“I was trained in the days of sail, my dear,” said Echegaray when at last she joined him, “but vaya! Vaya! my wind isn’t what it was!”
He puffed and blew and fanned himself with his beret.
Echegaray sat down at the mouth of the cave and fixed his eyes on the water below. He sat there for a quarter of an hour without stirring, as if in a trance. Lola, awestruck, watched him. He seemed to be holding silent communication with the people of the sea. She wondered if legend were true, and he really had webbed feet.
“What are you doing?” she whispered at last.
“Waiting to see if the fish will tell me anything,” he replied.
“What fish?”
“Look!” he said. “Follow my finger!”
Lola peered along his arm. She could see nothing but the gentle ripple of the water, the eddies of the backwash, and purple shadows far in the depths.
“I still don’t see them,” she said.
“The shadows,” explained Don Ramon. “They are shoals of fish.”
One of the shadows changed direction suddenly in a quite unshadowlike manner.
“Dogfish after them,” said Echegaray.
The shoal split. Part of it vanished into the cliff under their feet. The other shadows, barely visible, circled to and fro, then came together into one whole, and streamed into the cliff after the first.
“You see,” said Echegaray. “They’ve told us. There’s a cave down there. Are there any of our ‘frontiers’ inland?”
“I don’t think so,” Lola replied. “But let’s explore.”
They climbed back up the cliff, and Echegaray searched the valley below with his powerful glasses. Red cattle grazed in the lush grass. There were neither pools nor boulders. The sea might have been hundreds of miles away.
“Nothing!” he said, handing the glasses to Lola.
Two miles away the ground soared up in a steep slope, over the top of which peeped the jagged sierra. At the foot of the slope and straggling a little way up it was a grove of dwarf oaks with some grey rocks crouching like beasts in the shadow of the trees.
“Don Ramon!” said Lola, without lowering the glasses from her eyes.
“Yes, my dear.”
“Did you see that little wood on the hillside?”
“The one with an old blue shirt stuck in a tree? I did.”
“Don Ramon, it looks the sort of place where there might be a cave, and—and Ricardito used to wear a blue shirt.”
“I never heard of anyone sailing a wrecked boat two miles across the land,” said Echegaray, “but this is a crazy coast. Let’s go and see.”
Climbing low stone walls and jumping ditches, the old shipwright stumped across the plain, while the white Lola flitted along at his side. They entered the grove and worked their way up through the undergrowth towards the shirt.
Two great boulders, carpeted with moss and dead leaves, stuck up a few feet from the ground like the lips of an open mouth. They peered between them. For a moment they could see nothing, since their eyes were accustomed to the brilliant sunshine outside. Echegaray’s sight was the first to adjust itself. He saw a huge, irregular rock rising from the depths of the cavern nearly to the mouth, and on the top of it a small figure sitting dejectedly with its head on its knees.
“Good-morning, Don Ricardo,” said Echegaray in a very gentle voice so as not to startle him.
As it was, Dick jumped so nervously that he found himself on his feet without knowing how he got there. Then he pulled himself together.
“Good-morning, caballero,” he answered coolly. “Can you get me out of here?”
“Ricardito mio!” cried Lola.
She dropped down on the dead leaves, and burst into tears of relief.
“Hola, Lolita!” shouted Dick. “I’m feeling fine! Don’t cry!”
“Well, I’ll say you’re a cool hand, young man!” exclaimed Echegaray. “Just a minute, and I’ll be with you!”
He stroked Lola’s shoulders.
“I’ve got a job for you, brave girl. Go to Villadonga and tell Hal to bring out some blankets and a long plank at once. I’m going down to warm the boy up a bit. He must be frozen, and the sooner he gets taken care of, the better.”
Lola nodded and, crying good-bye to Dick, ran with her long, light stride in the direction of Villadonga.
Echegaray ducked between the boulders, and launched himself with a powerful standing jump on to the rock. The top of the rock was below the mouth of the cavern, so that it was much easier to get in than to get out.
“Knees good,” said Echegaray, “but wind rotten! Keep away from cafés when you grow up, young man! And now off with those damp clothes!”
