Then the keeper came back with the woman, who appeared to be a scared Indian and screeched some. He said her name was Titiaca, and she would look after us, but otherwise had no culture. Craney woke up and took a look at things.
“I have already,” the keeper says very solemn, “the advantage of your honourable names. My own is Gaspero Raphael de Avila y Mituas.” He stated it so, and went up the stairs. I dropped one leg out of the hammock, and I says thoughtful:
“I always had hard luck. They just named me Tom and chucked me.”
Titiaca knocked her head on the floor and screeched, but at that time I didn't see what for. She appeared to think the keeper was displeased.
It was monotonous lying all day in the tower, seeing only Titiaca, and now and then the black-cloaked keeper, stiff, silent, and solemn, and polite. But the days went by, and by-and-by we began to crawl out and lie in the seaward shadow, and sometimes under the banana tree, where the little black monkey loped around melancholy. We grew better. Titiaca gossiped, and told us the keeper was a magician, and master of the winds, and probably the bestower of rain and sunshine, and certain his light in the tower was connected underground with one of the volcanoes, so that he could tap different grades of earthquakes, graded as “motors, trembloritos, and tremblors,” according to size.
“For, see!” she says; “at night it is the red smoke of the mountain—all night! it is the light in the tower—all night! it is himself in the tower—all night—all day! He speaks not. Is it not so? The ground shivers. He says nothing. It is the magic. Ah-h-h! The magic!”
Craney grew so well and restless after a week or two that he began strolling, and finally one day he went down the path that Titiaca came by. For she said there was a village, and, beyond other villages and cocoa plantations, fishermen along the shore, many people, though only footpaths ran through the woods. Her gossip lacked variety, and the little black monkey took no interest in me at all. It appeared to me things were unnatural dull, and I went to the tower and called. The keeper answered, and I went up, and hoped I wasn't in his way. The middle story was like the one below, except for a table, chair, bed, and a few plain articles.
“On the contrary,” he says, “if you will do me the honour to precede,” and motioned to the stair leading to the lantern story, which was roofed, but open on all sides, and along the seaward wall was a stone bench.
It's good, now and then, as a man lives on, if something or some one comes along that gives him a new notion of things. At first it surprises him; then he thinks there might be something in it; and then maybe he gets so waterlogged and cosmopolitan as to admit an oyster's notions might be as reasonable as his.
As near as I could come to it the keeper was a Spaniard of a run-down family,—at least one branch of it was run down to him. It was old and uncommon proud, and had different kinds of decorated names. It began with being a legend; then it seemed to have a deal of trouble with Moors, and got rich with the results of trouble; then it owned some of that section of the New World, including twenty to thirty thousand natives in the property. That was the story of the family. But what they had they spent, or lost, or had confiscated, till there was nothing much but the story. Now here's what surprised me. For the thought of his race was in his bones, same as the sea is in mine. For instance, it seems to me I'm more to the point than my ancestors, on account of being alive. I don't much know who they were. I'm a separate island, with maybe a few other islands, close by. My continental connections appear to be sort of submerged. That's the average American way of looking at it, and he wants to be a credit to himself, if he does to anybody. But the keeper's notion was to be a credit to all the grandfathers he could find between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Conquest of Peru. Those of the last hundred years or so he wasn't particular about, but if they'd been dead long enough he'd do anything to satisfy them. I didn't seem to surround the idea so as to find it reasonable, but I got so far as to see it was a large one, and there was some kind of a handsomeness in it.