best, and was, besides, more and more terrified in the presence of one
whom he took to be a fairy. For he was but a simple-minded fellow,
believing all the tales that he had heard from wandering shepherds on
the windy waste or from old wives in rough-hewn chimney-corners.
Whenever a lizard glided across his path, he saluted the little green
creature with his best bow, for he believed that the lizard is itself so
courteous that it will not go to sleep on a sunny wall without
descending first to kiss the earth. When his eyes were hurting him, he
would watch the swallows in their wheeling flight, for he believed that
swallows know of a secret herb that cures sore eyes and that they pluck
off its leaves to carry to their nestlings. He always trembled and
crossed himself when he came upon even the prettiest little striped
snake, for he believed that snakes never die, but when they see Death
walking over the plain, looking for them, slip out of their skins and
run away, growing into huge serpents with the years and becoming, in the
centuries, scaly dragons that devour the flocks. This, he knew, was St.
John’s Eve, when, as he had heard since childhood, from every fountain
springs forth a fairy princess to spread her linen, white as snow and
fine as cobwebs, out to dry in the dew. His young wife had perished of
the fever a few weeks before and he could not leave their baby alone in
the poor little hut of their brief happiness. So he had, while tending
his flock, carried the child about with him, but the little one did not
thrive. It would be better to give him to this gentle princess, who,
perhaps, had come so far from her fountain to seek a playmate for that
tiny fairy-baby with the golden hair and the bright blue eyes that never
once winked as they looked out straight upon the western sun. What if
the princess were waiting for a herd of elfin goats to bring that dainty
creature milk? It would be as well for his honest Christian goats not to
meet them. No harm could come to the child in the shining diamond grotto
under the fountain, for the christening dews upon the little head would
guard it from all evil. So the goatherd slyly picked up his coarse brown
cloak and stealthily moved away with his flock, somewhat troubled in
mind, for he thought Saint John might better have sent an angel than a
fairy to their need, and missing so much the accustomed weight, lighter
with every week, upon his arm, that he picked up a young kid and carried
this for comfort.
Only the doll watched him as he went,--a high-minded doll that, as the
afternoon wore by, showed no signs of jealousy, though Pilarica was
utterly absorbed in her new plaything. The baby was almost as good as
the doll, sleeping, or cooing, or kicking with its scrawny little legs.
Once its wandering claw of a hand discovered an ear and did its best to
pull that curious object off to put into the button mouth for proper
investigation. It was this failure to detach its ear that finally roused
the infant to wrath and it bleated as lustily as if it had been born the
tenant of a kid-skin.
“Dear me!” sighed Pilarica, suddenly aware that she was weary and that a
great red moon was climbing up over the edge of the world. “Where has
the hairy man gone with his goats? Why didn’t he leave us some milk for
supper? And when will somebody be coming for me?”
For Pilarica had the wisdom of experience. She knew that somebody always
came for a little girl who was lost. For one moment a homesick thought
fleeted back to her father and Big Brother and the rustling newspaper
doll, and in the next she heard, not at all to her surprise, the
trot-trot of Don Quixote’s hoofs and beheld that gallant ass, with
Pedrillo running alongside, making over the plain toward the nooning
place.
“Cry louder, Baby!” she admonished, with a little shake to which Baby
instantly responded. It was really marvellous what a roar went forth
upon the air, as if the kid had been transformed into a lion-cub. Clear
and shrill above this remarkable accompaniment soared the ringing call
of Pilarica. Don Quixote frisked his ears and tail and turned his course
toward her of his own impulse; Pedrillo gave a shout of joy, and behind
Pedrillo rose the halloo of Bastiano, and behind Bastiano clanged the
great copper bell of Coronela.
There was a festival of greeting for Pilarica, but Baby Bunting, howling
his worst, had a welcome only from Tia Marta. She gathered the brown
bantling into her arms with a torrent of tender endearments and from
that hour constituted herself his nurse and champion.
As the days went by, many and sharp were her quarrels with Don Manuel,
who was determined that the foundling should be left at the first refuge
that offered.
“Do you hope to carry this ugly tadpole on to Santiago?” he demanded at
last. “Then let me tell you once for all that I will not receive it into
my house. My house,” he added, not remembering to be consistent in the
matter of Natural History, “is no nest for screech-owls.”
“Yah-_ee_!” protested the baby.
“Where’s Herod?” asked Hilario, winking at Tenorio and Bastiano, who
mischievously repeated, one after the other:
“Where’s Herod?”
But Pedrillo picked up the child from Tia Marta’s tired shoulder and,
dandling it skilfully, walked back and forth till the fretful cry was
hushed.
