FRIEND AND BROTHER
“Wisdom is good with an inheritance, and by it there is profit to
them that see the sun.”--ECCLESIASTES.
Mariposa’s sixteen dollars a month had been augmented to twenty-eight
by the accession of three new pupils. These had been acquired through
Isaac Pierpont, who was glad to find a cheap teacher for his potential
prima donnas, who were frequently lacking in the simplest knowledge of
instrumental music.
Mariposa was impressed and flattered by her extended clientele, and at
first felt some embarrassment in finding that one of the pupils was
a woman ten years older than herself. The worry she had felt on the
score of her living was now at rest, for Pierpont had promised her his
continued aid, and her new scholars professed themselves much pleased
with her efforts.
Her monthly earnings were sufficient to cover her exceedingly modest
living expenses. The remnants of her fortune--the few dollars left
after her mother’s funeral and the money realized by the sale of
the jewelry and furniture that were the last relics of their _beaux
jours_--made up the amount of three hundred and twenty dollars. This
was in the bank. In the little desk that stood on a table in her room
was the five hundred dollars in gold Shackleton had sent her. She
had not touched it and never intended to, seeming to repudiate its
possession by keeping it thus secret and apart from her other store.
The time was wearing on toward mid-December. Christmas was beginning
to figure in the conversation of Miguel and Benito, and with an eye
to its approach they had both joined a Sunday-school, to which they
piously repaired every Sabbath morn. They had introduced the question
of presents in their conversations with Mariposa with such smiling
persistence that she had finally promised them that, on her first free
afternoon, she would go down town and price certain articles they
coveted. The afternoon came within a few days after her promise, one of
her pupils sending her word that she was invited out of town for the
holidays, and her lessons would cease till after New Year’s.
The pricing had evidently been satisfactory, for, late in the
afternoon, Mariposa turned her face homeward, her hands full of small
packages. It was one of the clear, hazeless days of thin atmosphere,
with an edge of cold, that are scattered through the San Francisco
winter. There is no frost in the air, but the chill has a searching
quality which suggests winter, as does the wild radiance of the sunset
spread over the west in a transparent wash of red. The invigorating
breath of cold made the young girl’s blood glow, and she walked rapidly
along Kearney Street, the exercise in the sharp air causing a faint,
unusual pink to tint her cheeks. Her intention was to walk to Clay
Street and then take the cable-car, which in those days slid slowly up
the long hills, past the Plaza and through Chinatown.
She was near the Plaza, when a hail behind her fell on her ear, and
turning, she saw Barron close on her heels, his hands also full of
small packages. He had been at the mines for two weeks, and she could
but notice the unaffected gladness of his greeting. She felt glad,
too, a circumstance of which, for some occult reason, she was ashamed,
and the shame and the gladness combined lent a reserved and yet
conscious quality to her smile and kindled a charming embarrassment
in her eye. They stood by the curb, he looking at her with glances of
naïve admiration, while she looked down at her parcels. Passers-by
noticed them, setting them down, she in her humble dress, he in his
unmetropolitan roughness of aspect, as a couple from the country, a
rancher or miner and his handsome sweetheart.
He took her parcels away from her, and they started forward toward the
Plaza.
“Do you hear me panting?” he said, laying his free hand on his chest.
“No, why should you pant?”
“Because I’ve been running all down Kearney Street for blocks after
you. I never knew any one to walk as fast in my life. I thought even if
I didn’t catch you you’d hear me panting behind you and think it was
some new kind of fire-engine and turn round and look. But you never
wavered--simply went on like a racer headed for the goal. Did you walk
so fast because you knew I was behind you?”
She looked at him quickly with a side glance of protest and met his
eyes full of quizzical humor and yet with a gleam of something eager
and earnest in them.
“I like to walk fast in this cold air. It makes me feel so alive. For
a long time I’ve felt as though I were half dead, and you don’t know
how exhilarating it is to feel life come creeping back. It’s like being
able to breathe freely after you’ve been almost suffocated. But where
did you see me on Kearney Street?”
“I was in a place buying things for the boys. I was looking at a drum
for Benito, and I just happened to glance up, and there you were
passing. I dropped the drum and ran.”
“A _drum_ for Benito! Oh, Mr. Barron, don’t get Benito a drum!”
