- A figure in
black moving swiftly towards him with a drawn sword in his hand.
Oddly enough it was but a short time after seeing the old man at his
gate that I had my first sight of an inmate of Dovecot House. While
slowly riding by it I saw a lady come out from the front door - young,
good-looking, very pale and dressed in the deepest mourning. She had a
bowl in her hand, and going a little distance from the house she called
the pigeons and down they flew in a crowd to her feet to be fed.
A few months later when passing I saw this same lady once more, and on
this occasion she was coming to the gate as I rode by, and I saw her
closely, for she turned and looked at me, not unseeingly like the old
man, and her face was perfectly colourless and her large dark eyes the
most sorrowful I had ever seen.
That was my last sight of her, nor did I see any human creature about
the house after that for about two years. Then one hot summer day I
caught sight of three persons who looked like servants or caretakers,
sitting in the shade some distance from the house and drinking mate,
the tea of the country.
Here, thought I, is an opportunity not to be lost - one long waited for!
Leaving my horse at the gate I went to them, and addressing a large
woman, the most important-looking person of the three, as politely as I
could, I said I was not, as they perhaps imagined, a long absent friend
or relation returned from the wars, but a perfect stranger, a traveller
on the great south road; that I was hot and thirsty, and the sight of
them refreshing themselves in that pleasant shade had tempted me to
intrude myself upon them.
She received me with smiles and a torrent of welcoming words, and the
expected invitation to sit down and drink mate with them. She was a
very large woman, very fat and very dark, of that reddish or mahogany
colour which, taken with the black eyes and coarse black hair, is
commonly seen in persons of mixed blood - Iberian with aboriginal. I
took her age to be about fifty years. And she was as voluble as she was
fat and dark, and poured out such a stream of talk on or rather over me
like warm greasy water, and so forcing me to keep my eyes on her, that
it was almost impossible to give any attention to the other two. One
was her husband, Spanish and dark too, but with a different sort of
darkness; a skeleton of a man with a bony ghastly face, in old frayed
workman's clothes and dust-covered boots; his hands very grimy.
