There is no civilised country in the world so bare as Spain, and no part of the Peninsula so sparsely populated as the Castiles. The road ran for the most part over brown and barren uplands, with here and there a valley where wheat and olives and vineyards graced the lower slopes. The crying need of all nature was for shade; for the ilex is a small-leaved tree giving a thin shadow with no cool depths amid the branches. All was brown and barren and parched. The earth seemed to lie fainting and awaiting the rain. The horses trotted with extended necks and open mouths, their coats wet with sweat. The driver—an Andalusian, with a face like a Moorish pirate—kept encouraging them with word and rein, jerking and whipping only when they seemed likely to fall from sheer fatigue and sun-weariness. At last the sun began to set in a glow like that of a great furnace, and the reflection lay over the land in ruddy splendour.
‘Ah!’ said Concha, looking out, ‘it will be a great storm—and it will soon come.’
Vast columns of cloud were climbing up from the sunset into a sullen sky, thrown up in spreading mares’ tails by a hundred contrary gusts of wind, as if there were explosive matter in the great furnace of the west.
‘Nature is always on my side,’ said Vincente, with his chuckling laugh. He sat, watch in hand, noting the passage of the kilometres.
At last the sun went down behind a distant line of hill—the watershed of the Tagus—and immediately the air was cool. Without stopping, the driver wrapped his cloak round him, and the troopers followed his example. A few minutes later a cold breeze sprung up suddenly, coming from the north and swirling the dust high in the air.
‘It is well,’ said Vincente, who assuredly saw good in everything; ‘the wind comes first, and therefore the storm will be short.’
As he spoke the thunder rolled among the hills.
‘It is almost like guns,’ he added, with a queer look in his eyes suggestive of some memory.
Then, preceded by a rushing wind, the rain came, turning to hail, and stopping suddenly in a breathless pause, only to recommence with a renewed and splashing vigour. Concha drew up the windows, and the water streamed down them in a continuous ripple. Estella, who had been sleeping, roused herself. She looked fresh, and her eyes were bright with excitement. She had brought home with her from her English school that air of freshness and a dainty vigour which makes Englishwomen different from all other women in the world, and an English schoolgirl one of the brightest, purest, and sweetest of God’s creatures.