Even Tia Marta could not deny the charm of the landscape,—ranges of wooded mountains, reaches of green meadow and of farmlands waving with wheat, cozy farm-houses with broad, overshadowing roofs and a wealth of vines creeping up the white-washed walls, but she waxed ever more indignant at sight of the sturdy peasant-women working in the fields, driving the ploughs, wielding old-fashioned hoes and spades, loading bullock-carts with produce, and carrying boxes, barrels, bales, all manner of heavy and unwieldy burdens, on their heads.
“So that is what a woman’s head is good for in Galicia,” she remarked tartly. “And I’ll warrant that the husbands of these women are spending, out of every four and twenty hours, five and twenty at the tavern.”
Uncle Manuel, who had insisted on having the whole Andalusian party ride at the head of the train with him, that he might point out to them the first view of the pilgrim city, shook his head over this arithmetic, and Pedrillo, festive in a fringed fire-red scarf, ventured to remonstrate:
“Not so, Doña Marta. The husbands emigrate to South America, that they may grow rich there. Some of them die of the Galician homesickness, but others come back with their wallets full of gold. And there are many fishermen, who are oft casting their lines and nets.”
Grandfather caught only the last word, for Carbonera was in a laggard mood, but one word was bait enough to land a riddle:
“We have lost the first day of the feast, but we shall be in early enough for the fireworks, I hope,” said Uncle Manuel. His eyes were shining with an eagerness that made quite another man of him. “Look well to that rogue of a Blanco,” he added to Bastiano, who had come up with a peach for Pilarica. “We must not have any mishaps to detain us this afternoon.”
“Never fear!” growled Bastiano. “If we fall in with a wild boar, we have Don Juan Bolondron and his popgun to defend us.”
Rafael, who had been praised and petted (and forgiven) for his exploit on the mountainside until he was in no small danger of self-conceit, detected something that he did not like in this allusion and looked up sharply.
“Who is Don Juan Bolondron?” he inquired.
“Ask Pedrillo. He’s the story-teller,” replied Bastiano. “I’m taking his place at the rear, and I know why, too.
“Once there was a poor shoemaker named Bolondron,” began Pedrillo in a great hurry. “All day he would sit cobbling at his bench and as he cobbled he would sing coplas about his craft, as this:
“Or this,” struck in Grandfather.
“One day when he was sitting on his bench, taking a bowl of porridge,” continued Pedrillo, “it happened that a few drops were spilled, and flies swarmed upon them, and he slapped at the flies and killed seven. Then he began to shout: ‘I am a great warrior and from this time on I will be called Don Juan Bolondron Slay-Seven-at-a-Blow.’ Now there was in the region about the city a forest, and in the forest a wild boar that liked the people so well he would eat several of them every week. The king had sent many hunters out to take him, but always they ran away or he devoured them, for he was the fiercest of the fierce. One day it came to the king’s ears that he had in his city a man called Don Juan Bolondron Slay-Seven-at-a-Blow.
“ ‘This must be a terrible fighter,’ he said. ‘Bring him hither to me.’
“So Juan was brought into the royal presence. He wore his best shoes, but he trembled in them, though the king only looked at him out of two eyes, quite like anybody else, and said:
“ ‘They tell me, my man, that you are mighty in battle. Is it true that you slay seven at a blow?’
“ ‘It is true, your Sacred Royal Majesty,’ answered the cobbler, who could only guess how people talk at court.
“ ‘Well and good,’ said the king. ‘I happen to have, as kings usually do, a very beautiful daughter, and to you will I give her if you kill the wild boar that makes such havoc in my city. If you fail, by the way, you will lose your head. Choose from my armory the weapons that you like best, and kill the boar the first thing after breakfast to-morrow.’
“So in the morning Don Juan Bolondron, who had armed himself as well as he knew how, went out to the forest, his knees shaking with fright, to slay the monster. But he went so slowly, wondering how, if he should be so lucky as to escape from the boar, he could escape from the king, that it was past dinner-time when he arrived, and the beast, who could not bear to be kept waiting for his meals, rushed out upon him, bristling all over with rage and hunger. When Don Juan Bolondron saw this horrible, flame-eyed creature coming, he began to run with all his might back to the king’s palace and the boar came after, so that it was written down in history as the swiftest race ever known. Don Juan reached the palace first and hid behind the door, while the boar, losing sight of him, dashed on into the patio, where were stationed the royal guards. The soldiers, glad of something to do, discharged their muskets all at once, and the boar, much to his surprise, fell dead as a stone. Don Juan Bolondron, who had peeped out to see how matters were going on, now popped into their midst, drawn sword in hand, upbraiding them with having slaughtered the monster that he was driving in from the forest to give for a pet to the king.
“The king, who was sitting, greatly bored, on his throne upstairs, ran down to see who had called, and when he found that Don Juan had been bringing the boar as a present to his feet, he was so touched that he married him to the princess before supper.