Dick grinned and obeyed. Echegaray wrapped him in his own ample coat, and massaged him till his skin tingled. It was half luxury and half agony. Echegaray seemed to know every muscle that hurt him most.
“Now!” said the Basque. “You’re a bit old to sit on knees, but the closer you are the warmer you’ll be!”
He took Dick on his lap, lifted up the bottom of his voluminous blue jersey, and tucked Dick under it. Dick poked his head out of the V of the jersey on Echegaray’s chest, and stayed there looking like a baby on its mother’s bosom—a bosom that smelt strongly, but rather pleasantly, of salt, sweat and tobacco.
“If you’re not too tired,” invited Echegaray, “you could tell me your story while we’re waiting. I’m Ramon Echegaray of Bilbao.”
“The Echegaray?” asked Dick, who had heard of him from Pablo.
“Man!” exclaimed Don Ramon modestly. “Just plain Echegaray—and at your service.”
Dick told him his story, while Echegaray listened, fascinated.
“What do you think it was that you saw from the Cave of the Angels?” he asked when Dick had finished.
“I think it was a submarine,” said Dick.
He would have hesitated to say that to anyone else for fear of being laughed at, but Echegaray was different.
“It might be,” agreed the old shipbuilder. “Whatever it was, it sunk the San José.”
“What was the San José?” asked Dick.
So Echegaray told him how the fishing launch had gone down inexplicably in a dead calm.
“Could it have been a whirlpool that you saw?” suggested Don Ramon.
“No,” replied Dick definitely. “It was something which cut through the water. Lola felt the wash of it, and thought a steamer had passed.”
“What about an eruption of volcanic mud under water? That might happen at the time of an exceptionally high tide.”
“Perhaps,” answered Dick doubtfully. “It let out a whoosh like all the steam in Spain blowing off.”
“Well,” said Echegaray, “ now that we know where it comes from, we can find out what it is in a day or two. The holes in this Asturian coast look as if they might dive plumb to the eternal fires, and fill the devil’s bath-tub for him.”
He borrowed Dick’s flash-light, and let the beam rove around the walls of the cave.
“This rock makes our search a bit easier,” he said. “The sea has never gone over the top of it, and nothing of any size or force could get around it. So the source of the trouble must lie between here and the sea. I’ll sound and chart the whole channel along which you came.”
“Dick!” yelled Hal from outside the cave.
Dick wriggled frantically within the jersey, and Echegaray lifted it to let him out.
“Hal! Hal! It’s good to see you again!” he cried, prancing up and down on the rock with excitement.
“One! Two! Three!” chanted hearty voices outside.
At “three” a heavy plank shot through the mouth of the cave, and fell with one end on the rock. Dick and Echegaray marched over the bridge to freedom.
Father Juan, Pablo, Paca, and Lola were there to greet them, and half the village besides. Hal and Dick grinned at one another sheepishly, each knowing what the other was thinking and both determined not to make a scene in public. P
aca caught Dick in her arms and wept over him, much to Dick’s embarrassment. Pablo, who was volleying curses of joy at the heavens, slapped him on the back much harder than he meant to; and Father Juan put his arm around him, and blessed him in grave and gentle Latin which Dick did not understand— though he loved to hear Father Juan’s voice anyway. Lola, gazing at Dick with wide eyes, put out her hand and just touched him with her finger-tips as if to make sure that he was really there.
“I can never thank you enough, Don Ramon,” said Hal, shaking his hand.
“Nothing to thank me for, amigo!” answered Echegaray. “I might have looked for your Ricardito all my life and not found him. I expect the sea to be where it ought to be—off the coast. But she whose ancestors owned this land, she understands it. Lola told me where to look. Lola found Dick. Caballeros, three cheers for Dolores Pelayo, Countess of Ribadasella!”
“Viva la Condesita! Viva! Viva!” they yelled.
