the patch beneath his thumb. And even while he pointed out Andalusia in
the south, with its Moorish cities of Granada and Seville and Cordova,
and the port of Cadiz; and Castile, occupying the middle of the
Peninsula, with its ancient city of Toledo and its royal city of Madrid;
and her father’s native province of Aragon to the northeast, with
Saragossa, the home of his boyhood, still Pilarica’s air was so
skeptical as to throw the lecturer into frequent convulsions of mirth.
“But where is the basket,--the big basket that Spain flings acorns
into?” she questioned.
This, again, was too much for the Geography Gentleman, and while he was
gasping and choking, Don Carlos came to his little daughter’s aid.
“Cuba is an island,” he explained, “the largest of the West Indian
islands and almost all that is left to Spain of her once vast American
possessions. One by one, the lands she had discovered and claimed--you
remember about Queen Isabella and Columbus--rebelled against her, or
otherwise slipped from her hold, and even now there is a revolt in Cuba
that has already cost Spain dear in life and treasure.”
“And if the Yankees take a hand in the game,” put in their host, “may
cost us Cuba herself.”
“What are Yankees?” asked Rafael, frowning quite terribly at this
suggestion.
“The most powerful nation in America,” replied Don Carlos, “a nation
that threatens to go to war with us, if the trouble in Cuba continues
much longer.”
“They must be very wicked people,” declared Rafael with flashing eyes.
“No, my son; they are much like the rest of the world,” answered his
father, quietly. “I have met a few of them, but not to know them well,
for they did not understand Spanish.”
“Not understand Spanish!” exclaimed Pilarica. “Then at least they must
be very stupid, for Spanish even the donkeys understand!”
This reproach set the Geography Gentleman off again, and his sides were
still shaking as he pointed out Cuba on the globe.
And now all Pilarica’s gathering suspicions of the science of geography
were confirmed.
“But if Cuba belongs to Spain, who put it there close to America?” she
asked. “Did the Yankees make that globe and put it there themselves?”
And once more the Geography Gentleman laughed till the close-fitting cap
fell off and showed his shining bald head.
“‘Honey is not for the mouth of an ass,’” he quoted, “‘and learning is
not for women.’ But what a pity, Don Carlos, that this child is only a
girl! Her wits run bright as the quicksilver fountain that used to
sparkle in the royal garden of Seville.”
“She is like Rodrigo, keen as a Toledo blade,” assented Don Carlos. “It
is this youngster,” drawing Rafael closer to him, “who has the slow
brains of his father.”
“Slow and sure often wins the race,” said the old teacher, turning kind
eyes on Rafael. “He will make a scholar when the time comes, and it
should come soon now. Will you not enter him in the lower school next
year? He may not be the mathematical wonder that his brother is, taking
prizes as naturally as other lads bite off ripe mulberries, but if his
father’s steadfastness of purpose has descended to him with his father’s
chin, he will do well in the world. Character is better than talent.
But this rosebud brings back to me her mother, who used to coax and
coax me, when she was the merest midget, to teach her to read my books.
Her parents spent several summers in Granada and, if they had consented,
I would have liked to see what a girl’s head could do. But of course
they would not hear of it. She was taught to dance and to embroider,
only that. Her mind went hungry. But bless my heart! Such talk as this
is not meal for chickens. A penny for your thoughts, my sober little
man!”
“I was thinking about Spain,” answered Rafael, who all this time had
been glowering at the globe. “How did we lose what was ours? Were there
no more great kings after Ferdinand?”
“Yes,” said Don Carlos. “Spain has had strong kings and weak kings, wise
and foolish, but even the best of them blundered at times. Ferdinand and
Isabella themselves made mistakes. So some thirty years ago, when I was
a boy, Spain tried to be a republic and get on without any king at all,
but she did not prosper so.”
“King Alfonsito is not much older than I am,” murmured Rafael, with a
wondering look in his great dark eyes.
“And a gallant child it is! A right royal child!” chirruped the
Geography Gentleman.
“God bless him and grant him a long and righteous reign!” added Don
Carlos, so solemnly that Pilarica clasped her hands as if she were
saying her prayers.
“His father, King Alfonso XII, had a great heart,” the Geography
Gentleman said musingly, “but his heart was wrung to breaking by sore
troubles. I was in Madrid when the young Queen Mercedes died. Woe is me!
What a grief was his!”
“Pilarica knows a song about that,” observed Rafael.
“Ah, to be sure! Spanish babies all over the Peninsula dance to that
sorrow,” nodded the Geography Gentleman. “Come back into the patio,
where the fountain will sing with her, and let us have it.”
