Tomasos Fortune and Other Stories | Page 9

away by a servant. There
followed the murmur of a conversation, between two persons only,
below his window. So far as he could gather from the tones, for the
words were inaudible, they were spoken in English. And thus he fell
asleep.

During the next few days Whittaker made good progress, and fully
enjoyed the quiet prescribed to him by the doctors. The one event of the
day was Miss Cheyne's visit, to which he soon learnt to look forward.
He had, during an adventurous life, had little to do with women, and
Miss Cheyne soon convinced him of the fact that many qualities--such
as independence, courage, and energy--were not, as he had hitherto
imagined, the monopoly of men alone. But the interest thus aroused did
not seem to be mutual. Miss Cheyne was kind and quick to divine his
wants or thoughts; but her visits did not grow longer day by day as, day
by day, Whittaker wished they would. Daily, moreover, the visitor
arrived on horseback, and the murmured conversation in the verandah
duly followed. A few weeks earlier Whittaker had made the voyage
across to the island of Majorca, to visit an old companion-in-arms there,
and offer him a magnificent inducement to return to active service.
That comrade had smilingly answered that he held cards of another
suite. Miss Cheyne likewise appeared to hold another suite, and the
American felt vaguely that the dealer of life's cards seemed somehow
to have passed him by.
He daily urged the young doctor to allow him to leave his bed, "if
only," he pleaded with his twisted smile, "to sit in a chair by the
window." At last he gained his point, and sat, watch in hand, awaiting
the arrival of Miss Cheyne's daily visitor. To the end of his life
Matthew Whittaker believed that some instinct guided him at this time.
He had only spoken with his nurse and the doctor, and had refrained
from making inquiries of either respecting the lady whose hospitality
he enjoyed. He had now carefully recalled all that the dead driver of the
diligencia had told him, and had dismissed half of it as mere gossip.
Beyond the fact that Miss Cheyne's aunt, Mrs. Dorchester, acted as her
companion, he knew nothing. But he had surmised, from remarks
dropped by the young lady herself, that her mother had been a Spaniard;
hence the uncle from whom she had inherited this estate. He also had
reason to believe that Miss Cheyne's mother had brought her up in the
older faith.
He reflected on these matters, and smiled half cynically at the
magnitude of his own interest in Miss Cheyne as he sat at the open
window. He had not long to wait before the clatter of horse's feet on the
hard road became audible. The house stood back from the high-road in

the midst of terraced olive groves, and was entirely surrounded by a
grove of cypress and ilex trees. The visitor, whose advent was
doubtless awaited with as keen an impatience by another within the red
stone house, now leisurely approached beneath the avenue of evergreen
oak. Whittaker got painfully upon his feet, and stood, half concealed by
the curtain. He was conscious of a singular lack of surprise when he
recognized the face of the horseman as one that he had already seen,
though, when he came in a flash of thought to reflect upon it, this
among all he knew was the last face that he could have expected to see
in that place.
He sat down quite coolly and mechanically, thinking and acting as men
think and act, by instinct, in a crisis. He seemed to be obeying some
pre-ordained plan.
The horseman was dark and clean-shaven--the happy possessor of one
of those handsome Andalusian faces which are in themselves a passport
in a world that in its old age still persists in judging by appearance.
Whittaker scrupulously withdrew from the window. He had no desire
to overhear their conversation. But his eyes were fierce with a sudden
anger. The very attitude of the new-comer--his respectful, and yet
patronizing, manner of removing his hat--clearly showed that he was a
lover, perhaps a favoured one. And the American, who, with all his
knowledge of the world, knew so little of women, stood in the middle
of the room wrapt in thought. It seemed hardly possible that a woman
of Miss Cheyne's intelligence, a woman no longer in the first flush of
girlhood, should fail to perceive the obvious. He did not know that so
far as her vanity is concerned a woman does not grow older, by the
passage of years, but younger--that she will often, for the sake of a little
admiration, accept the careless patronage of a man, knowing well that
his