Читать книгу In Sunny Spain with Pilarica and Rafael - Katharine Lee Bates - Страница 5

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AT last, at last, that tiresome stint of embroidery was done. The threads, no longer white, had tangled so often under the impatient tugs of those rosy little fingers that it was fully half an hour later than usual before Pilarica could jump up from the threshold, run back through the house to Tia Marta, display those finished three inches of “labors” and plead:

“Tia Marta, with your kind permission I will now go out to play.”

Tia Marta was stooping over a great, open chest in the inner room whose only other furniture was a wide, low bedstead and two canvas cots. All the family slept there except Pilarica’s big brother, Rodrigo, who was a student in the Institute of Granada and so, being a person of dignity, had the curtained box-bed in the kitchen. This outer room, like the bedroom behind it, was all of stone and so dim that the light from the doorway showed only a glimmer of copper and pewter on the side where the cooking was done. The bedroom had a window, so narrow that it seemed hardly more than a slit cut in the thick stone of the wall. There was no glass in the window and there were no rugs nor carpets on the cold, tiled floors.

Tia Marta, huddled over the big chest in the duskiest corner of all, could not have seen the embroidery well, even though Pilarica’s eagerness thrust it close against the squinting red eyes; but she scolded, for Tia Marta enjoyed scolding, quite as sharply as if every moist little stitch had been measured and found wanting.

“Worse and worse! The very gypsies would be ashamed to wear it. The donkeys would bray at it. What is to become of a girl born without the needle-gift? The saints take pity! But get you out into the sunshine, child, and play! This house is as dark as a wolf’s mouth. Out of doors with you!”

TIA MARTA SCOLDS

And Tia Marta thrust the strip of linen back to Pilarica with such a jerk that the needle flew off the thread, slid to the floor and, after a merry hop or two, hid itself in a crack. This was fun for the needle, but it kept Pilarica away from the garden for ten minutes more while her small palms rubbed over the worn, uneven tiles in anxious search. But as soon as she knelt down and prayed to Santa Rita, the clever saint who can find anything that is lost, the needle gave her knee a saucy prick and consented, after its run-away frolic, to be stuck into the cloth again. For, you see, the needle had been working hard, too, and wanted its bit of holiday as much, perhaps, as Pilarica wanted hers.

But the loss of those ten minutes out of her golden afternoon was a sore trial to the little girl and she dashed like a tiny whirlwind through the house to fling herself, sobbing and laughing both at once, into the arms of Grandfather. He sat, white-haired and dreamy-eyed, his guitar on the mosaic bench beside him, under the olive-tree before the door. It was so comforting to feel the tender clasp of the old, trembling arms and to hear the slow and broken but still sweet old voice that had crooned over Pilarica since her earliest memory.

“What’s this? What’s this? Dew on my red rosebud? Hush, Heart of Honey, hush! I have a new riddle for you.

“ ‘Little glass boxes

That sometimes leak,

But open and shut

Without a squeak.’ ”

Pilarica promptly pointed her two forefingers at her still tearful eyes.

“That is easy,” she said, slipping to her knees upon the ground and leaning against the end of the bench. “Please tell me one, a bad, rude one, about a needle. I do hate needles so.”

Grandfather did not have to think long, for he was the wisest man in Spain, as all the children on the Alhambra hill would have told you, and he knew more rhymes and riddles than all the professors in all the universities and all the preachers in all the pulpits put together. So presently he began to repeat in the soft, singsong tone that always soothed Pilarica like the murmur of running water:

“ ‘I have only one eye, like the beggar who sits

In the great church porch at Cadiz;

My temper is sharp, and yet I am

A favorite with the ladies.’

Will this do?” he asked. “For there is another, and I see that just now the needle is no favorite at all with my little lady here.”

“I would like, please, to hear the other,” replied Pilarica promptly, for surely one could not know too many riddles, especially about anything so vexatious as a needle.

And Grandfather, after letting his fingers wander for a minute over the strings of the guitar to refresh his memory, chanted this other:

“ ‘I’m little, but do me no wrong,

For my temper is sharp and spry;

I’m not a man, but my beard is long,

And it grows right out of my eye.

I’m as small as a spear of wheat in spring,

And yet it is I who dress the King.’ ”

“One more, dear Grandfather, if you will do me the favor,” coaxed the child.

“One more,” assented Grandfather, lightly kissing the red carnation which Pilarica, like a true little Andalusian, had tucked into her rippling mass of soft dark hair. “One more, but not about the needle this time.

“ ‘O bright long paths to Fairytown!

What shining paths do I mean?

