In Sunny Spain with Pilarica and Rafael

“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.”