He could not control his laughter at the sight of her expression of
horrified protest. He laughed so loudly that people looked at him. She
smiled herself, not quite knowing why, and insensibly, both feeling
curiously light-hearted, they drew closer together.
“What can I get?” he said. “I looked at knives and guns, and I knew
that they wouldn’t do. Benito would certainly kill Miguel and probably
grandma. I thought of a bat and ball, and then I knew he’d break all
the windows. The man in the store wanted me to buy a bow and arrow,
but I saw him taking his revenge on the crab lady. Benito’s a serious
problem any way you take him.”
They had come to the Plaza, once an open space of sand, round which the
wild, pioneer city swept in whirlpool currents, now already showing the
lichened brick and dropping plaster, the sober line of house-fronts,
of an aging locality. Where Chinatown backed on the square the houses
had grown oriental, their western ugliness, disguised by the touch of
gilding that, here and there, incrusted their fronts, the swaying of
crimson lanterns, the green zigzags of dwarf trees. Over the top of the
Clay Street hill the west shone red through smoke which filled the air
with a keen, acrid smell. It told of hearth-fires. And oozing out of
a thousand chimneys and streaming across the twilight city it told of
homes where the good wife made ready for her man.
“Let’s not take the cars,” said Barron. “Let’s walk home. Can you
manage those hills?”
She gave a laughing assent, and they turned upward, walking slowly as
befitted the climb. Chinatown opened before them like the mysterious,
medieval haunt of robbers in an old drawing. The murky night was
settling on it, shot through with red gleams at the end of streets,
where the sunset pried into its peopled darkness. The blackness of
yawning doorway and stealthy alley succeeded the brilliancy of a
gilded interior, or a lantern-lit balcony. Strange smells were in the
air, aromatic and noisome, as though the dwellers in this domain were
concocting their wizard brews. There was a sound of shifting feet, a
chatter of guttural voices, and a vision of faces passing from light to
shadow, marked by a weird similarity, and with eyes like bits of onyx
let into the tight-drawn skin.
It was an alien city, a bit of the oldest civilization in the world,
imbedded in the heart of the newest. Touches of bizarre, of sinister
picturesqueness filled it with arresting interest. On the window-sills
lilies, their stalks bound with strips of crimson paper, grew in blue
and white china bowls filled with pebbles round which their white roots
clung. Miniature pine-trees, in pots of brass, thrust their boughs
between the rusty ironwork of old balconies. Through an open doorway a
glimpse was given down a dark hallway, narrow, black, a gas-jet, like a
tiny golden tear, diffusing a frightened gleam of light. From some dim
angle the glow of a blood-red lantern mottled a space of leprous wall.
On a tottering balcony a woman’s face, rounded like a child’s, crimson
lipped, crowned with peach blossoms, looked down from shadows, the
light of a lantern catching and loosening the golden traceries of her
rich robe, the trail of peach blossoms against her cheek.
The ascent was long and steep, and they walked slowly, talking in a
desultory fashion. Mariposa recounted the trivial incidents that had
taken place in the Garcia house during her companion’s absence. As they
breasted the last hill the light grew brighter, for the sunset still
lingered in a reluctant glow.
“Take my arm,” said Barron. “You’re out of breath.”
She took it, and they began slowly to mount the last steep blocks. She
glanced up at him to smile her thanks for his support, and met his
eyes, looking intently at her. The red light strengthened on her face
as they ascended.
“You’ve the strangest eyes,” he said suddenly. “Do you know what
they’re the color of?”
“My father used to say they were like a dog’s,” she answered, feeling
unable to drop them and yet uneasy under his unflinching gaze.
“They’re the color of sherry--exactly the same.”
“I won’t let you see them any more if that’s the best you can say of
them,” she said, dropping them.
“I could say they were the color of beer,” he answered, “but I thought
sherry sounded better.”
“Beer!” she exclaimed, averting not only her eyes, but her face.
“That’s an insult.”
“Well, then, I’ll only say in the simplest way what I think. I’m not
the kind of man who makes fine speeches--they’re the most beautiful
eyes in the world.”
“That’s the worst of all,” she answered, extremely confused and not
made more comfortable by the thought that she had brought it on
herself. “Let’s leave my eyes out of the question.”
“All right, I’ll not speak of them again. But I’ll want to see them now
and then.”
