In Sunny Spain with Pilarica and Rafael

Tia Marta’s squinting eyes, as she returned to the kitchen, peered into the shadows that lay beyond the flickering circle of light cast by the brasero.

“Rafael, come and get your soup and then to bed,” she called. “You must be as sleepy as the shepherds of Bethlehem.”

But no Rafael replied. Rodrigo and his father exchanged startled glances.

“Didn’t the boy come back to the house?” asked Don Carlos.

“Do you mean to say you didn’t take him with you?” demanded Tia Marta.

“Father commanded him to stop where he was,” said Rodrigo, aghast, and rushed out again into the rain, Don Carlos and Tia Marta at his heels.

They found Rafael, drenched to the skin, standing erect with folded arms beside the Sultana Fountain, a stubborn little image of obedience; but when his brother’s hand fell on his shoulder, the child reeled and fainted away. Rodrigo caught the boy just in time to save the dark head from crashing against the marble curb of the basin and, with Tia Marta’s help, carried him to the kitchen. Here they both worked over the passive form with rubbing, hot flannels and every remedy they knew, while Don Carlos, sick at heart, looked on, not venturing to touch his little son.

Rafael revived at last, but only to pass into fit after fit of convulsive crying. He lay in his brother’s arms, refusing to taste the hot soup, goat’s milk, herb tea, that, one after another, Tia Marta pressed upon him.

“But it’s peppermint tea, my angel,” she wheedled, “and peppermint is the good herb that St. Anne blessed.”

“It’s bed-time, Rafael,” pleaded Rodrigo. “Isn’t it, father? And no boy ever goes to bed without his supper.”

“Bed-time? I should think so indeed,” replied Don Carlos. “It’s quarter of two by my watch.”

At the word watch Rafael’s wild crying broke out anew.

“Do you see those tears, Don Carlos?” scolded Tia Marta, whose anxiety had to vent itself in abuse of somebody. “Tears as big as chickpeas! A house in which a child weeps such tears as those is not in the grace of God. And why, in the name of all the demons, must you be talking of watches? Such is the tact of Aragon, not of Andalusia. Oh, you Aragonese! You would speak of a rope in the house of a man that had been hanged.”

Rafael’s crying suddenly ceased. The loyal little lad sat upright on Rodrigo’s knee and turned his stained and swollen face with a certain dignity upon the old servant.

“You are not to speak to my father like that, Tia Marta,” he said. “What my father does is right.”

“Oh, the impudent little cherub!” cried Tia Marta, hugely delighted, while Don Carlos had to turn away to hide the quiver that surprised his lip.

The next day Pilarica, though she slept till noon, was as well as ever, but Rafael lay, now shaking with chills, now burning with fever, yet always wearing the rumpled red fez, which his light-headed fancies seemed to connect with the look of comprehending love in his father’s eyes.

Those first few days left little memory of their stupors and their nauseas and their pains, but when Rafael began to pay heed to life once more, he found himself thin and languid, to be sure, but the object of most gratifying attentions from the entire household. His cot had been placed – not without a pitched battle between Don Carlos and Tia Marta – under the old olive tree just before the door, and Grandfather, in his accustomed seat on the mosaic bench, had brightened up again into the best of entertainers. All this stir and excitement in the household seemed to have scattered the mists that had been creeping slowly over his brain. He was more alert than for many months and no longer played with oranges and snails. He knew his son-in-law now and while he had as many riddles in his white head as ever, he gave them out only as the children called for them. When Rafael saw that they amused his father, the boy began to hold them in higher esteem.

“They do well for girls at any time,” he confided to Rodrigo, “and for men when we are ill.” But he insisted that the answers should be guessed.

“Ask us each a riddle in turn, please, Grandfather,” he requested one marvelous Andalusian evening, when the earliest stars were pricking with gold the rich purple of the sky, “and I will pronounce the forfeits for those who fail.”

“With whom do I begin?” asked Grandfather.

“With my father, of course,” responded Rafael.

“No, no, my son. Always the ladies first,” corrected Don Carlos, drawing Pilarica to his side.

“Then it is Tia Marta who begins, for she is bigger than I am, and so she must be more of a lady,” observed Pilarica wisely.

Just then the five-minute evening peal from the old Watch-Tower rang out, and Grandfather, turning to Tia Marta, recited:

“Shut in a tower, I tell you truth,
Is a saintly woman with only one tooth;
But whenever she calls, this good old soul,
Sandals patter and carriages roll.”

“Bah!” ejaculated Tia Marta. “As if I had not known that ever since I could suck sugarcane! To ask a church-bell riddle of one who was born on the top of the Giralda!”

“I was born in a bell-tower;
So my mother tells;
When the sponsors came to my christening,
I was ringing the bells,”

sang Grandfather roguishly, strumming on his guitar.

“But this fiddling old grasshopper is enough to set the blood of St. Patience on fire,” snapped Tia Marta, who had been standing in the doorway and now indignantly popped back into her kitchen.

“Did Tia Marta ring the bells when she was a teenty tinty baby?” asked Pilarica.

“Not just that,” replied Don Carlos, who was seated in the hammock that he had swung beside Rafael’s cot in order to care for the sick boy at night, “but it is true that she was born high up in the Giralda, which, as she may have told you, is the beautiful old Moorish minaret, that looks as if it were wrought of rose-colored lace, close by the glorious cathedral of Seville. There are thirty bells in this tower and they all have names. One is Saint Mary, I remember, and one Saint Peter, and one The Fat Lady, and one The Sweet Singer. Tia Marta can tell you all the rest, for she spent the first seventeen years of her life among them, way up above the roofs of the city. The hawks that build their nests even higher, under the gilded wings of the crowning statue of Faith, used to drop their black feathers at her feet and she would wear them in her hair when she came down to the festivals of Seville. She was a wonderful dancer in those days, I have heard your grandfather say.”

“Ay, that she was,” chimed in the old man, speaking with unwonted animation. “I can see her now in her yellow skirt spangled all over with furbelows, wearing her wreath of red poppies with the best, while her little feet would twinkle to the clicking of the castanets.”

“But how did she happen to grow so old and ugly?” asked Rafael.

“Oh, Rafael!” exclaimed Pilarica, shocked by such unmannerly frankness.

“Very nobly,” answered Don Carlos, stroking his little daughter’s hair. “By love and by service. When her father, the bell-ringer, died, and a stranger took his rooms in the Giralda, Marta came down into the city and entered the home of your grandfather and sainted grandmother – ”

“May God rejoice her soul with the light of Paradise!” murmured Grandfather devoutly.

“There Marta was nurse-maid for your mother, then a little witch two or three years old,” continued Don Carlos. “And she grew so fond of her charge that she never left her, not even when your mother had the infinite goodness to marry me, and we moved to Cadiz, my naval station then. And now Tia Marta, for your mother’s blessed sake, spends all her strength and devotion upon you. We must never forget what we owe her, and we must always treat her with respect and affection.”

Rodrigo, who was pacing the tiled walks near by, trying to puzzle out a mathematical problem, turned to say:

“I’ll bring her a cherry ribbon from Granada to-morrow.”

“And she may wash my ears as hard as she likes,” magnanimously declared Rafael.

But Pilarica slipped from within the circle of her father’s arm and ran into the house to surprise Tia Marta with a sudden squeeze and shower of kisses.

By the time the little girl came out again, Grandfather had a riddle for her:

“When she wears her silvery bonnet,
My lady is passing fair;
But she’s always turning her head about,
Gazing here and there.”

As the child hesitated, Rodrigo pointed to the luminous horizon, and she promptly said: “The Moon.”

“But that’s not playing fair,” protested Rafael.