Part 12

The _fiesta_ lasted for several days. There were solemn ceremonies in the cathedral, stately processions through the streets, fairs, sports, open-air music and dancing. Pilarica’s height of rapture was reached when the King of Censers, the great, silver incense-burner of the Middle Ages, swung by a system of chains and pulleys from the vaulting of the central cupola, flashed its majestic curves through the cathedral, a tremendous fire-bird dipping and rising in a cloud of fragrance over the upturned faces of the vast, hushed congregation. But Rafael took a boy’s delight in the eight giants, hollow wicker images some twelve feet high, representing mediæval pilgrims, Moors, Turks and modern tourists, an absurd array that strutted at the head of the processions and even danced, to the music of pipe and tabor, before the High Altar. He was puzzled to understand how they were propelled until he saw peering out at him from the waistband of that chief booby, John Bull, the rueful face of Hilario. A teasing troop of dwarfs were trying to trip and upset this particularly clumsy giant, and Rafael struck in gallantly to the rescue, serving Hilario at cost of a bloody nose. He pelted the dwarfs with melon rinds, while Bastiano, concealed inside the British Matron, John Bull’s towering escort, gathered up his calico petticoats and pounded at them with his pasteboard head. Rafael described this, with high glee, at the supper table, but, remembering Don Juan Bolondron, was silent as to his own exploits.

In the motley assemblage of pilgrims the children came often upon their friends of the road. They were all conducting themselves most decorously now. The dreamy-eyed pilgrim was too deeply absorbed in his devotions for more than a dim smile at Pilarica, and even the wild peasant woman was doing a weary penance, dragging herself on her bruised knees up the long flight of stone steps to the great west doors and on over the worn pavement of the nave to where the enthroned statue of St. James welcomes his worshippers.

After the feast of Santiago there came, in the end of August, the wedding of Tia Marta. Pedrillo had decided, or, rather, she had decided for him, to give up the road and try to make a living out of the soil, whereat Don Manuel, who counted Pedrillo his right-hand man, was sorely vexed.

“Why not leave the world as it is?” urged the master-carrier. “Is not the woman better off under my roof, where she is made one of us and has her spoon in every dish, than living on a mud floor, with goat and pig, in that cabin of yours, munching a crust of bread and an onion? As for you, man, your feet will tingle to be on the tramp.”

Pedrillo scratched his bushy head.

“And Juanito?” he asked.

“Ah, Juanito! He is not so bad, that Juanito. He will amuse my wife while I am away. Now that the little rascal is getting fat on the good, rich milk of our Galician cows, he cries no more than a pigeon. He will soon be playing the screech-owl again on such fare as you can give him.”

“I have heard,” said Pedrillo, “that St. Peter, when he lived upon the earth, was anxious about the rearing of an orphan and told his trouble to our Lord Christ. The Master bade him turn over a heavy stone beside their path. So St. Peter, puffing a bit, rolled it over, and found under it all manner of grubs and slugs living in content. Then said Christ our Lord to Peter: ‘Shall not the care that provides even for such as these be trusted to nourish this dear child?’”

“Be that as it may,” replied Don Manuel stubbornly, “every man is the son of his deeds, and life has not made you a farmer.”

Grandfather who, through all the talk, had been smiling sagely and strumming on his guitar, now began to sing:

“Though many friends give counsel, Take your own advice; ’Tis not by other people’s paths One wins to Paradise.”

“Your Honor is as wise as Merlin,” exclaimed Pedrillo, beaming on the singer. “I invite you to my wedding.”

It was on a sunny morning, when the tassels of the maize were dancing in the sea-breeze, that Pedrillo and Tia Marta knelt before the priest in a small side-chapel of a neighboring church. The ceremony was brief. A white scarf was cast over Tia Marta’s head and over Pedrillo’s shoulder, and their necks were tied together with a white satin ribbon, called the yoke. When the ritual of the church had been spoken and the couple had given each other wedding rings, the priest handed to Pedrillo a tray on which were heaped thirteen silver dollars. These he passed to Tia Marta as a symbol of his worldly wealth wherewith he her endowed, and she prudently knotted the coins up in her handkerchief.

“No wedding without a tamborine,” said Don Manuel, who was bearing his defeat with a good grace. So the Andalusian bride, quietly dressed in black with a blue kerchief over her head, and the Galician bridegroom were made guests of honor in a house of loving faces, of music and of feasting. Rafael and Pilarica had strewn the rooms with rushes and wild flowers, and Doña Barbara and Dolores had prepared the wedding breakfast. The main dish, on which Doña Barbara prided herself not a little, was founded on rice boiled in olive oil, but to this she had added chicken, red peppers, peas, salt pork, sausage, clam and eel, and flavored it all with saffron, so that it was, as everybody said, fit for the King of Spain.

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:

“The months are the branches; A week is a nest; The days are the thrushes; Each song is the best.”

XXI

WORK AND PLAY

Rafael still dreamed of his father, especially on gusty nights, and still, as he worked and played, tried to do what his father would approve. For there was plenty of work, as well as play. Work is the fashion in Galicia and neither Uncle Manuel nor Aunt Barbara could have conceived of a happy life without it. Rafael, though he had developed no liking for arithmetic, pegged faithfully away at the simple sums that his uncle delighted to set him and became, if not swift, tolerably sure.

“Dame Diligence is the mother of success,” Aunt Barbara would say cheerfully, when the lad’s face grew flushed over long columns, and presently a purple plum or a russet apple would be dropped upon the blurred and crumpled page. Another of Aunt Barbara’s quiet ways of helping was to divert Pilarica’s headlong rushes upon her brother to impart some news of burning importance,--how Bastiano had promised her a hat woven of rushes or how Don Quixote had slipped off the stepping-stones and splashed down into the brook. Aunt Barbara had only to whisper _Bat_ to send the little girl dancing away out of doors again, trilling like a penitent lark:

“Who is the student--hark, oh hark!-- Who studies best in the deepest dark? Should you disturb his studies, beware! This angry student will pull your hair.”

What the boy longed to do was to learn to write, that he might send a letter to his father, and a tall youth from the Institute, where Rafael was to go, his uncle said, when he was ten years old, came in twice a week to set copies in a free, flourishing script and make fun of his pupil’s painful scrawls.

“I don’t see why letters are so much harder to do than figures,” Rafael would groan, casting his pen to the floor in an Andalusian temper.

But Doña Barbara would pick it up and pat the ink-smeared hand into which she fitted it again with cool, comforting touches.

“Flowers black as night, Field white as snow, A plough and five oxen To make it go,”

she would say in the dear voice that was a softer echo of his father’s, and the five sturdy little oxen would resolutely resume their labors with the plough.

As for play, he found the games of Santiago rougher than those to which he had been accustomed in Granada. He was surprised, at first, to see such big boys dancing in circles, while a lad on the outside would try to touch one of them above the waist, but he soon discovered that these were kicking circles where heels struck out behind so vigorously as to make it no easy matter to tag without receiving the return compliment of a kick.

The work element, too, entered into these Galician games. In the first one Rafael played, he received whispered orders from the leading lad, “the master,” to “be carpenter and gimlet.” After a few more directions, Rafael stooped over, his palms on his knees, and held this position while the other boys in turn took running leaps over him, resting their hands on his shoulders, but careful not to touch him with their legs. At the first jumping, every boy would say in the harsh Galician grumble, like so many leap-frogs at his ear:

“Here’s a new worker good and clever. Man must work forever and ever.”

On the return jumping-trip, when Rafael’s back was beginning to ache, each asked:

“What do you do with your best endeavor?”

And he, as he had been instructed, made answer:

“I’m a carpenter good and clever.”

On the third leaping, each workman paused with his hands on Rafael’s shoulders to put a question to the master and, upon receiving a negative reply, vaulted as before.

“Have you saws that saw as sharp saws should?” “Yes, my saws are very good.” “Have you planes that plane as smooth planes should?” “Yes, my planes are very good.” “Have you hammers that pound as hammers should?” “Yes, my hammers are very good.” “Have you gimlets that bore as gimlets should?” “No, my gimlets are not so good.”

At this the last questioner flung his arms about Rafael, pulling the doubled little figure upright, and all the boys dealt him friendly cuffs and tweaks as they dragged him to the master, chorusing:

“He needs a gimlet; that is true. He needs a gimlet and he’ll take you.”

And then the game began all over again with another youngster secretly appointed by the master as “tinker and tongs.”

Pilarica frankly disdained the Galician games. It hurt the child’s sense of romance and poetry to find the same plays that had been robed in beautiful suggestion, as she romped through them with her Andalusian mates, given this queer, workaday, bread-and-butter flavor. How lovely it used to be when the children would choose Pilarica to lead the Morning-stars in their dancing advances nearer and nearer the deep shadow cast by the Alhambra wall! Within the mystery of dusk would lurk the lonely Moon, waiting her chance to spring and catch the first daring star who should venture to skip across the line dividing light from darkness! How the very words of the song twinkled and tempted!

“O the Moon and the Morning-stars! O the Moon and the Morning-stars! Who dares to tread--O Within the shadow?”

And here was the same play in Galicia so degraded that Pilarica would never consent to play it. Instead of the Moon in the shadow, a beanseller sat in his stall, and instead of stars there were thieves who scampered over the forbidden border, shouting rudely:

“Ho! Old Uncle! Seller of Greens! We are robbing you of your beans.”

On a certain sunshiny morning of her second autumn in Galicia, Pilarica was protesting to her schoolmates against the game of _Hunt the Rat_. For Pilarica went to school. The little girl had teased so to be taught that Uncle Manuel, to quiet her, was sending her, at a penny a week, to the dame-school kept in the porch of an old gray church. It was against the church wall that the children were seated in a close row, so that the rat, Pilarica’s shoe, could be hidden between the wall and the small of their backs. As the shoe was shuffled along from one to another, the seeker was teased with the song:

“Rat, rat! Can’t you find the rat? Look in this hole and look in that.”

“It’s ugly,” pouted Pilarica. “I don’t want my shoe to be a rat. Why don’t you hunt a golden cup or a fairy or something else that is nice to think about?”

The other children stared and one tall, sullen-faced girl rudely threw the shoe back to Pilarica.

“Because we don’t have golden cups and fairies in Galicia to hunt,” she said, “and we do have rats. That’s sense, isn’t it? But take your old shoe. We don’t want it.”

“These are not old shoes, yet,” replied Pilarica with untroubled sweetness, “because their eyes are shut.”

“Do you mean anything by that?” demanded the sullen-faced girl.

Pilarica put on the rat-shoe, curling her toes with a shiver of disgust, stretched out her feet and sang:

“Two little brothers Just of a size; When they get to be old folks They’ll open their eyes.”

“Mine are wide open,” lisped a midget beside her, tumbling over on his back that he might the better hold up his ragged footgear to the public gaze, but as most of the children were barefoot, the subject was allowed to lapse.

The morning session was half over, as you could see by looking down that row of child faces. Half of them had been washed, and the other half evidently not. Pilarica was one of some five, out of the fifty, that came clean and tidy from home. The teacher, a white-headed grandmother, with a poppy-red handkerchief twisted into a horn over each temple, now appeared scuffling around the corner of the church on her knees, with loud puffings and groanings. She had a hard vow to fulfil,--to go seventy times around the outside of the church on those rheumatic joints, and the gravel was cruel; but she tried to make one circuit every day. Bowing her white head and kissing the lowest step of the porch, she dragged herself up and, sitting down on the alabaster fragment of a long-since-shattered statue, clucked for her pupils to gather round her as a hen would call her chickens.

“We will leave the rest of the faces till afternoon,” she announced. “Some of you may rub my knees, and Pilarica may have her doll and drill you in the scales.”

The shrewd old mistress had discovered that Pilarica was possessed of a little musical knowledge, thanks to Grandfather and his guitar, and so allowed her to bring her doll, essential to the lesson, to school; but its Paris wardrobe and Granada countenance had suffered so much in Galician handling that dolly was now regularly placed, for safe keeping, between the jaws of a stone griffin above the porch. The biggest boy had the daily privilege of climbing up and depositing it there, and the old dame’s rod would knock it out again to be caught in Pilarica’s anxious arms. Battered and tattered as the doll had become under this severe educational process, it was dearer to Pilarica than ever, and she clasped it tight as, standing before the children, she sang in that clear, fresh voice which even the sullen-faced girl gladdened to hear:

“_Do_n’t pin-prick my darling dolly, _Do_ _Re_spect my domestic matters. _Re_ _Me_thinks she grows melancholy, _Mi_ _Fa_st as her sawdust scatters. _Fa_ _Sol_e rose of your mamma’s posy. _Sol_ _La_ugh at your mamma, so! _La_ _Se_al up your eyes all cozy. _Si_ _La Sol Fa Mi Re Do._”

After Pilarica and the doll had done their best for half an hour to inculcate a knowledge of the scales, the dame bade the children go and play _Kite_ in the churchyard; but one of them remained.

“Well?” asked the old woman apprehensively.

“Will you please teach me something?” pleaded Pilarica.

“Ay, child, to be sure I will,” and the wrinkled hand drew, from a crack in a wondrously carven pedestal beside her, all the library the school possessed,--a dilapidated primer and a few loose leaves from a prayer-book.

The mistress pored over these dubiously for a while and then her look brightened.

“This is _O_,” she said impressively, “and that is _M_.”

“But you teach me O and M every time,” remonstrated Pilarica, “and never anything else. Indeed, I know O and M quite well now.”

The old dame cocked her red horns petulantly and thrust back her library into the marble crevice.

“O and M are very good learning,” she insisted. “Go back under the doorway and say your prayer and don’t come to school again to-day.”

So Pilarica, the corners of her mouth drooping just a little, knelt under the Gothic portal and repeated:

“Mother Most Holy, Thy servant kneels to say That with thy kind permission It is time to play. Mother Most Holy, My loving heart implores, Bless this little sinner Before she runs outdoors.”

XXII

THE PORCH OF PARADISE

Pilarica was quite at home, by this time, in the crooked, sombre streets of Santiago, whose stones are histories. There fell on her unconscious little figure, as she tripped along, the shadow of ancient buildings,--churches, convents, hospitals, with quaintly sculptured fronts. Over many of the massive, deeply recessed doors was graven the cockle shell of St. James, showing that these were once rest houses for the overflow of pilgrims, of whom thousands used to sleep on the floor of the cathedral. Over the rough granite slabs that paved the roads her little feet danced on to an inner music of her own, though all about her was the harsh uproar of a Spanish city,--children blowing penny whistles, blacksmiths beating their anvils, shopmen calling their wares. The screech of the file, the grating of the saw, the click of the chisel, added their discords to the braying of donkeys, the cracking of whips, the screaming of parrots, the clanging of mule-bells.