They were enjoying a full midday meal at a village inn, for their
lodging-place was so far on it could hardly be reached before late
evening. Now that they were getting up into the hill country, where
water was more plentiful and the heat not so intense, Don Manuel was
pressing on at the full speed of the train in his desire that all, but
especially the children, should be at Santiago for the feast of St.
James. They were sitting at table in a long open room, at whose further
end stood the mules and donkeys, their halters thrown over wall-pegs
ingeniously made of ham-bones. Swallows flashed and called among the
rafters. Pigeons with rainbow necks flew down to share the crumbs. A
dog and two or three cats hunted about under the table for scraps. An
enterprising hen, with a brood of fluffy chickens twit-twit-twittering
behind her, bore in at the open door with the determined air of a
militant suffragette and flew heavily across the room, lighting, to the
children’s glee, right on Bastiano’s astonished head. The turkey and the
pig, a gaunt black pig with stiff bristles, tried to join the party, but
the dog, recalled to a sense of duty, promptly drove them out.
The muleteers were making merry over their favorite dish of big yellow
peas boiled to a pap in olive oil, and flanked, on this occasion, by a
platter of fried fish, but the children preferred an omelet tossed up in
a twinkling out of the freshly laid eggs that they had helped the
_ventera_ find in the hay-scented stable. Meanwhile Grandfather was
feasting them with riddles and with a treat of roasted chestnuts,
singing as they munched:
“More than a score of neighbors who dwell
Each in a satin hall,
Like a little brown nun in a little brown cell,
And never go out to call.”
And again:
“A jewel-case from her treasury
The courteous forest gave to me
As through brown leaves I trod;
A chest as glossy as chest could be,
A chest locked tight without a key;
The carpenter was God.”
At this the _ventera_, a dumpling of a body with roguish round eyes,
held a secret consultation with Grandfather and then stood laughing at
Pilarica and Rafael while he puzzled them with an entirely new riddle:
“Oh, this will make your patience melt,
The meaning is so shady;
The lady has a soft brown belt,
But the belt it has no lady.”
It was not until the doughnuts were spluttering in the olive oil that
the children had the answer in their throats, and then it was on the way
down instead of up. The carriers, even Don Manuel, came crowding about
that tempting kettle, but Tia Marta, her thin face twitching, still sat
on her three-legged stool at the table, crumbling her share of the loaf
for the chickens and doves, and wishing she could give Roxa a shred of
the fried fish. Pedrillo lingered near. Since her absorption in
Juanito, as she called the child whom she had taken to her heart on St.
John’s Eve, she seemed to have half forgotten her grudge against
Pedrillo.
He came up to her now to show her that the baby slept.
“_Angelito_,” she murmured over it, touching the tiny cheek. “See, it is
fatter already! I could make him well and strong, as I made the donkey.
But what am I to be? A stranger in a strange land, a servant in another
woman’s kitchen, with not even a cat of my own to mew to me. Never
before have I been without a child to rear. There were my little sisters
first, and then my blessed Catalina, and then her rosy Rodrigo--ah, that
cruel Cuba!--and then those cherubs there that Doña Barbara will steal
away from me. Blood is thicker than water, though it be water of tears.
_Ay de mi!_”
“But eat, woman, eat,” gruffly implored Pedrillo. “You are giving away
all your luncheon. Eat, and your trouble will be gone. Bread is relief
for all kinds of grief.”
“Not for mine,” wailed the Andalusian. “Everyone knows his own sorrow,
and God knows the sorrow of us all. Are the doors of Santiago so narrow
that the gifts of Heaven may not enter in? Oh, this Don Manuel! This
Galician with his soul shut in his account book! Growing richer every
trip and grudging a few drops of milk as if he were a son of ruin with
nothing left for God to rain on!”
“Patience, patience!” urged Pedrillo, his snub-nosed face so intent on
Tia Marta that he inadvertently tilted Juanito wrong side up. “Did you
never hear of the monk who, as he was telling his beads in his vineyard,
suddenly held out his hand to see if it rained? Down flew a thrush and
laid an egg on his palm. So the holy man waited, always with his arm
outstretched, day after day, till five eggs had been laid, and then week
after week, till they had all been hatched out and the fledglings had
flown away. Then the mother-thrush, perching on the nearest fig tree,
sang to the monk a song as sweet as an angel’s, so that he was well
rewarded for his patience.”
“Bah! and how about the ache in his arm? But it is long since you have
told me one of your foolish stories, Don Pedrillo.”
And Tia Marta, for the first time since Cordova, smiled on him.
“Ah!” murmured Pedrillo, hastily righting Juanito who was puckering for
a roar. “Give the canary hempseed and you’ll see how it will sing.”
But at this critical moment Capitana, who had worked her halter free and
whose softly jingling bells, as she ambled down the room, had not been
noticed by the absorbed talkers, thrust her long head, with its most
solemn expression, in between the two faces that had drawn so near
together.
XVI
BY THE WAY
As the road wound up into the mountains, fresh energy possessed the
entire company. Even Carbonera became freakish, while Capitana was more
than ever the practical joker of the train. The donkeys ran races. Don
Manuel talked less of his winnings and more of the home-coming, though
he still threatened Juanito, who crowed defiantly and brandished tiny
fists, with the first orphanage they should reach. The rising spirits of
the muleteers bubbled over in songs and witticisms at the expense of
Pedrillo, whose devotion to Tia Marta, no longer forbidden, could not
hope to escape their merry mockery; but that sweet-natured hobgoblin
only grinned under their jesting, and Tia Marta, her tongue at its
keenest, gave them as good as they sent. Grandfather and his riddles
were by this time in high favor with the carriers, and Pilarica, as
brown as a gypsy and as eager as a humming-bird, was very proud of the
homage paid to his wild-honey learning.
And Rafael’s hurt was healing. He loved his father better than ever,
better than in the days of that vague hero-worship, better than when the
dear touch was on his shoulder and the dear voice in his ears,--touch
and voice that he had missed with such an ache of longing. Now dreams
and yearning had both melted into a constant loyalty, a passion of
obedience, that was the pulse of the son’s heart. Pilarica understood.
To the others he was still a sturdy, black-eyed urchin, ripe for
mischief, with a child’s heedlessness and a boy’s boastfulness, but the
little sister knew the difference between the teasing Rafael of the
Moorish garden and this elder brother, whose care of her, though it
lacked the tender gaiety of Rodrigo’s, had grown, since St. John’s Eve,
into a steady guardianship.
They had been climbing for two hours, and those the first two hours
after the siesta, when, even here among the mountains, the July heat was
hard to bear. Springs were no longer infrequent and Shags had been
relieved of his burden of jars, but Uncle Manuel, when they were nearing
some stream long familiar to him, would find an excuse for sending
Rafael on in advance that the lad might have the joy of discovery and
announcement. So to-day it was their water-boy, as the carriers
laughingly called him, who stood at a turn of the ascending road waving
his broad-brimmed straw hat, long since substituted by Uncle Manuel, who
had no faith in magic, for the beloved red fez.
“Water! Fresh, clear, sparkling water! Only a copper a glass!” shouted
Rafael, imitating the cry of the Galician water-seller so common in the
cities of Spain.
“A fine little fellow that!” commented Tenorio, whose long legs easily
kept pace, on the climb, with Coronela.
Uncle Manuel tried his best not to look pleased.
“Needs training,” he said harshly. “Needs discipline. All boys do. I set
him sums to work out in his head every day now as we ride.”
“Ay, and put him to figuring after supper, when he can hardly keep two
eyes open,” grunted Tenorio. “You’ll wear out the youngster’s brains,
Don Manuel.”
“The feet of the gardener never hurt the garden,” replied the
master-carrier, who prided himself on the practical education that he
was giving his nephew.
As the animals came in sight of the cascading stream, they brayed with
joy. The donkeys and the riding mules plunged at once into the water,
and the carriers speedily released the pack-mules so that these, too,
might cool their legs in the pleasant swash of the current.
“Ah!” sighed Hilario, looking up from the bank where he had thrown
himself down at full length to drink. “A brook of Galicia is better than
a river of Castile.”
“It’s wetter, any way,” growled Bastiano, who had gone some distance up
the stream to fill a leather bottle with the pure flow of the cascade.
“The rivers of Castile are dry half the year and without water the other
half.”
“What is the thing--can’t you tell me yet?--
That falls into the water and doesn’t get wet?”
hummed Grandfather, while his eyes followed the play of a sunbeam in the
waves.
“Did you ever hear,” asked Pedrillo of the children, as they watched
Shags and Don Quixote revelling in the rill, “of that peasant called
Swallow-Sun?”
“What a funny name!” exclaimed the little girl. “A thousand thanks, Don
Bastiano.”
For Bastiano, who was never surly with Pilarica, had brought his bottle
to her before he drank himself.
“He was called so,” continued Pedrillo, “because one day, when his
donkey was drinking out of a stream in which the sun was reflected, the
sky suddenly clouded over, and the peasant cried out in dismay: ‘Saint
James defend us! My donkey has drunk up the sun.’”
It was so pleasant by the rivulet, under the shade of the great locusts,
that Uncle Manuel permitted an hour’s rest.
“Don’t let us overrun the time,” he said to his nephew, and the men
exchanged winks as Rafael, with an air of vast importance, consulted his
watch.
Everybody welcomed Uncle Manuel’s decision. Shags and Don Quixote
trotted off to a velvet patch of grass and rolled in the height of
donkey happiness, their hoofs merrily beating the air. Pedrillo
gathered twigs and made a bit of a fire on a broad grey rock, so that
Tia Marta might heat the milk for Baby Bunting, who lay kicking on his
kid-skin beside her, in the little soft shirt she had knit for him.
“This is not Castile, where I had to dig up the roots of dead bushes for
fuel,” said Pedrillo, his face more comical than ever as he puffed out
his cheeks to blow the flame.
“It is good to be among trees again,” admitted Tia Marta, “though the
pine forests of Galicia are not beautiful like the orange-groves of
Andalusia.”
“A bad year to all the grumblers in the world!” exclaimed Hilario in
loyal indignation.
“No heaven was ever invented
That pleased the discontented,”
muttered Bastiano.
“What have you in Andalusia that shines in the sun like that white
poplar yonder?” demanded Don Manuel.
Grandfather, sitting on the edge of a rock with Pilarica nestled against
him, made a gesture of reverence.
“The white poplar is the first tree that God created,” he said. “It is
hoary, you see, with age.
“Are there good trees and bad trees?” asked Pilarica.
“Yes,” replied Grandfather. “The trees that are green all the year round
enjoy that favor in return for having given shade to the Holy Family on
the journey to Egypt, but the willow, on which Judas hanged himself, is
a tree to be shunned. Yet the birds love the willow, for it gives them
food and shelter. Back in Estremadura, where, you remember, we saw
scarcely a shrub, no birds can nest, and they say that even the wee
lark, if it would visit that province, must carry its provisions on its
back.”
“Are all the birds good?” asked Pilarica again.
“Almost all,” replied Grandfather.
“‘The little birds among the reeds,
God’s trumpeters are they,
For they hail the Sun with music
And wish him happy day.’
But the swallows are best of all, because they used to build under the
eaves of Joseph’s home at Nazareth and watch the face of the Christ
Child at his play.”
“There was once a bird,” struck in Pedrillo, “a very saucy little bird,
who ordered a fine new suit of his tailor, hatter and shoemaker, and
then, quite the dandy, flew away to the palace garden. Here he alighted
on a twig just outside the King’s window and had the impudence to sing:
“‘In my new spring suit (aha the spring!)
I’m a prettier fellow
Than his Majesty there (oho the king!)
For all his purple and yellow.’
The king, very angry, had the bird caught and broiled and, to make sure
of him, ate him himself, but the little rebel raised such a riot in the
royal stomach that the king was glad enough to throw him up again. The
bird came out in forlorn plight, stripped of all his new feathers, but
he went hopping about the garden, begging a plume from every bird he
met, so that he was soon even gayer and saucier than before. But when
the king tried to catch him again, he flew so fast he drank the winds
and did not stop till he was above the nose of the moon.”
“Bah!” said Tia Marta. “Stuff and nonsense”
“Rubbish!” chimed in Bastiano. “Pedrillo must have been taught to lie by
a serpent descended from the snake of Eden.”
“And what, pray, do you know about it?” snapped Tia Marta, turning most
inconsistently against her fellow-critic, “you who are standing off
there solitary as asparagus or as that ill-tempered old rat who made
himself a hermitage in a cheese,--You who couldn’t tell a story half as
good, no, not for a pancake full of gold-pieces!”
“What a scolding deluge is this! It froths and fizzes like cider. It’s a
pity there are not stoppers enough for all the bottles in the world,”
retorted Bastiano.
“Come, come!” interposed Grandfather. “Stabs heal, but sharp words
never. There is a cool breeze springing up. Thank God for his angel, the
wind!
“‘Without wings to church it flies,
Without a mouth it whistles,
And without hands it turns the leaves
Of the Gospels and Epistles.’”
The little fire on the rock flared up in the gust, and the children,
who, having borrowed all the hats in the company, had ranged them in a
row and were trying to outdo each other in jumping over every hat in the
line and back again without a pause, came panting up to watch the flame.
“Sing us the fire songs, please, Grandfather,” coaxed Pilarica. She
brought the old man his guitar and as the withered fingers moved over
the strings, even Don Manuel drew near to listen.
“Here’s a fine gentleman come to town;
His shoes are red and his plume is brown.”
“Ugh!” interpolated Tia Marta, who had burned her finger. Grandfather’s
eyes twinkled.
“I’m red as a rose for you;
I live at your command;
My spirit glows for you.
Then why withdraw your hand?”
“Don’t forget the one about the charcoal,” prompted Rafael.
“I may be black when I come,
But only make me at home,
And you shall find me a merry fellow,
Dancing in stockings red and yellow.”
“We stack up pine cones for fuel in our Galician cellars,” observed
Uncle Manuel. “It is only the stupidest peasants who cut down our
splendid chestnuts for firewood, burning their best food.”
“Green, green, green it sang on the hill;
Dark and silent it crossed the sill;
Yellow to-night as a daffodil
And red as a rose it is singing still.”
“But there is no end to his wisdom!” gasped the admiring Hilario. “Only
two more,” smiled Grandfather.
“More than a hundred beautiful ladies
I saw for an instant dancing by;
All their faces were red as roses,
But in an instant I saw them die.”
“Those are the sparks,” interpreted Pilarica.
“Before the mother is born, we meet
The son out walking on the street.
Tall as a pine, his weight indeed
Is less than that of a mustard seed.”
“That’s the smoke,” expounded Rafael.
“And now do let him rest,” commanded Tia Marta, folding her bright-hued
Andalusian shawl into a pillow for the white head. “Lie down there by
Juanito and be quiet till the start. These children, little and big,
would keep you playing and singing for them till the Day of Judgment.
It’s your own fault, too. If you make yourself honey, the flies will eat
you.”
While Grandfather dozed, Pedrillo put out the fire and tried to talk
with Tia Marta, but she perversely turned her back.
“Vainly to the shrine goes poor José;
His saint is out of sorts to-day,”
mocked Tenorio, but Pedrillo, nothing daunted, set to making Rafael a
popgun. This he did very deftly by cutting a piece of alder half as long
as Pilarica’s arm, which he measured with great gravity from wrist to
elbow. Drawing out the pith, he fitted into the alder tube a smaller
stick to serve as ramrod, and everybody fell to searching for bits of
cork, pebbles, pieces of match, anything that would do for bullets.
Uncle Manuel went so far as to contribute a sharp-pointed pewter button.
So was Rafael, all unconsciously, armed for his great adventure.
XVII
PILGRIMS OF ST. JAMES
From time to time, while our travellers took their ease in the locust
shade, other wayfarers came toiling up or down the steep and stony road
and paused to drink at the stream. There were two strings of pack-mules
during the hour, the muleteers passing the laconic greeting: “With God!”
A freckled lad of a dozen years or so, in charge of a procession of
donkeys nearly hidden under their swaying loads of greens, was too busy
for any further salutation than an impish grimace at Rafael. There were
boorish farmers, doubled up on side-saddles. There was a group of rustic
conscripts, ruddy-cheeked, saucer-eyed, bewildered, their little all
bundled into red and yellow handkerchiefs and slung from sticks over
their shoulders. There was a village baker with rings of horny bread
strung on a pole,--bread eyed so wistfully by a lame dog who was tugging
along a blind old beggar that Uncle Manuel, quite shamefaced at his own
generosity, gave Rafael a copper to buy one of those dusty circlets for
the two friends in misfortune.
Here it was the children first heard the unforgettable squeal of a
Basque cart. Far up the mountain road sounded vaguely a groan, a rumble,
and then a rasping screech that startled Grandfather out of his nap and
made Tia Marta, snatching up Baby Bunting, scramble to her feet in
consternation. When at last the yoke of stalwart oxen, with a strip of
red-dyed sheepskin draped above their patient eyes, came lumbering down
the difficult descent into view, the children saw that they were
attached to a rude cart, whose wheels were massive disks of wood, into
which a clumsy wooden axle-tree was fitted, grating with that uncanny
squeakity-squeak at every revolution. The cart had a heaping load of
cabbages, together with a bundle of fodder for the oxen and a basket of
provision for the driver, who plodded along beside them.
“What a hideous, horrible racket!” scolded Tia Marta, while Juanito,
jealous of this unexpected rival, screamed his lustiest.
“Hush, baby, hush!” soothed Pedrillo. “Hush, or the Bugaboo will get
thee. Nay, Doña Marta, that is the music of my homeland. We all love it
here. The oxen would not pull without it. Besides, it scares away the
wild beasts of the mountains and puts even the Devil to flight.”
“And see those cabbages, the bread of the poor,” exulted Hilario. “Ah,
there is no dish in all Spain so good as our Galician cabbage-broth.”