So in the fragrant air of the patio, where an awning had been drawn to
shut off the direct rays of the sun, Pilarica, dancing with strange,
slow movements of feet and hands, sang childhood’s lament for the
girl-queen.
“‘Whither away, young King Alfonso?
(Oh, for pity!) Whither away?’
‘I go seeking my queen Mercedes,
For I have not seen her since yesterday.’
“‘But we have seen your queen Mercedes,
Seen the queen, though her eyes were hid,
While four dukes all gently bore her
Through the streets of sad Madrid.’
“‘Oh, how her face was calm as heaven!
Oh, how her hands were ivory white!
Oh, how she wore the satin slippers
You had kissed on the bridal night!
“‘Dark are the lamps of the lonely palace;
Black are the suits the nobles don;
In letters of gold on the wall ’tis written:
_Her Majesty is dead and gone_.’
“He fainted to hear us, young Alfonso,
Drooped like an eagle with broken wing;
But the cannon thundered: ‘Valor, valor!’
And the people shouted: ‘Long live the king!’”
“And now we must be taking our leave, with a thousand thanks for a
red-letter day,” said Don Carlos.
“But no, no, no!” cried the Geography Gentleman. “Not until you have
tasted a little light refreshment to wing your feet for the Alhambra
hill. We will go up to the balcony and see Lorito--the wasteful
rumple-poll that he is--enjoy his bread and butter.”
It was very pleasant on the balcony, with its pots of sweet basil, its
earthen jar of fresh water and its caged cricket “singing the song of
the heat.” The gentlemen were regaled with wine and biscuit, the
children with candied nectarines and tarts, and to Lorito the maid
respectfully handed a great slice of bread, thickly buttered. The square
was quiet again, though from the _Alameda_ came confused sounds, as of
an angry crowd, cut by shrill outcries. A few beggars were gathered
beneath the balcony, waiting for the bread which Lorito, after scraping
off every least bit of the butter with his crooked beak, tore into
strips and threw down to them, dancing on his perch and screaming with
excitement to see them scramble for it.
This amused the children so much that they could hardly recall the
proper Andalusian phrases for farewell. But their host, loving the
ripple of their laughter, found nothing lacking in their courtesy and,
at parting, slipped into Pilarica’s hand a dainty white Andalusian fan,
painted with birds and flowers, and into Rafael’s a small geography,
written by himself. Rafael was deeply impressed at receiving this, the
first book he had ever owned, from its author, and carried it, on their
homeward walk, in such a way that no learned person who might meet them
could fail to see what it was.
“Of course nobody would give a geography to a girl,” he remarked.
“Maybe your geography isn’t true,” retorted Pilarica, flirting her fan.
“But look, look! There is Grandfather with the donkeys, and Rodrigo is
waiting for us, too.”
Don Carlos, who had his own reasons for wishing to see what Don Quixote
was able to do, placed both the children on the white donkey’s back,
leaving Shags for Grandfather to ride, and Don Quixote acquitted himself
so well that he, with his double burden, was the first to arrive at the
garden gate. Shags, trotting for sheer surprise, was close behind, but
it was half an hour later before Don Carlos and Rodrigo came slowly up
the road, the father’s arm thrown lightly over the lad’s shoulders.
IX
CHOSEN FOR THE KING
The next morning, as Don Carlos was starting off, as usual, with
Rodrigo, Rafael clung to his father’s hand.
The officer who, since that first unhappy night, seemed to have a
complete understanding of the boy, hesitated.
“But I may walk all the way into Granada with your brother to-day and
may not come back until afternoon. You know how tired you were yesterday
by the time we reached the Gate of the Pomegranates.”
Rafael’s black eyes looked wistfully into his father’s.
“I would rather go with you and be tired than not go with you and not be
tired,” he said.
Don Carlos smiled so tenderly that Rafael had a queer feeling as if his
heart were growing too big for his jacket.
“You may come, my son,” decided the father, and then his glance fell
doubtfully on Pilarica. “No, the city will be in tumult; no place for a
little girl. But you may walk a bit of the way with us, Sweetheart.”
It seemed such a very wee bit that, when her father kissed her and bade
her run back, the tears stood in Pilarica’s eyes like dew on pansies.
“Why not let her romp a while with the other children?” suggested
Rodrigo, looking over to where a dozen happy tatterdemalions were
skipping songfully about in one of their favorite circle-dances. “There
are no gypsies among them this morning, and it is to the gypsies that
Tia Marta most objects.”
“Very well,” assented Don Carlos, relieved to see the grieved face
brighten. “You may play with them this forenoon, if you like. But don’t
follow tourists into the Alhambra.”
“And scamper home if the children get rude,” warned Big Brother.
“And don’t go near the Gypsy King,” put in Rafael.
Uncrushed by all this weight of masculine authority, Pilarica threw
kisses to her three guardians as long as they were in sight and then
flashed into the midst of the dancing circle, where she was welcomed
with a gleeful shout. Carmencita clamored, as always, for _Little White
Pigeons_, and so the children divided into two opposite rows, each line
in turn clasping hands and lifting arms while the other danced under, as
the song indicates:
“Little white pigeons
Are dreaming of Seville,
Sun in the palm tree,
Roses and revel.
Lift up the arches,
Gold as the weather.
Little white pigeons
Come flying together.
“Little white pigeons
Dream of Granada,
Glistening snows on
Sierra Nevada.
Lift up the arches,
Silver as fountains.
Little white pigeons
Fly to the mountains.”
Then they played Hide-and-Seek in their own special fashion. The first
seeker was Pepito, who sat doubled over, with his chubby palms pressed
tight against his eyes, while the others slipped softly into their
hiding-places, all except Pilarica, who, as the Mother, stood by and
gave Pepito his signal for the start by singing:
“My nightingales of the Alhambra
Forth from the cage are flown.
My nightingales of the Alhambra
Have left me all alone.”
After they were tired of this, Isabelita called for Butterfly Tag and
was chosen, because of her pink frock--torn though it was,--to be the
Butterfly. Forming in a close circle about her, the children lifted her
dress-skirt by the border and held it outspread, while Pilarica, on the
outside, danced round and round the ring, fluting like a bird:
“Who are these chatterers?
Oh, such a number!
Nor by day nor by night
Do they let me slumber.
They’re daughters of the Moorish king
Who search the garden-close
For lovely Lady Ana,
The sweetest thing that grows.
She’s opening the jasmine
And shutting up the rose.”
Then the children all at once lifted the pink frock and wrapped it about
Isabella’s head, while Pilarica, dancing faster than ever, led them in
singing seven times over:
“Butterfly, butterfly,
Dressed in rose-petals!
Is it on candle-flame
Butterfly settles?
How many shirts
Have you woven of rain?
Weave me another
Ere I call you again.”
Suddenly they varied the song:
“Now that Lady Ana
Walks in garden sweet,
Gathering the roses
Whose dew is on her feet,
Butterfly, butterfly,
Can you catch us? Try it, try!”
In an instant the circle had broken and scattered, while the Butterfly,
blinded and half smothered in the folds of the skirt, dashed about as
best she could, trying to catch one or another of her teasing playmates.
Then followed Washerwoman, and Chicken-Market, Rose and Pink, and Golden
Earrings, and when, at noon, Don Carlos and Rafael came back, the
children were all absorbed in the circle-dance of _Mambrú_. Don Carlos
remembered the song from his own childhood in Saragossa and hummed the
pathetic couplets under his breath, as he stood watching.
“Mambrú is gone to serve the king,
And comes no more by fall or spring.
“We’ve looked until our eyes are dim.
Will no one give us word of him?
“You’d know him for his mother’s son
By peasant dress of Aragon.
“You’d know him for my husband dear
By broidered kerchief on his spear.
“The one I broider now is wet.
Oh, may I see him wear it yet!”
With the last word of the song all the little figures in the circle
flung themselves face downward on the ground, so impetuously that
Carmencita and Pepito bumped their heads together and set up such a duet
of stormy weeping that, for dramatic close, there was nothing left to be
desired.
Don Carlos swung Pilarica, hotter and more weary than Rafael himself,
to her feet, and as she smiled up into his face, she saw in it, for all
its gravity, a great relief.
Tia Marta, too, who met them at the garden gate, was quick to read his
look.
“Your heart has been taking a bath of roses,” she said.
And Don Carlos, in the same breath, was telling her his good tidings.
“Rodrigo drew a lucky number. There is weeping in other homes to-day,
but not in ours.”
“Other people’s troubles are easily borne,” scoffed Tia Marta, but the
dry, walnut face was twitching so strangely that the children wished it
had been polite to laugh.
After their simple luncheon, a hunch of bread and a bowlful of olives
for each, Pilarica coaxed Rafael out to the summer-house where the boy,
not ill-pleased to have an audience for his story, seated himself with
his back against the column and recounted the great event of the day.
“The Gov’ment,” he explained, with the dignity of a prime minister,
“needs more soldiers for Cuba.”