They are not gray, nor black, nor brown,

Nor blue, nor white, nor green.’ ”

Dear me! What paths did he mean? Pilarica sprang to her feet and looked about her on a scene of wonderful beauty. For the two gloomy rooms in which the family ate and slept were all that remained of an old Moorish palace, once as dazzling in its strange and delicate splendor as if it had been carven out of moonlight and jeweled by the frost. Time had destroyed those silvery walls and towers, those airy arches and columns, but it had dealt gently with the lordly pleasure-garden, which only grew lovelier and lovelier through the centuries of neglect. When the Christian armies, long ago, drove the grave, dark-faced, turbaned Moors down from the Alhambra hill, out of Spain, and back over the narrow strip of sea to the north coast of Africa, the household that had to flee from this fair home must have turned at the garden gate and sighed as they looked their last on their lost Eden. Now the roses clambered over the broken marble basins of the seven fountains, but the sparkling jets of water were as limpid as ever and, when they were all playing, Pilarica could bathe under the spray of a different fountain every day in the week.

What paths did he mean? “Not gray, nor black, nor brown,” for there were no hues so dull as these in this rainbow wilderness. “Nor blue, nor white”? There had been walks of sky-tinted porcelain and creamy marble once, and other walks of many-colored tiles, set in patterns of stars and crescents and circles, but the myrtle hedges had sent out rambling sprays of yellow blossoms to clamber over these, and fallen orange flowers and jasmine petals, acacia blooms and drifting leaves of all sorts helped with their fragrant litter to hide the pavement of those winding ways. “Nor green”? There were trees upon trees in the garden, solemn cypresses and soaring palms, magnolias with their great, sweet blossoms, cedars with level boughs, banana trees and lemon and citron and pomegranate, oleanders with their clusters of snowy flowers, and the leafless coral tree, blooming in brilliant scarlet. Only the birds, whose wings went flashing from one beckoning branch to another, knew how many, many green paths there were amidst the leafage of those marvellous boughs. And while Pilarica was still gazing with happy eyes right up and away into that waving world of twinkling sprays and glowing blossoms, a sudden ray of sunlight struck across a pink-plumed almond and slanted down to Pilarica’s swinging feet.

“Sunbeams! Yellow paths!” cried Pilarica, clapping her hands.

The sunbeam danced a little, just a little, but enough to awake in those small sandalled feet an irresistible desire to run and play. So the child slipped away from Grandfather’s knee and left him to doze again, one withered hand still straying on the strings of his guitar and calling out notes of dreamy music even as he slept.

Pilarica tripped along by a hedge of boxwood, in which Rodrigo had amused himself by cutting out, some five feet apart, queer shapes of peacocks and lions and eagles. To each of these she gave a swift caress in passing, for they seemed, in a way, like playmates, and their rustling green faces were very pleasant to kiss. A shade of anxiety was gathering in her eyes, for her other brother, Rafael, was a seeker for hid treasure. The boy had often annoyed some ancient snail in its hermitage and sent the lizards scampering like flashes of green light by his groping about the bottom of cracked marble cisterns and flower-choked baths, but he had never yet found any riches of the Moors, not one alabaster jar full of rubies and emeralds nor even a single nest of pearls as large as hen’s eggs,—no, not although he had dug by moonlight with a spade dipped three times in the Sultana Fountain and rubbed dry with bunches of pungent rosemary. Perhaps Rafael might have been more successful if the Sultana had been less dilapidated. She was now merely a slender foot poised on the basin rim and a white arm clasping the central shaft of porphyry. All else had been broken away ages since, but this mainly missing Sultana was none the less the lady of Rafael’s homage and he would not allow Pilarica, never once, to kiss that uptilted marble heel.

But although Rafael was not fortunate in finding the buried treasure of the Moors, he was always coming upon buried treasure of Pilarica’s, to her great indignation and concern. All over the garden were hidden her little hoards of such childish wealth as Tia Marta’s well-worn broom would send spinning out of the house,—fragments of ruddy pottery, bits of sunrise-hued mosaic, choice feathers shed by the garden birds, feathers that might some day be fashioned into a fan, beads and ribbons that had come traveling up the Alhambra hill in Rodrigo’s pocket when there chanced to be a fair going on in Granada.

So Pilarica’s eyes, those great, changeful Andalusian eyes, that gleam like jewels but are in color nearest to the deep purple of pansies, grew dark, like dusky velvet, with the fear that Rafael might have found her latest gift from Big Brother, her castanets. Stepping softly from one broken piece of paving to another, along a mere thread of a path that wound in and out of the scented shrubbery, the child came to what had once been a summer-house with silken awnings, enclosed by a low marble colonnade. The blue sky roofed it now and only one of those graceful white columns was still standing and still—O happy Pilarica!—keeping safe watch and ward over the little yellow clappers, adorned with red tassels, which had been buried at its foot under a drift of perfumed leaves and petals. Pilarica caught them to her heart, those shells of hollowed wood, with a gasp of joy. Running her thumbs through the loops of red cord that bound each pair together, she flung her arms above her head and, beating out with the middle finger a sharp, clicking music from the castanets, began to dance. It was a wonderful sight to see Pilarica dance, whirling about and about, her feet as light as her heart, in the circle of the summer-house, but there was only one column to look on, and he was not greatly impressed, for he was old and weather-worn and tired and, besides, he had seen grand Moorish ladies, with castanets of ivory and pearl, dancing very much like Pilarica, hundreds of Aprils ago.