So, one by one, the guests sailed away down the mysterious river, and left Don Enrique alone in the great house at Echague, to be master of all he surveyed. And there he moved about his lost world, and was capped and bowed down to, and had his courteous, imperious way, until I think he began to feel that he was really a very great man indeed. And perhaps he was, as great as any other.
But solitary grandeur has its drawbacks, even to as grave and great a man as Don Enrique; and as the summers came treading on each other's heels with their burden of endless days, Don Enrique, sipping his Rioja in solitary state in the great dining-room, where the sweetness of orange-blossoms stole in through the wide windows, began to dream dreams of a companion who should sit always with him of an evening across the big, gleaming table, or come close beside him and share his thoughts. No, Don Enrique was not thinking of a wife; he had had a wife, and "lost" her, as he told the world. But there was his "little girl," Mercedes, back in a great gray convent in Madrid. His little girl, he called her in the letters he sent back every month, for she lived in his memory as the shy little maid he had given to a sweet-voiced Mother Superior, so many years before. It was for her he had been working all these years and piling up these princely possessions, and a look of almost womanish tenderness would come over his proud, grave face when he thought of her. This thought of her had sustained him in all the loneliness, and he had always dreamed of her coming as the crowning touch to his life. "Sometime," said Don Enrique often to the lizards darting across the table in the evening, as lizards will, "sometime she shall come to us." And somehow sometime always lingered in the future.
But at last, one evening when the odor of the blossoms hung very heavy in the damp, still air, and the thunder was muttering in the pass far back of Santa Lucia, Don Enrique stopped his sipping to look very hard at the great-grandfather of all the lizards, a tremendous old fellow almost five inches long. And the lizard returned the stare with his bright, beady eyes.
"_Por Diós_, my big friend," said Don Enrique to the lizard, at last, "she shall come to us at once." And if you realize what a very great man Don Enrique was, you will understand that when he began to make companions of the lizards, even the biggest and most respectable of them, it was quite time that he sent for Doña Mercedes.