jest; but if you
touched her honour, ignorant that she had one, would stab you without
ruth, and go her free way, leaving you carrion in the ditch. Such was
the Spain which Mr. Manvers visited some fifty years ago.

THE SPANISH JADE

CHAPTER I

THE PLEASANT ERRAND

Into the plain beyond Burgos, through the sunless glare of before-dawn;
upon a soft-padding ass that cast no shadow and made no sound; well
upon the stern of that ass, and with two bare heels to kick him; alone
in the immensity of Castile, and as happy as a king may be, rode a
young man on a May morning, singing to himself a wailing, winding chant
in the minor which, as it had no end, may well have had no beginning.
He only paused in it to look before him between his donkey's ears; and
then--"_Arre, burra, hijo de perra!_"--he would drive his heels into
the animal's rump. In a few minutes the song went spearing aloft again
.... "_En batalla-a-a temero-o-sa-a_....!"

I say that he was young; he was very young, and looked very delicate,
with his transparent, alabaster skin, lustrous grey eyes and pale, thin
lips. He had a sagging straw hat upon his round and shapely head, a
shirt--and a dirty shirt--open to the waist. His _faja_ was a broad
band of scarlet cloth wound half a dozen times about his middle, and
supported a murderous long knife. For the rest, cotton drawers, bare
legs, and feet as brown as walnuts. All of him that was not
whitey-brown cotton or red cloth was the colour of the country; but his
cropped head was black, and his eyes were very light grey, keen,
restless and bold. He was sharp-featured, careless and impudent; but
when he smiled you might think him bewitching. His name he would give
you as Esteban Vincaz--which it was not; his affair was pressing,
pleasant and pious. Of that he had no doubt at all. He was intending
the murder of a young woman.

His eyes, as he sang, roamed the sun-struck land, and saw everything as
it should be. Life was a grim business for man and beast and herb of
the field, no better for one than for the others. The winter corn in
patches struggled sparsely through the clods; darnels, tares,
deadnettle and couch, the vetches of last year and the thistles of
next, contended with it, not in vain. The olives were not yet in
flower, but the plums and sloes were powdered with white; all was in
order.

When a clump of smoky-blue iris caught his downward looks, he slipped
off his ass and snatch