Caesar on a paved courtyard.

Except that the stages of his hegira had been marked by too vivid impressions, he might conceive that he was still prostrate on the Correction House pavement.

The shock of his fail did not penetrate the thick coat of insensibility pervading his body, and nothing like a groan could be forced out of his sealed mouth. He fell like a pig of lead.

"Put the 'cold meat' in the buttery," commanded the porter, authoritatively. "It is the directions."

"Oh. you will learn'what is the best offer in the day?" asked Omfrio.

"Yes; they do not have counts and grandees for sale every midday of the week!" answered the porter, closing the gate.

By each end, Don Ceesar felt a pair of hands lift him and he was carried with the utmost disrespect into a smill room, as he calculated by its quick return of the sounds the shuffling feet made, odoriferous with cheese.

salt fish, smoked meats and the pitch with which wine-flasks were sealed. He was let drop upon bags which might, from their unpleasant feeling, contain nuts, and a door closing with a slap, all -was dark and silent around him.

It was the instant when he should have exhaled a long breath, in evanescent relief, but he had lost the art of respiration.

The reek of the edibles brought the water chokingly to his lips, as it had come when the selfish monks regaled at the inn. This tortured him so that, had he been released, he would have bitten into the first wine skin, grasped at, or the first bottle would have had its neck wrung and been drained in spite of the strict table etiquette which the noble had been taught by his tutor.

Another spell of anguish ensued, for he doubted very reasonably that such monks inhabited a monastery of succor to the afflicted.

"If ever," he muttered, "if ever I make the acquaintance of our holy father, the Pope, I will certainly beseech him to strike this imposition off the list of abbeys deserving a place on the records for hospitality. I shall also desire him to have Father Anselmo hanged at the heels as a bob to that pendulum, Omfrio, both of whom I should suspend from the belfry hereto, at which a most dismal bell is now tolling, I surmise. It cannot be for masses on my head, for they will begrudge that!"

Emboldened by the renewed quiet, rats and mice began to attack the holes they were boring, and the two or three which had already made mines, trotted gayly over the sacks and held councils on his body, with a view of determining if this new bag of store'^f contained a more desirable dainty.

"I read, somewhere, in the tomes whose titles I have forgotten," observed he, ruefully, "of a captive, much

like me, who ingeniously anointed his bonds with tallow so that the vermin in his prison chewed the ropes asunder and he stood up, a kee man. It is to my crossing that I cannot get sufficiently free to grease my bag, though, were that much vouchsafed me, I should make the exit without my friends', the rats', assistance."

Suddenly the rats scuttled out by the ways they had! come. They had heard before the dull man the approach of some one. Indeed, a wicket in the wall, just an airhole, was quietly opened. Now it was not a cat, since few cats can draw a bolt, even to get at mice.

"A man! Not that I expect that these friars are not all of a tribe." His frigid heart stirred none the less. "I should say by his not using the regular ingress, that he is a thief. But I doubt that I am so valuable that I am sought to be stolen away from my good friend, this double—nay, treble-dealing abbot."