Hal wrapped Dick in blankets and carried him down the slope to the ox-cart that was waiting. The two white oxen laid their great foreheads to the yoke and ambled home with a rolling walk, neither quickening it at Pablo’s hoots of encouragement nor slowing it when the cart, creaking and swaying, jammed in a rut or mounted a rock with two of its wheels. They are independent beasts, oxen.
Hal and Echegaray put Dick to bed, while Paca went to the kitchen to concoct some horrible drink of herbs which was an age-old secret in her family. She brought it in, a tepid, brownish-green liquid, and set it on a table at Dick’s bedside while she gathered up the blankets from the floor.
“Must I drink it?” asked Dick under his breath.
Echegaray smelt it like an expert, and held it to the light.
“Yes,” he whispered in answer. “The old witch knows her business.”
Dick drank it and choked, but kept it down. Then Hal sat with him till he slept.
Don Ramon raided the larder, for he was very hungry. When Paca returned to her kitchen after busying herself about the house, she found him sitting on the table with a large flagon by his side, consuming a pair of cold pigeons.
“May it profit you!” said she—the invariable polite exclamation of Spaniards on seeing somebody else eating.
“Have some!” Echegaray said, offering her the other pigeon.
“Have the goodness to tell me what you are doing in my kitchen!”
“Why, woman!” protested Echegaray in surprise, “I’m only eating.”
“Aye—eating the pigeons that I had prepared for the master’s lunch, and he starving and wondering whether the boy will live.”
“He will,” said Don Ramon calmly.
“Who told you so? He will, says he! Of course he will, but what business is it of yours, foreigner?”
“Woman—” began Echegaray with his mouth full of pigeon.
“Woman, indeed! I am Doña Paca—at your service— and when you want anything of Doña Paca, go into the living-room and ring the bell like a Christian, instead of tearing the food from the fire!”
“It wasn’t on the fire,” said Don Ramon weakly.
“Of course it wasn’t! Do you think I would roast my pigeons twice? Madre mia—these Basques! What men for arguments and discussions! Now he would teach me how to cook!”
Echegaray stood up and prepared to assert himself.
“Very respectable señora——” he began.
“That, yes!” snapped Paca. “Thanks be to the saints! No one can say a word against my virtue. I may be an old witch—but respectable, yes!”
“Doña Paca,” apologised Echegaray, seeing what was the cause of the trouble, “I beg you to forgive me. It was a manner of speaking——”
“A pretty manner!” exclaimed Paca with bristling eyebrows.
“A manner of speaking,” continued Don Ramon. “When one says ‘witch,’ one naturally says ‘old witch.’ The two words are married to each other. My aunt, Doña Paca, was the most dashing woman in all Biscay, and yet they called her an old witch!”
“But she was a witch,” answered Paca, somewhat softened, “and I’m not.”
“You surely are, Doña Paca, for you have bewitched me. And were I twenty years younger I would convince you of it without caring this much”—here Echegaray snapped his twisted fingers like a pair of castanets—“for your respectability!”
“Mi madre, what creatures men are!” exclaimed Paca, giggling. “Glad I am that you’re not twenty years younger, Don Ramon, for I don’t know how I should resist you.”
She turned away to hide her pleasure among the pots and pans, and Echegaray, who believed in keeping on good terms with the cook of any house where he happened to be staying, slipped out of the kitchen taking the flagon with him.
For the next fortnight Echegaray and Pablo were underground from sunrise to sunset. They rigged a derrick on the rock in the cavern, raised Pablo’s boat, patched it, and used it for the exploration of the dark and smelly channel. The entrance to the cave resembled a mine shaft. Beneath the oaks lay baulks of timber, torches, lines and leads, picks, and coils of rope. Villadonga quayside had no loungers on it in the late afternoons, for such was their curiosity that they all strolled out to “the works” as they called it, and lounged on the hillside.
“They’re no longer afraid of the Cave of the Angels,” remarked Father Juan, “now that they know there is something there to be afraid of.”
