Page:Once a Week Volume 8.djvu/574

566 cards, perhaps the famous old trick which French swindlers call saut du roi. I know he was doing this, because I was first in the room, and as my eyes were turned in the stripling’s direction, I distinctly saw the gay colours of the painted pasteboard. But the landlord, who came next, saw no such thing, for the pale lad with infinite skill slipped three large open books over the pack of cards, and bent over them in the most natural way in the world.

“My wife—Excellency—my son. He! Catrina, woman, awake!” And the housewife, thus adjured, rubbed her eyes, and awoke, yawning. Meanwhile Diego asked, in a sullen way, where he was to put my valise. I bade him set it down, adding that I should be ready to depart at moon-rise, and that I would therefore sup at once. I thought the dusky ostler grinned a very saturnine grin as I said this, but he said nothing, crossed himself before a large image that stood in a recess, with a feeble lamp burning before it, and went out. Meanwhile the mistress of the house had risen to drop me a curtsey, bobbing her long gold earrings, and adjusting her disordered mantilla and comb as she did so, and then turned to her son, who was apparently studying with most edifying absorption, and lovingly scolded him for “wearing out his poor dear eyes over the books,” quite as an English mother would have done. The landlord, who was vigorously bustling among his stewpans and spits, and under whose orders a dingy Indian Maritornes of a girl, with unkempt hair and kirtle of red cotton, was blowing up the charcoal fires of the great cooking braziers, whisked in, ladle in hand, at these words.

“Let the boy alone, dame. He picks up learning as easily as a vulture snuffs carrion. He’ll be a bishop, yet—an archbishop, and wear a grand rochet and alb, and give his poor parents absolution for all their—ahem!”

And Señor Mendez, who had begun warmly, and with a ring of genuine fatherly pride in his voice, stopped awkwardly, and gave a confused kind of cough. I hardly noticed this at the time. I was too much amused—wickedly amused, I fear—by the droll contrast between the exalted clerical dignity predicted for the boy, and the dubious occupation in which I had found him engaged. But politeness required that I should say something, and I asked the landlord if this were his only son, and if he were studying for the university.

“Our only son, our only child, and hope, and darling!” exclaimed the mother, fondly passing her plump hand over the lad’s dark hair; “he has been already for half a year at college in the capital, Excellency, and a brave scholar he is, and high honours he’ll win, only I’m always afraid he’ll dry up the very brains in his head with over much poring over St. Virgil and St. Cæsar, the dear, good, industrious boy.”

For my own part, I glanced at the demure student, and could not help entertaining a doubt as to whether his sickly pallor were wholly due to intense classical or theological researches, especially as I saw him, when neither father nor mother were looking, extract the cards from under the folios, and dexterously slip them into his bosom.

Señora Mendez had the help of an Indian girl, who might have been the twin sister of the one employed in blowing the fire, in arranging the table. This she covered with a cloth, not very clean indeed, but with a fringed border of crimson silk, much faded, but still handsome; the plates were of coarse earthenware, but the knives, spoons, and forks, had heavy handles of dull silver, and were stamped with armorial bearings, half effaced, in a rough fashion, as with a smith’s file. I guessed that they had been part of the plunder taken from the mansion of some rico by the robber-soldiery of one faction or other, and sold cheap to the innkeeper when fortune turned. Covers were laid for four. It was evident that I was not to sup alone, but that the hour of the usual family meal had been advanced to accommodate me. Meanwhile, the table having been cleared of the books, young Hopeful was necessarily disengaged, and I made one or two attempts to draw him into conversation. In vain. His was a stealthy, secretive nature, and in his sly eyes and the affected bashfulness of his brief answers I could read, what I already conjectured from the little episode of the cards, that the youth was on the high road towards graduating as a finished hypocrite. He had good features, in spite of his pasty complexion, and was inclined to be tall and stout, like his parents, but he soon inspired me with a feeling of actual disgust.

“So must Tartuffe have looked at sixteen,” was my inward soliloquy, while the lad’s mother set flasks and jugs upon the table, and lit the lamps, finding time ever and anon to bestow a kind word or a proud look upon her saintly son, of whom she and her husband were evidently immoderately fond and vain. As for the stripling himself, he seemed to take all this adoration as his due, and was as passive an idol as I ever looked upon, though the stolen glances he darted at me, when he thought my attention was elsewhere, were keen and inquisitive enough.

Presently in came the landlord, no longer in a cook’s white garb, but wearing his Sunday jacket of green velvet, splendid with silver bell-buttons, a purple scarf fringed with heavy gold bullion, and a yellow sash round his waist, hastily put on to make him worthy, as he said, of the honour to sit at meat with so noble an Englishman as myself. The supper was now brought in, smoking hot, by the two Indian handmaids, and I was ceremoniously requested to sit down to table. I complied, placing the Foreign Office bags, by force of habit, close to my chair, just as you see them now. The hostess glanced at the image of the Madonna, crossed herself, and sat down in a slow reluctant way, caused very likely by some twinge of conscience at sharing her meal with a heretic, and I was looking towards her end of the table when a mosquito, attracted by the lamps, flew humming up and bit me sharply in the cheek. I turned my head, and caught a glimpse of Señor Mendez, who was covetously ogling the bags, which, with their fine brass mountings, and the blaze of the English arms thereon engraved, no doubt impressed him much. For a moment it occurred to me, as I saw the man’s eyes sparkle, that I was in unscrupulous company, and that the