He saw her color mounting, and in the joy of her close proximity,
loitering arm in arm up the sordid street, he laughed again in his
happiness and said:
“When a person owns something that’s rare and beautiful he oughtn’t to
be mean about it.”
“I suppose not,” said the owner of the rare and beautiful possessions,
keeping them sternly out of sight.
He continued to look ardently at her, not conscious of what he was
doing, his step growing slower and slower.
“It’s a long climb,” he said at length.
“Yes,” she assented. “Is that why you’re going so slowly?”
“Are we going so slowly?” he asked, and as if to demonstrate how slow
had been their progress, they both came to a stop like a piece of
run-down machinery.
They looked at each other for a questioning moment, then burst into
simultaneous peals of laughter.
One of the last and daintiest charms that nature can give a woman
is a lovely laugh. It suggests unexplored riches of tenderness and
sweetness, unrevealed capacity for joy and pain, as a harsh and
unmusical laugh tells of an arid nature, hard, without juice, devoid of
imagination, mystery and passion. Like her mother before her, Mariposa
possessed this charm in its highest form. The ripple of sound that
flowed from her lips was music, and it cast a spell over the man at
whose side she stood, as Lucy’s laugh, twenty-five years before, had
cast one over Dan Moreau.
“I never heard you laugh before,” he said in delight. “What can I say
to make you do it again?”
“You didn’t say anything that time,” said Mariposa. “So I suppose the
best way is for you to be silent.”
Barron took her advice and surveyed her mutely with dancing eyes. For
a moment her lips, puckered into a tremulous pout, twitched with the
premonitory symptoms of a second outburst. But she controlled them,
moved by some perverse instinct of coquetry, while the laughter welled
up in the eyes that were fixed on him.
“I see I’ll have to make a joke,” he said, “and I can’t think of any.”
“Mrs. Garcia’s got a book full. You might borrow it.”
“Couldn’t you tell me one that’s made you laugh before and loan it to
me?”
“But it mightn’t work a second time. I might take it quite solemnly. A
sense of humor’s a very capricious thing.”
“I think the lady who’s got it is even more so,” he said.
And then once again they laughed in concert, foolishly and gaily and
without knowing why.
They had gained the top of the hill, and the blaze of red that swept
across the west shone on their faces. They were within a few minutes’
walk of the house now and they continued, arm in arm, as was the custom
of the day, and at the same loitering gait.
“Didn’t you tell me your people came originally from Eldorado County,
somewhere up near Hangtown?” he asked. “I’ve just been up that way, and
if I’d known the place I might have stopped there.”
“Oh, you never could have found it,” said Mariposa hastily. “It was
only a cabin miles back in the foothills. My mother often told me
of it--just a cabin by a stream. It has probably disappeared now.
My father and mother met and were married there among the mines,
and--and--I was born there,” she ended, stammeringly, hating the lies
upon which her youthful traditions had been built.
“If I’d known you had been born there I’d have gone on a pilgrimage to
find that cabin if it had taken a month.”
“But I tell you it can’t be standing yet. I’m twenty-four years old--”
she suddenly realized that this, too, was part of the necessary web of
misstatement in which she was caught. The color deepened on her face
into a conscious blush. She dropped her eyes, then raising them to his
with a curious defiance, said:
“No--that’s a mistake. I’m--I’m--more than that, I’m twenty-five,
nearly twenty-six.”
Barron, who saw nothing in the equivocation but a girl’s foolish desire
to understate her age, burst into delighted laughter, and pressing the
hand on his arm against his side, said:
“Why, I always thought you were _years_ older than that--thirty to
thirty-five at least.”
And he looked with teasing eyes into her face. But this time Mariposa
did not laugh, nor even smile. The joy had suddenly gone out of her,
and she walked on in silence, her head drooped, seeming in some
mysterious way to have grown suddenly anxious and preoccupied.
“There’s the house,” she said at length. “I was getting tired.”
“There’s a light in the parlor,” said Barron, as he opened the gate.
“What can be the matter? Has Benito killed grandma, or is there a
party?”
Their doubts on this point were soon set at rest. Their approaching
footsteps evidently were heard by a listening ear within, for the hall
door opened and Benito appeared in the aperture.
“There’s a man to see you in the parlor,” he announced to Mariposa.
Inside the hallway the door on the left that led to Mrs. Garcia’s
apartments opened and the young woman thrust out her head, and said in
a hissing whisper:
“There’s a gentleman waiting for you in the parlor, Miss Moreau.”