Meanwhile Dick was recovering. After sleeping for twenty hours, he woke up so stiff that he could not move. Two days of Echegaray’s rubbings and Paca’s medicines put him on his feet, and in two days more he was living a normal life. It was a very exciting life, for he spent his afternoons holding the other end of the tape for Don Ramon and Pablo, and learning to sound till he could sing out the depths in the melancholy voice of an old sailor.
The Erreguiña had gone to Bilbao and come back with her captain. Dick and Olazábal took to each other at once, and within half an hour of their meeting were swapping reminiscences of Coney Island and Blackpool, and inventing amusement machines which, if they could ever have been constructed, would certainly have made their fortunes. Both of them became a little impatient with Echegaray’s painstaking measurements of the underground channel, his charts, tide tables, and cross sections. The novelty wore off for the villagers too, and they returned to their usual habit of lounging on the quay. Even Don Ramon himself, finding nothing whatever of interest, was proposing to give up the search for the time being, and to return to Villadonga for the big spring tide the following March.
“Dynamite—caramba!” roared Olazábal as he and his men sat in the village tavern. “Dynamite is what you need!”
“Barbarian,” said Pablo, “have you no respect for science?”
“That for your science!” answered Olazábal, driving his knife clear through the table. “You can’t lay ghosts with a tape measure! Send the cave to the angels where it belongs!”
Father Juan found it very difficult to keep Dick’s attention on the morning lessons. It was not in his nature to be severe unless he was very sure that severity was justified; so he sought about for new ways and means of interesting his pupil. There was an ancient iron-bound chest in the vestry of the church, filled with worm-eaten books. Father Juan, like most of his predecessors in the parish of Villadonga, had glanced through them, and, finding nothing but lives of the saints, monastery chronicles, and works of mediæval theology, had let them lie. They had been printed by a 16th century printer who evidently did not know a good manuscript from a bad one. Their Latin was the dog-Latin of ignorant monks—a conversational language that anybody who was familiar with Spanish and had the elements of Latin grammar could read without much difficulty.
Father Juan selected a Life of St. Andrew, and tried it on Dick the next morning. Dick slowly read a page, amazed at the ease with which he could understand it.
“Padre!” he cried. “It’s a miracle! I’ve learned Latin at last!”
Father Juan smiled.
“I dou
bt if Julius Cæsar would have understood it as well as you,” he said. “Still, it is Latin of a sort, and I’m proud of my pupil.”
And for the rest of the morning Father Juan told him how the monks of the Middle Ages lost and then won back the knowledge of good Latin, until Dick felt he would rather have been a scholar than a knight-errant.
In the afternoon Father Juan went up to the oak grove to see how Echegaray and Pablo were getting on. Dick, fascinated by the new language that seemed to have suddenly come to him, decided to read some more of the Life of St. Andrew; it was a lively story, anyway, full of myths, miracles, and adventures. To play the part of a scholarly monk more thoroughly, he chose to read in Father Juan’s library rather than in the garden. There, he was surrounded by carved oak panels and high shelves of books in brown leather bindings. The room was full of shadows, save where the shafts of sunlight driving through the little panes of the windows turned the brown to a deep orange.
With the back of a high oak chair towering above his head, and the dusty volume spread out on a desk in front of him, Dick read slowly on and on until he came to a point where the narrative did not make sense. He looked back, and saw that he had turned over two pages at once. When he tried to separate them, he found that the edges had been lightly gummed together. He prised them apart with Father Juan’s silver paper knife, and discovered between them a vellum manuscript covered with tiny, neat writing in characters that he had never seen before and could not read. The words were not divided at all. At the foot of the manuscript were two additions in other hands. The last was certainly Spanish, but he could make out little except a date—1557—and the words cueva en un robledo, meaning “cavern in an oak grove.”
The rest of the afternoon he spent hunting through the book to see if there was anything in it that would give him a clue to the meaning of the manuscript. But it was still a mystery when at sundown Father Juan, Pablo, Echegaray, and Olazábal all trooped into the library.
“Look at my scholar!” said Father Juan proudly.
“He studies more than an archbishop,” echoed Pablo.
Don Ramon and Olazábal winked at each other behind the backs of the two Asturians.
The Spanish Cave Page 6