“Unluckily, Don Juan dreamt of his bench and, as he had a way of talking in his sleep, he called to the princess:
“ ‘Here, wife! Hand me my last, will you! The pincers, too! And my awl, wife, my awl!’
“The princess, startled awake by his impatient cries, was naturally much shocked to think that her father might have mistaken a cobbler for a hero. So in the morning she went to the king before he had finished shaving and asked him to look into it.
“The king had Don Juan Bolondron Slay-Seven-at-a-Blow summoned to his chamber at once and thundered, waving his frothy razor:
“ ‘Fellow, are you a cobbler or a king’s son-in-law? You certainly can’t be both, even if I have to cut off your head, after all, to set this blunder straight.’
“ ‘High-and-Mighty Father-in-Law,’ replied Don Juan, ‘give yourself no concern. Her Highness, the Princess, my honorable Lady, though very beautiful, has only a woman’s wit. She was confused with sleep, too, and misunderstood what I said. I was again in my dream taunting the wild boar, as I taunted him when I was dragging him by his ears up the palace steps, telling him that his face was flat as a last, his teeth dull as pincers, and his bite no more to be dreaded than a cobbler’s awl. You see, sire, how a woman, unused to deeds of valor, would fail to understand.’
“ ‘They are such impulsive creatures,’ sighed the king. ‘It is very troublesome. Do you not see, my daughter, how rashly you jumped to a conclusion? Now go in peace, both of you, and don’t come bothering me again with your domestic quarrels.’
“And so,” concluded Pedrillo, “my story ends with bread and pepper and a grain of salt, and I’ve no more to say.”
“I do not care for that story,” said Rafael, who had grown very red in the face.
“But the Princess was right,” protested Pilarica, with a puzzled little pucker of her forehead.
“If the Devil had not invented lying, that shoemaker would,” observed Tia Marta. “But your tiresome tale has not been quite useless, Don Pedrillo. It has put Juanito fast to sleep.”
“And Grandfather, too,” added Pilarica.
“The better for them,” remarked Uncle Manuel, patting the glossy neck of his offended mule, for Capitana had just been so rude as to frisk past Coronela and take the lead.
Pedrillo was quite disconcerted by these frank criticisms and croaked dolefully, pushing Peregrina on beside the impudent, triumphant Capitana:
“What on earth is the matter with the man?” queried Tia Marta.
“There is something I would say to you before we come to the city,” faltered Pedrillo.
“Say it now,” bade Tia Marta briskly. “Of what art afraid, heart of butter?”
“My mother’s son has no wife,” ventured Pedrillo wistfully. “I know,” he went on to say, with his old twinkle, “that choosing a wife is as risky as choosing a melon. I know that there is in heaven a cake kept for husbands who never repented of their choice, and into which, up to this day, no one has ever set tooth—”
“Bah!” interrupted Tia Marta. “That is because no husbands ever went to heaven.”
“My house is only a cottage,” pursued Pedrillo humbly, “and Don Manuel’s house is large and fine. It was a pilgrim inn once and still has the sacred shell of St. James carved over the door. But ‘little bird, little nest.’ ”
“And what would I be in Don Manuel’s grand house?” asked Tia Marta bitterly. “A cook of cabbage broth, without a place of my own to scold in or anybody of my own to scold, not even allowed to keep for myself this child as harmless as a crust of bread, this innocent as pure as a water-jar.”
And she kissed the baby head that nestled so confidingly against her shoulder.
“There will always be room in my cottage and in my heart for Juanito,” promised Pedrillo.
Tia Marta, dropping her look to Capitana’s inquisitive, pricked-up ears, made answer in an Andalusian copla:
“I know I’m not much to look at,” admitted Pedrillo, a trifle aggrieved by the comparison.
“No, you are not,” assented Tia Marta. “Truth is God’s daughter. But you are a handy little piece of a man, and since I have a loaf of bread, I’ll not ask for cheese-cakes. The poor should be contented with what they find and not go seeking for truffles at the bottom of the sea.”
The two were so absorbed in each other that they failed to notice Pilarica, who had ridden up on Don Quixote and was now charging joyously down the line, telling everybody that Don Pedrillo and Tia Marta, while both making believe to kiss Juanito, had really kissed each other. The news was received with peals of laughter, and all the carriers ran forward, voicing saucy congratulations:
“No summer like a late summer,” mocked Bastiano.
“You would better take me, Doña Marta,” advised Tenorio, whose legs looked longer than ever, attired in their festival garb of chestnut-colored breeches, with rows of glass buttons down the sides, “for I have a nose, at least.” And then, turning back, he sang over his shoulder at Pedrillo:
“Don’t trust him, Doña Marta,” teased Hilario, whose shabby suit was set off for the occasion by a red and gold handkerchief. “He loses his heart to somebody every trip.
“A truce to your nonsense!” called Don Manuel, who had urged Coronela on to the crest of the long rise they had been slowly ascending. “Look! Look! Yonder is Santiago de Compostela.”
All gazed in silence upon the pilgrim city, set upon a hill in a circle of hills, its many groups of towers and spires tending upward on every side toward its crowning cathedral of St. James.
Don Manuel beamed upon the group of Andalusians.
“Will you not be happy here?” he asked, his iron face all quivering with joy and love, while the honest Hilario wept aloud and the other three carriers, even Bastiano, did not restrain their tears. “Listen! Where there are church bells, there is everything. Even at this distance I can hear them ringing,—the five-score and fourteen holy bells of Santiago.”
“HERE they are!” shouted Uncle Manuel, flinging himself off Coronela and running forward like a boy to embrace his wife and daughter, who had sighted the mule-train from the roof of their house and had come to the outskirts of the city to bid the travellers welcome.
Aunt Barbara, a short, dark, active woman, with a face whose expression was so sweet with gracious kindness that nobody could ever tell whether the features were beautiful or not, gathered the two children into her arms with a low, wordless cry of passionate tenderness. As she held them close, winning even Rafael’s shyness with eager, delicate caresses, they remembered what they had not known their memories held,—the lavishment of love that had cherished their babyhood.
“Mothers must be different from all the world,” thought Pilarica, and pressed, with a sudden yearning for something that her childish heart had lost, into the depths of that ardent tenderness.
Meanwhile Dolores, a merry-faced, cozy little body, in her festal array of wine-colored bodice with cuffs worked in gold thread, her petticoat as blue as a violet, her white kerchief starred with marvellous fruits and flowers, was giving the prettiest of greetings to Grandfather. And Tia Marta was met with a cordial gentleness that readily included Juanito.
“Of course we cannot keep him,” began Don Manuel.
“Wait and see!” laughed Dolores. “You know it will be just as Lady Mother and I say.” And then she flew back into her father’s arms to kiss away his very feeble effort at a rebuking frown.
At once the guests were hurried home to pottage. And such a pottage! Egg and chicken cut into small pieces, bits of ham, red peppers and green string beans! But they could not linger over their plates, for all the world was scurrying through the streets toward the cathedral to see the fireworks.
“Drops of water must run with the stream,” said Uncle Manuel, thrusting his dripping spoon behind his ear, like a pen, in his haste; but Grandfather was too weary for junketing, and Tia Marta could not be persuaded to leave Juanito.
“A Christian child is holier than fireworks,” she declared, standing in the doorway, under the carven cockleshell, with the sleepy baby fretting in her arms.
“And quite as noisy,” came back as a parting shot from Don Manuel, who might seem to have had enough to do, without that, in shepherding his party of women and children through the surging throng.
Although Rafael’s head, still sensitive from the bump, was aching hard when they all came home an hour before midnight, and Pilarica had to pull her hair and pinch herself to keep a certain pair of pansy eyes from drawing their silk curtains, yet both children loyally felt that they must do their best to make up to Tia Marta for the ravishing sights she had missed.
Much relieved that Doña Barbara left it for her to put her darlings to bed, Tia Marta listened demurely to all their drowsy wonder-tales of cascades of fire, showers of falling stars, flaming rivers flowing through the night, golden trees blossoming with rubies and emeralds and amethysts, the colossal lizard that sprang up with a crash, turning to a glistening green dragon that tried to chase the stars, and, best of all, a million-tinted Alhambra which changed, in one splendid instant, to lustrous silver, to an intense and awful white, and then vanished, with a series of deafening thunders, as a sign of Santiago’s victory over the Moors. Yes, Tia Marta listened to everything they could keep awake long enough to tell her, and never once confessed how she had seen all this, and more, from the roof of the house, with Pedrillo sitting close beside her, his hand over hers, to reassure her in case the explosions should be too loud for Andalusian nerves to bear.
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:
“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:
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.
Then they grew so earnest that the young voice would sometimes break with feeling.
For a while they waxed resentful.
But soon they were triumphant.
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:
There followed dark, chill weeks when all the tiles took to crying:
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.
So sang Aunt Barbara, and Pilarica, lifting her radiant little face for one more kiss, made answer:
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:
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.
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:
On the return jumping-trip, when Rafael’s back was beginning to ache, each asked:
And he, as he had been instructed, made answer:
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.
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:
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!
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:
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:
“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:
“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:
| “Don’t pin-prick my darling dolly. | Do |
| Respect my domestic matters. | Re |
| Methinks she grows melancholy, | Mi |
| Fast as her sawdust scatters. | Fa |
| Sole rose of your mamma’s posy. | Sol |
| Laugh at your mamma, so! | La |
| Seal 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: