CHAPTER VIII.

A SOUTHERN PEARL.

“Mariquita!  Ma—­ri—­kee—­tah!”

A woman’s voice, shrill and quavering, with an accent of anger that increased each time the summons was repeated.

“What’s come of the young vixen?” went on the speaker, addressing her husband, the Tio Pedro, who sat with her behind the counter of a small tobacconist’s shop—­an ugly beldame, shrank and shrivelled, with grey elf-locks, sunk cheeks, and parchment complexion, looking ninety, yet little more than half that age.  Women ripen early, are soon at their prime, and fade prematurely, under this quickening Southern sun.

The husband was older, yet better preserved, than his wife—­a large, stout man, with a fierce face and black, baleful eyes.  All cowered before him except La Zandunga, as they called his wife here in Bombardier Lane.  He was at her mercy—­a Spaniard resident on the Rock by permit granted to his wife—­a native of Gibraltar, and liable to be expelled at any time unless she answered for him.

The shop and stock-in-trade were hers, not his, and she ruled him and the whole place.

“Mariquita!” she called again and again, till at length, overflowing with passion, she rushed from behind the counter into the premises at the back of the shop.

She entered a small but well-lighted room, communicating with a few square feet of garden.  At the end was a low fence; beyond this the roadway intervening between the garden and the Line wall, or seaward fortifications.

La Zandunga looked hastily round the room.  It contained half-a-dozen small low tables, drawn near the window and open door, and at these sat a posse of girls, busy with deft, nimble fingers, making cigarettes and cigars.  These workpeople were under the immediate control of Mariquita, the mistress’s niece.  She was popular with them, evidently, for no one would answer when La Zandunga shrieked out an angry inquiry to each.

No answer was needed.  There was Mariquita at the end of the garden, gossiping across the fence with young Sergeant McKay.

It was quite an accident, of course.  The serjeant, returning to his quarters from Waterport, had seen Mariquita within, and made her a signal she could not mistake.

“I knew you would come out,” he said, pleasantly, when she appeared, shy and shrinking, yet with a glad light in her eyes.

“Vaya! what conceit!  I was seeking a flower in the garden,” she answered demurely; but her low voice and heightened colour plainly showed that she was ready to come to him whenever he called—­to follow him, indeed, all over the world.

She spoke in Spanish, with its high-flown epithets and exaggerated metaphor, a language in which Stanislas McKay, from his natural aptitude and this charming tutorship, had made excellent progress.

“My life, my jewel, my pearl!” he cried.