At the same time Miguel imparted similar information from the top of
the stairs, and the Chinaman appeared at the kitchen door and cried
from thence, with the laconic dryness peculiar to his race:
“One man see you, parlor.”
Mariposa stood looking from one to the other with the raised eyebrows
of inquiring astonishment. The only person who had visitors in the
Garcia house was Pierpont, and they did not come at such a fashionably
late hour.
“He’s a thin, consumpted-looking young man with eye-glasses,” said
Mrs. Garcia, curling round the door the better to project the hissing
whisper she employed, “and he said he’d wait till you came in.”
Mariposa turned toward the parlor door, leaving the family, with
Barron, on the stairs, and the Chinaman, peering from the kitchen
regions, watching her with tense interest, as if they half expected
they would never see her again.
Two of the gases in the old chandelier were lit and cast a sickly light
over the large room, which had the close, musty smell of an unaired
apartment. The last relics of Señora Garcia’s grandeur were congregated
here--bronzes that once had cost large sums of money, a gilt console
that had been brought from a rifled French château round the Horn in
a sailing ship, a buhl cabinet with its delicate silvery inlaying
gleaming in the half-light, and two huge Japanese vases, with blue and
white dragons crawling round their necks, flanking the fireplace.
On the edge of a chair, just under the chandelier, sat a young man. He
had his hat in his hand, and his head drooped so that the light fell
smoothly on the crown of blond hair. He looked small and meager in the
surrounding folds of a very large and loose ulster. As the sound of
the approaching step caught his ear he started and looked up, with the
narrowed eyes of the near-sighted, and then jumped to his feet.
“Miss Moreau?” he said inquiringly, and extended a long, thin hand
which, closing on hers, felt to her warm, soft grasp like a bunch of
chilled sticks. She had not the slightest idea who he was, and looking
at him under the wan light, saw he was some one from that world of
wealth with which she had so few affiliations. Something about him--the
coldness of his hand, an indescribable trepidation of manner--suggested
to her that he was exceedingly ill at ease. She looked at him
wonderingly, and said:
“Won’t you sit down?”
He sat at her bidding on the chair he had risen from, subsiding into
the small, shrunken figure in the middle of enveloping folds of
overcoat. One hand hung down between his knees holding his hat. He
looked at Mariposa and then looked down at the hat.
“Cold afternoon, isn’t it?” he said.
“Very cold,” she responded, “but I like it. I hope you haven’t been
waiting long.”
“Not very,” he looked up at her, blinking near-sightedly through the
glasses; “I don’t know whether you know what my name is, Miss Moreau?
It’s Shackleton--Winslow Shackleton. I forgot my card.”
Mariposa felt a lightning-like change come over her face, in which
there was a sudden stiffening of her features into something hard and
repellent. To Win, at that moment, she looked very like his father.
“Oh!” she said, hearing her voice drop at the end of the interjection
with a note of vague disapproval and uneasiness.
“I’ve seen you,” continued Win, “once at _The Trumpet_ office, when you
were there with Mrs. Willers. I don’t think you saw me. I was back in
the corner, near the table where Jack--that’s the boy--sits.”
Mariposa murmured:
“No, I didn’t see you.”
She hardly knew what he said or what she responded. What did _this_
mean? What was going to happen now?
“You must excuse my coming this way, without an introduction or
anything, but as you knew my father and mother, I--I--thought you
wouldn’t mind.”
He glanced at her again, anxiously, she thought, and she said suddenly,
with her habitual directness:
“Did you come from your mother?”
“No, I came on--on--my own hook. I wanted”--he looked vaguely about and
then laid his hat on a table near him--“I wanted to see you on business
of my own.”
The nervousness from which he was evidently suffering began to
communicate itself to Mariposa. The Shackleton family had come to mean
everything that was painful and agitating to her, and here was a new
one wanting to talk to her about business that she knew, past a doubt,
was of some unusual character.
“If you’ve come to talk to me about going to Europe,” she said
desperately, “I may as well tell you, there’s no use. I won’t go to
Paris now, as I once said I would, and there’s no good trying to make
me change my mind. Your mother and Mrs. Willers have both tried to, and
it’s very kind of them, but I--can’t.”