“Acorns,” murmured Pilarica.
“And so it has set up in every city and town and village--my father told
me so--urns for the lottery, and all the men who ar’n’t too young, like
me, or too old, like Grandfather and the Geography Gentleman, draw out a
number. If it’s a very, very high number, you don’t go to Cuba, but if
isn’t, you do.”
“And Rodrigo?” breathed Pilarica, who was sitting on the ground exactly
in front of Rafael, leaning forward and squeezing her sandals in her
hands so hard that her toes ached all the rest of the afternoon.
Rafael’s eyes glowed.
“Oh, he was so tall and straight as he stood there waiting his turn. He
had his cap in his hand and he waved it and looked right across the urn
to my father and me and laughed. And my father took off his hat to him.
Think of that! My father! Some day I am going to be a hero, like the
Cid, and then, perhaps, he will take off his hat to me.”
Don Carlos, pacing back and forth on one of the tiled walks, smiled as
he caught the words.
“And then it was Rodrigo’s turn?” prompted Pilarica.
“Yes, his turn among the very first, and I stood on my tippiest tiptoes
to see. I saw his arm go down into the urn, and I saw it come up again,
and in his hand was something that he held out to the officer who was
marking the names. Then the officer smiled, and nodded to my father, and
we knew it was all right; so we followed Rodrigo out of the hall to
embrace him. And I wanted him to come back with us, but he waited to see
how the luck went with his friends.”
It was not till late in the afternoon that Rodrigo came back, and then
he did not come alone. Along the road was heard a sound of tramping feet
and suddenly there broke forth the familiar song of Cuban conscripts.
“We’re chosen for Alfonsito;
We serve the little king;
We care not one mosquito
For what the years may bring.
How steel and powder please us,
We’ll tell you bye and bye.
Give us a good death, Jesus,
If we go forth to die.”
“What does this mean?” demanded Don Carlos hoarsely, rising from the
mosaic bench and fronting the lads as they thronged into the garden. He
had already recognized Rodrigo’s voice and now he saw his son marching
among the recruits.
There was a moment’s pause and then one of Rodrigo’s classmates stepped
forward.
“We kiss your hands, Don Carlos,” he said, “and salute you as the father
of a generous son. All Granada rings with his praises. For even while
we, chosen for the King, were congratulating him on his better fortune,
up to the urn came a young peasant, a laborer in the vineyards, as dazed
as a pig in a pulpit. He drew a lot for the hungry island, and his
mother--ah, you should have seen and heard her! They say it was she who
led the rabble yesterday afternoon, when the women, hating Columbus for
having ever discovered Cuba, stoned his statue in the _Alameda_. Her
shrieks, as she pushed her way through the crowd to her boy, might have
pierced the very bronze of that statue to the heart. The Civil Guards
laid hands on her to drag her out, but she clung to that staring lout of
hers like a starved dog to its bone. Then Rodrigo, the head of our
class, the pride of the Institute, came forward and gave himself as a
substitute for that dull animal, that mushroom there. And not even a
God-bless-you did the unmannerly couple stay to give him, but made off
as if a bull were after them. To bestow benefits upon the vulgar is to
throw water into the ocean. But we, who know a great action when we see
it, have escorted Rodrigo home to do him honor.”
For the first moment it looked to Rafael as if the stern face of his
father had turned gray, but that may have been only the shadow of the
olive-leaves above his head.
“You are welcome, Don Ernesto,” he replied in a voice even deeper than
its wont, “and welcome to you all, soldiers of Spain. Marta, do me the
favor to bring forth such refreshment as the house affords. Gentlemen,
all that I have is yours. Take your ease and be merry.”
And so all was bustle and jollity till the conscripts trooped away
again, and the family had, but only for one night more, Rodrigo to
themselves. The children decided that it must be a fine thing, after
all, to go and help put Cuba in its right place on the map, for
everybody was talking faster and more cheerily than usual. Only
Grandfather was heard murmuring a riddle that made a sudden silence in
the group:
“In my little black pate
Is no love nor hate,
No loyalty nor treason,
And though I’ve killed your soldier boy,
I do not know the reason.”
“Bullet,” guessed Pilarica, her lip quivering as she looked toward Big
Brother.
“That’s the bullet I’m going to dodge,” laughed Rodrigo. “There are more
bullets than wounds in every battle. Eh, Tia Marta?”
“A shut mouth catches no flies,” returned the old woman tartly. But she
bundled Grandfather into the house where he was still heard crooning to
his guitar:
“I would not be afraid of Death,
Though I saw him walking by,
For without God’s permission
He can not kill a fly.”
