In Sunny Spain with Pilarica and Rafael

Then Pedrillo, putting a brave face on it, started off with Juanito, thrown like a sack of meal across his shoulder, but the baby cooed serenely and kicked out a pair of pink heels in disrespectful bye-bye to the great house of the cockle shell. For once, Tia Marta had no words, but kissed Doña Barbara and Dolores with lips that twitched and trembled.

Don Manuel shook her hand and wished her joy in his blunt fashion. He wanted to venture on a jocose remark, but although she seemed so meek just then, he still stood in awe of the tongue, by which he had been often worsted in their battles over Baby Bunting. “A scalded cat dreads cold water,” he mused, and discreetly held his peace.

Rafael and Pilarica escorted the new family to their home just outside the city. It was a cottage, to be sure, but with a vine-shaded porch, a maize-field of its own and a funny little stone barn standing up on six granite legs and wearing a gabled roof.

As the door was opened, the wind made a slight stir of dust in the empty house.

“Ah!” croaked Pedrillo joyously. “Good Santa Ana, by way of example to the housekeeper, is sweeping here.”

“And I will help her,” cried Pilarica, seizing a bundle of peacock feathers of faded jewel hues and brushing up the hearth. “We have two homes in Galicia now, Rafael.”

“And another uncle,” laughed Rafael, “Tio Pedrillo.”

“O-hoo!” crowed Juanito.

Then Tia Marta, gathering the three children into one indiscriminate hug, fell to crying with all her might, which proved that she was entirely happy.

Autumn came with its harvesting and all the joys of the vintage. Pedrillo, like his neighbors, made his own wine, and Rafael and Pilarica had glorious times stamping, in the lightest of attire, on the grapes in the vat and singing:

“Green I slept in my cradle;
Red at the ball danced I;
But now I’m purple you like me best
And laugh to see me die.”

The autumn found Dolores more than ever fond of finery. She would don her best cream-colored kerchief, starred with gold, only to visit her father’s sheep out in the heather. One early October evening, when the girl, with shining eyes, had slipped away to join one of the groups of leaping dancers that dotted the fields, Doña Barbara smiled and sighed, and sighed and smiled, saying as if to herself:

“There is no sun without its clouds and no lass without her lovers.”

“I heard that handsome sailor-lad of Vigo tell Dolores that she is so sweet the roses are envious of her,” piped up Pilarica.

“No sailor-lad shall ever enter my door,” growled Uncle Manuel, just back from another trip.

“No door can keep out love and death,” answered Aunt Barbara softly.

Pilarica began to wonder about love and death. People spoke those words in such strange, beautiful tones. And night after night she lay awake beside Dolores to hear a boyish voice, with the hoarse Galician note, singing under the window. At first the coplas were light and playful.

“The stars of heaven
Are a thousand and seven.
Those eyes of thine
Make a thousand and nine.”

“Tiny and dainty, you please me well,
Down to my heart’s true pith.
You look to me like a little bell
Made by a silversmith.”

Then they grew so earnest that the young voice would sometimes break with feeling.

“Blest are the sheep that follow you
Across the meadows green,
For their shepherdess, in her mantle blue,
Is like the Heavenly Queen.”

“Until the singing shells
On the margin of the sea
Give me counsel to forget,
I will remember thee.”

For a while they waxed resentful.

“Don’t act as if you were the Queen
Putting on such airs.
I don’t choose to reach my Love
By a flight of stairs.”

But soon they were triumphant.

“I thought thee a proud, white castle;
I neared thee with alarm;
And I find thee a tender little girl
Who nestles in my arm.”

The winter was colder than the children had ever known, but it brought the same gleeful Christmas, with its almond soup and cinnamon cake, the blessing of the house with rosemary, the dancing before the mimic Bethlehem and the putting out of stubby little shoes on the balcony, a wisp of hay beside them for the camels, that the Three Kings might be pleased and leave some friendly token – a few figs wrapped in a green leaf or a tiny fish made of marchpane – of their mysterious passing in the night. And after the family Christmas – “Every man in his own house and God in the house of all” – there were gatherings of neighbors to sing scores on scores of Holy Eve carols, and then the splendid celebration in the cathedral.

Aunt Barbara, by gentle persuasions of which she alone possessed the secret, induced Uncle Manuel to let her give liberal store of food and linen to households in need, and Tia Marta, out in the granite cottage, held Juanito close as she crooned:

“Where her happy heart was beating
Mary tucked her darling in,
Singing softly: ‘O my sweeting,
Love the poor and pardon sin.’ ”

There followed dark, chill weeks when all the tiles took to crying:

“Ladies sitting on a roof; it is rainy weather;
Still the ladies sit there, weeping all together.”

And since the new conscription had taken the Vigo sailor-lad away to the war, Dolores, too, wept and wept until her girlish face had lost its dimples and its rosy color.

But Pilarica and Rafael, though they did their childish best to comfort Dolores, laughed the winter through. They searched the woods for flowers, bringing home violets in January and narcissus in March, while Dolores, whom they would coax out with them, bore back on her erect young head a burden of fragrant brush for the evening fire.

Then came Easter, with its springtide joys, and festal summer, bringing new troops of pilgrims to the shrine of Santiago.

“A tree with twelve branches;
Four nests on a bough;
In each nest seven thrushes;
Unriddle me now.”

So sang Aunt Barbara, and Pilarica, lifting her radiant little face for one more kiss, made answer: