In Sunny Spain with Pilarica and Rafael

“A thousand thanks,” responded Pilarica. And now that this series of polite phrases, taught in every Spanish nursery, was duly accomplished, Rafael called again for the heroes.

“One at a time,” responded the father, throwing out his hands with a gesture of playful remonstrance. He had just come back from his morning walk with Rodrigo, whom he liked to accompany for at least a part of the way to the Institute, and was warm from the return climb. “One hero a day, like one breakfast a day, is quite enough for Don Anybody.”

Then he told them stories of a champion who was mighty in Spain eight hundred years ago.

“If I were one hundred times as old as I am,” cried Rafael with sparkling eyes, “perhaps I would have seen him.”

“Perhaps,” smiled Don Carlos, and went on to tell the children that this warrior’s name was the name of their own brother, Rodrigo, though he had other names, too, as Ruy Diaz de Bivar, and was most often called the Cid, or Lord, a title given him by the five Moorish kings whom he conquered all at once.

“Five – Moorish – kings!” exclaimed Rafael in rapture, while Pilarica, to help her imagination, propped up five tawny breadsticks in a row.

So their father told them how the Cid, when a stripling not twenty summers old, had ridden forth on his fiery horse, Bavieca, followed by a troop of youthful friends, against those five royal Moors who, with a great army, were plundering Castile, and how he overthrew them and set their host of Christian captives free.

“Our Rodrigo would have done that, too,” declared Rafael proudly, while Pilarica, with one valiant dab of her forefinger, tumbled the five bread-sticks into the dust. Later, remembering Tia Marta, she picked them up and polished them off with a handful of rose-petals before restoring them to the plate.

Finding his hero so popular, Don Carlos recited what he could remember of an old Spanish ballad that tells of the Cid’s offer to give Bavieca to the King of Castile.

“The King looked on him kindly, as on a vassal true;
Then to the King Ruy Diaz spake after reverence due:
‘O King, the thing is shameful, that any man beside
The liege lord of Castile himself should Bavieca ride:

“ ‘For neither Spain nor Araby could another charger bring
So good as he, and certes, the best befits my king.
But that you may behold him, and know him to the core,
I’ll make him go as he was wont when his nostrils smelt the Moor.’

“With that, the Cid, clad as he was in mantle furred and wide,
On Bavieca vaulting, put the rowel in his side;
And wildly, madly sped the steed, while the mantle streamed behind
As when the banner of Castile beats in a stormy wind.

“And all that saw them praised them; they lauded man and horse
As mated well and rivalless for gallantry and force;
Ne’er had they looked on horseman might to this knight come near,
Nor on other charger worthy of such a cavalier.

“Thus, to and fro a-rushing, the fierce and furious steed,
He snapped in twain his hither rein. ‘God pity now the Cid!’
‘God pity Diaz!’ cried the lords, but when they looked again,
They saw Ruy Diaz ruling him with the fragment of his rein;
They saw him proudly ruling with gesture firm and calm,
Like a true lord commanding, and obeyed as by a lamb.

“And so he led him foaming and panting to the King;
But ‘No!’ said Don Alfonso, ‘it were a shameful thing
That peerless Bavieca should ever be bestrid
By any mortal but Bivar. Mount, mount again, my Cid!’ ”

Rafael’s mind was still full of the Cid when, two or three days later, he was well enough to take a short ride on Shags outside the garden. The rough-coated, mouse-colored donkey carried his young master jauntily, being apparently well pleased to see him out again. Don Carlos, racking his memory for more ballads of the Cid, was walking beside Shags, when Pilarica, who had tripped on ahead and turned a corner, uttered a cry of distress. The father sprang forward and found the child on her knees in the dust of the highway, her face streaming with tears, while she held up her clasped hands in entreaty to a sullen-faced fellow who was brutally beating his ass. The poor creature, hardly more than skin and bones, was so cruelly overladen with sacks of charcoal that he had stumbled on a steep and stony bit of the road and broken the fastenings of one of the sacks, whose contents were merrily making off downhill like little black imps on a holiday. The peasant, in a fury, was dealing the ass great fisticuffs on the tender nose, and between the eyes, shut in patient endurance of the blows.

Don Carlos had often seen animals beaten and had usually passed by with a shrug of annoyance, but the anguish of pity in his little daughter’s face and attitude suddenly smote him with an intolerable feeling, as if that horny fist were pounding his own heart.

“Hold, there, my friend!” he protested. “Enough is as good as a feast. If you kill your donkey, who will carry the load?”

The charcoal seller, his arm raised for another blow, stared in astonishment at the speaker.

“You would do well to put your tongue in your pocket,” he growled. “This ass is mine, to beat if I choose and to kill if I choose. I am thinking that is what I will do, for his skin is the best of him now.”

Pilarica rose and rushed to her father, her eyes their deepest pansy purple with beseeching.

“Oh, dearest father, if you please! If you would kindly do me the favor! Instead of the doll with golden hair, if only you would give me this sweet, beautiful donkey!”

Her father lifted her in his arms, so that the flushed, wet face was pressed against his own.

“Do you mean it, Honeydrop? Think again. Do you really wish me to buy you this wretched ass in place of the wonderful dolly with Paris clothes, in the Granada shop? I am afraid there is not money enough for both.”

“Oh, yes, yes!” entreated Pilarica. “The doll is happy in the shop-window, where she can see the children smile at her as they go by, but the donkey – oh, father, the donkey!”

The peasant, whose arm had fallen to his side and who had been listening shrewdly, now stepped forward, touching his hat with a surly civility.

“It’s not for the price of a basket of cabbages I would be selling my fine donkey. I’m a poor man, your Worship. All that God has given me for my portion in the world is morning and evening, three pennyworths of poverty, and a bushel of children with the gullets of sharks. What would become of us all without my strong, good ass?”

“I’ll give you two dollars for your dingy old rattlebones, my man, and that is twice what anybody else would be fool enough to give you,” said Don Carlos, holding out the coins.

The charcoal-seller looked at them greedily, but still hung back.

“Come, now!” spoke Don Carlos sharply. “Don’t stand hesitating like a grasshopper that wants to jump and doesn’t know where. Remember that covetousness bursts the bag. Is it a bargain or not?”

The decision of the officer’s tone and, still more, the tempting gleam of the silver prevailed, but the peasant would not give over his donkey until he had delivered the load of charcoal. So Don Carlos and Pilarica, Rafael and Shags, escorted Sooty-Face and his limping ass to the hotel hard by the Alhambra, where the sale was at last effected.

“And now the donkey, such as he is, is yours,” said Don Carlos, putting the shabby bridle into Pilarica’s hand. “Haven’t you a smile for me now?”

But the child, though she kissed her father gratefully, flung her arms about the donkey’s neck, and, pressing her cheek to the bruised nose, cried harder than ever, until Shags felt it time to interfere. That generous-minded animal, whose long ears had been responding, with various cocks and tremors, to every stage of the proceedings, now drowned Pilarica’s sobs in a resounding bray. The stranger seemed to understand this greeting better than he understood Pilarica’s endearments and took a timid step or two toward his new comrade.

“Shall we call him Bavieca?” asked Rafael, eying the sorry beast doubtfully. He certainly did small credit to the name of the peerless steed.

“Better call him Rosinante,” laughed the father, “after the forlorn old horse of Don Quixote, who was something of a hero, too, in his way. Most people, as, for instance, his fat squire, Sancho Panza, who rode a famous ass named Dapple, thought it a very foolish way.”

“Why?” questioned Pilarica, whisking off her tears with the ends of her hair-ribbon.

“Oh, he took windmills for giants, and wayside inns for castles, and flocks of sheep for armies. He rode through the country trying to right wrongs and only got knocked about and made fun of for his pains. In fact, this coming to the rescue of an abused donkey is something after his fashion.”

And Don Carlos, a little shame-faced, looked his purchase over. The ass was lame in one foot, covered with welts and fly-bites, and so weak that he seemed hardly able to walk even now that his load had been removed. But Pilarica was enchanted with him and kept lavishing caresses upon the gaunt beast, whose large, liquid eyes looked out wonderingly at her.

“I want to call him Don Quixote,” she announced. “I think Don Quixote is a lovely hero, and this is such a lovely, lovely donkey.”

“Very well!” assented her father, with a shrug. “At any rate, he’s lean enough. And now to see what Tia Marta will have to say to this performance of ours!”