Suddenly Don Carlos turned to Rodrigo, holding out both hands:
“My noble boy, I beg your pardon,” he said. “I will tell you frankly
that I have thought it was your fault to lay overmuch stress on your
own concerns and your own career, a career whose promise has indeed been
bright, and now you have cast it all away that a peasant lad may not be
torn from his mother.”
“I have no mother, sir,” replied Rodrigo, blushing like a girl and
speaking in a hesitating way most unlike his usual fluency. “If there
had been anyone to grieve over me like that--and yet I don’t know.
Something happened--happened inside of me. It was as if a candle-flame
went out and the daylight flooded in. After all, a life is a life.”
“Bah!” sniffed Tia Marta. “All trees are timber, but pine is not
mahogany.”
Yet the children reasoned that she was not displeased, for she spared no
pains to prepare a festival supper that evening, serving all the dishes
that Rodrigo liked best, even to spiced wine and fritters.
X
TIA MARTA’S REBELLION
When they gathered in the garden that evening, the grown people would
still keep talking. Rafael and Pilarica, who were tired and drowsy after
all the excitement of the day, missed the silence that usually fell as
their father smoked and Rodrigo puzzled out his problems. To-night it
seemed that nobody could keep quiet for ten seconds together.
“What shall I bring you back from Cuba, Tia Marta?” laughed Rodrigo.
“Yourself,” snapped the old woman, “with a grain of sense under your
hair for something new.”
“And epaulets on my shoulders? I may return a general. Who knows?”
“Bah! Being a man I may come to be Pope. But many go out for wool and
return shorn.”
Meanwhile Grandfather was strumming on his guitar and murmuring a
riddle that neither of the children had heard before:
“An old woman gathering fig upon fig,
Nor heeds whether moist or dry,
Soft or hard or little or big,
A basketful for the sky.”
Before they could ask the answer, their father was pointing out to them
the lovely cluster of stars that we call the Pleiades.
“Those are what shepherds know as the Seven Little Nanny Goats,” he
said, “and that long river of twinkling light you see across the
sky”--designating the Milky Way--“is the Road to Santiago. For Santiago,
St. James the Apostle, was the Guardian Saint of all Spain in the
centuries when the Moors and Christians were at war in the Peninsula,
and the story goes that in one desperate battle, at sunrise, when the
Christian cause was all but lost, there appeared at the head of their
ranks an unknown knight gleaming in silver armor, as if he had ridden
right out of the dawn, waving a snow-white banner stamped with a crimson
cross. He charged full on the infidel army, his sword flashing through
the air with such lightning force that his fierce white steed trampled
the turbaned heads like pebbles beneath his hoofs. This was St.
James--so the legend says--and from that time on he led the Christian
hosts till the Moors were driven back to Africa. And up in Galicia, in
the city of Santiago, where your Aunt Barbara lives, is his famous
shrine, to which pilgrims used to flock from all over Europe, and they
looked up at the heavens as they trudged along and named that beautiful
stream of stars the Road to Santiago.”
Now information is amusing in the morning, and pleasant enough in the
middle of the afternoon, when one’s brain has been refreshed by the
siesta, but after a long day of dancing, walking, guests and feasting,
information is good for little but to put one to sleep. Pilarica did not
awaken even enough to know when her father and Big Brother kissed her
good-night, but Rafael questioned with an enormous gape:
“Was Santiago’s horse as good as Bavieca?” and then his blinking eyes
shut tight without waiting for the answer.
It was as well, as it turned out, that the children had a full night’s
sleep, for never in all their lives had there been a day so crowded
with emotions and surprises as the morrow. Pilarica in the great bed of
the inner room and Rafael on his cot under the olive tree were aroused
at the same time by angry screaming that their tousled heads, still in
the borderland between sleep and waking, took at first for Lorito’s, but
as the dream-mist cleared away, they knew the voice for that of Tia
Marta in a rage. She was standing in the middle of the kitchen, arms
akimbo, facing their father, whose hand was raised in a vain effort to
check her torrent of words.
“Would you throw the rope after the bucket?” she was crying. “Is it not
enough that the _señorito_ must sail to the Indies, and you, but you
would have me lead forth those forsaken innocents to Galicia? _Galicia!_
That will I never do in spite of your teeth. Don’t tell me of their Aunt
Barbara. Did she not stoop to marry a Galician? Bah! Coarse is the web
out of which a Galician is spun. It is not the maid of the Giralda who
will pass the end of her days among pigs.”