She had an expression at once of fright and determination. The subject
was becoming a nightmare to her, and she saw herself attacked again
from a strange quarter, and with, she imagined, a new set of arguments.
“It’s nothing to do with going to Europe,” he said. “It’s--it’s”--he
put up one of the long, bony hands, and with the two first fingers
pressed his glasses back against his eyes, then dropped the hand and
stared at Mariposa, the eyes looking strangely pale and prominent
behind the powerful lenses.
“It’s something that’s just between you and me,” he said.
She surveyed him without answering, her brows drawn, her mind
concentrated on him and on what he could mean.
“Do you want me to teach somebody music?” she said, wondering if this
could be the pleasant solution of the enigma.
“No. The--er--the business I’ve come to talk to you about ought to do
away altogether with the necessity of your giving lessons.”
They looked at each other silently for a moment. Win was conscious that
his hands were trembling, and that his mouth was dry. He rose from his
chair and mechanically reached for his hat. When he had started on his
difficult errand he had been certain that she knew her relationship to
his father. Now the dreadful thought entered his mind that perhaps she
did not. And even if she did, it was evident that she was not going to
give him the least help.
“What _is_ the business you’ve come to see me about?” she asked.
“It’s a question of money,” he answered.
“Money!” ejaculated Mariposa, in baffled amaze. “What money? Why?”
He glanced desperately into his hat and then back at her. She saw the
hat trembling in his hand and suddenly realized that this man was
trying to say something that was agitating him to the marrow of his
being.
“Mr. Shackleton,” she said, rising to her feet, “tell me what you
mean. I don’t understand. I’m completely at sea. How can there be
any question of money between us when I’ve never seen you or met you
before? Explain it all.”
He dropped the hat to his side and said slowly, looking her straight in
the face:
“I want to give you a share of the estate left me by my father. I look
upon it as yours.”
There was a pause. He saw her paling under his gaze, and realized that,
whatever she might pretend, she knew. His heart bled for her.
“As mine!” she said in a low, uncertain voice. “Why?”
“Because you have a right to it.”
There was another pause. He moved close to her and said, in a voice
full of a man’s deep kindness:
“I can’t explain any more. Don’t ask it. Don’t let’s bother about
anything in the background. It’s just the present that’s our affair.”
He suddenly dropped his hat and took her hand. It was as cold now as
his had been. He pressed it, and Mariposa, looking dazedly at him, saw
a gleam like tears behind the glasses.
“It’s hateful to have you living here like this, while we--that is,
while other people--have everything. I can’t stand it. It’s too mean
and unfair. I want you to share with me.”
She shook her head, looking down, a hundred thoughts bursting in upon
her brain. What did he know? How had he found it out? In his grasp, her
hand trembled pitifully.
“Don’t shake your head,” he pleaded, “it’s so hard to say it. Don’t
turn it down before you’ve heard me out.”
“And it’s hard to hear it,” she murmured.
“No one knows anything of this but me,” he continued, “and I promise
you that no other ever shall. It’ll be just between us as between”--he
paused and then added with a voice that was husky--“as between brother
and sister.”
She shook her head again, feeling for the moment too upset to speak,
and tried to draw away from him. But he put his other hand on her
shoulder and held her.
“I’ll go halves with you. I can have it all arranged so that no one
will ever find out. I can’t make the regular partition of the property
until the end of the year. But, until then, I’ll send you what would
be your interest, monthly, and you can live where, or how, you like.
I--I--can’t go on, knowing things, and thinking of you living in this
sort of way and teaching music.”
“I can’t do it,” she said, in a strangled undertone, and pulling her
hand out of his grasp. “I can’t. It’s not possible. I can’t take money
that was your father’s.”
“But it’s not his--it’s mine now. Don’t let what’s dead and buried come
up and interfere.”
She backed away from him, still shaking her head. She made an effort
toward a cold composure, but her pain seemed to show more clearly
through it. He looked at her, vexed, irresolute, wrung with pity, that
he knew she would not permit him to express.
It was impossible for them to understand each other. She, with
her secret knowledge of her mother’s lawful claim and her own
legitimacy--he regarding her as the wronged child of his father’s
sin. In her dazed distress she only half-grasped what he thought. The
strongest feeling she had was once again to escape the toils that these
terrible people, who had so wronged her mother, were spreading for her.
They wanted to pay her to redeem the stain on their past.
“Money can’t set right what was wrong,” she said. “Money can’t square
things between your family and mine.”
“Money can’t square anything--I don’t want it to. I’m not trying to
square things; I’ve not thought about it that way at all. I just wanted
you to have it because it seemed all wrong for you not to. You had a
right, just as I had, and Maud had. I don’t think I’ve thought much
about it, anyway. It just came to me that you ought to have what was
yours. I wouldn’t make you feel bad for the world.”
“Then remember, once and forever, that I take nothing from you or your
people. I’d rather beg than take money that came from your father.”
“But he has nothing to do with it. It’s mine now. I’ve done you no
injury, and it’s I that want you to take it. Won’t you take it from me?”
He spoke simply, almost wistfully, like a little boy. Mariposa answered:
“No--oh, Mr. Shackleton, why don’t you and your people let me alone?
I won’t tell. I’ll keep it all a secret. But your mother torments me
to go to Europe--and now you come! If I were starving, I wouldn’t--I
couldn’t--take anything from any of you. I think _you’re_ kind. I think
you’ve just come to-day because you were sorry. But don’t talk about
it any more. Let me be. Let me go along teaching here where I belong.
Forget me. Forget that you ever saw me. Forget the miserable tie of
blood there is between us.”
“That’s the thing I can’t forget. That’s the thing that worries me.
It’s not the past. I’ve nothing to do with that. It’s the present
that’s my affair. I can’t have everything while you have nothing. It
don’t seem to me it’s like a man to act that way. It goes against me,
anyhow. I don’t offer you this because of anything in the past; that’s
my father’s affair. I don’t know anything about it. I offer it because
I--I--I”--he stammered over the unfamiliar words and finally jerked
out--“because I want to give back what belongs to you. That’s all there
is to it. Please take it.”
She looked directly into his eyes and said, gravely:
“No. I’m sorry if it’s a disappointment, but I can’t.”
Then she suddenly looked down, her face began to quiver, and she said
in a broken undertone:
“Don’t talk about it any more; it hurts me so.”
Win turned quickly away from her and picked up his hat. He was confused
and disappointed, and relieved, too, for he had done the most difficult
piece of work of his life. But, at the moment, his most engrossing
feeling was sympathy for this girl, so bravely drawing her pride
together over the bleeding of her heart.
She murmured a response in a steadier voice and he turned toward her.
Had any of his society friends been by they would hardly have known
him. The foolish manner behind which he sheltered his shy and sensitive
nature was gone. He was grave and looked very much of a man.
“Well, of course, it’s for you to say what you want. But there’s one
thing I’d like you to promise.”
“To promise?” she said uneasily.
“Yes, and to keep it, too. And that is, if you ever want anything--help
in any way; if you get blue in your spirits, or some one’s not doing
the straight thing by you, or gone back on you--to come to me. I’m not
much in some ways, but I guess I could be of use. And, anyway, it’s
good for a girl to have some friend that she can count on, who’s a man.
And”--he paused with the door-handle in his hand--“and now you know me,
anyway, and that’s something. Will you promise?”
“Yes, I’ll promise that,” said Mariposa, and moving toward him she gave
him her hand.
He pressed it, dropped it, and opened the door. A moment later Mariposa
heard the hall door bang behind him. She sat down in the chair from
which she had risen, her hands lying idle in her lap, her eyes on a
rose in the carpet, trying to think, to understand what it meant.
She did not hear the door open or notice Benito’s entrance, which was
accomplished with some disturbance, as he was astride a cane. His
spirited course round the room, the end of the cane coming in violent
contact with the pieces of furniture that impeded his route, was of so
boisterous a nature that it roused her. She looked absently at him, and
saw him wreathed in smiles. Having gained her attention, he brought his
steed toward her with some ornamental prancings. She noticed that he
held a pair of gloves in his hands.
“That man what came to see you,” he said, “left this cane. It was in
the hat-rack, and I came out first, so I swiped it. I took these for
Miguel”--he flourished the gloves--“but the cane’s mine all right. Come
in to supper.”
And he wheeled away with a bridling step, the end of his cane rasping
on the worn ribs of the carpet. Mariposa, mechanically following him,
heard his triumphant cries as he entered the dining-room and then his
sudden wails of wrath as Miguel expressed his disapprobation of the
division of the spoils in the vigorous manner of innocent childhood.