Glories of Spain

by Charles W. Wood

He paused, but we the patient listener: Saul sitting at the feet of Gamaliel: made no reply.

"Nevertheless, if I cannot instruct, I think I can interest you," continued Delormais, breaking the momentary silence. "My life has been singular and eventful. I will rapidly sketch some of its passages: a mere outline. To go through it circumstantially, in detail, would prolong the narrative to days and weeks. To write the life chapter by chapter, incident by incident, would fill many volumes.

"I have a good memory and it carries me back to the earliest scenes of childhood: scenes full of fairy visions and sweet remembrances. Orange-groves and lemon-groves, olive-yards and vineyards, orchards where grew all the luscious fruits of the earth, gardens filled with its choicest flowers, these are my first impressions. I breathed an air for ever perfumed.

"These realms were inhabited by beings fitted for paradise. My mother's lovely and gentle face haunted the groves; my father's voice filled the house with music and energy. He was a man born to command, but ruled by charm, not by power: expressed a wish rather than gave an order. Most lovable of husbands and most indulgent of fathers, we, who were to him as the breath of his nostrils, worshipped him. I was his constant companion. Day after day, when just old enough to run by his side, he would sail about with me in his white-winged boat, on the blue waters of the Levant. On the terrace in front of the château my mother would sit and watch us, an open book before her to which only half her thoughts were given and nothing of her heart. That followed the little craft skimming to and fro in the sunshine.

"Or in a larger yacht, we would take longer voyages; but if my mother were not with us these absences were rare, three days their limit. I was the idol of the sailors, just as my father was their king, who could do no wrong.

"All my days and surroundings were coloured by this gentle, dark-eyed mother of exquisite loveliness and delicate refinement, whose only failing was too great a devotion to her husband and boy. I was an only surviving child, and for that reason doubly precious to my parents. A little daughter had first been born to them; a child, I have heard, the very counterpart of her mother—frail, delicate, and too good for earth; her soul too pure and her face too fair. At the age of three, when she was budding into loveliest rose-blossom, she went back to the angels.

"There never was any fear of that sort for me. From the first I was strong and sturdy, escaping even the ordinary ailments of childhood. So far I saved my parents all anxiety. Their only care was to check my high and venturesome spirit, which now would cause me to be fished up from the bottom of shallow waters; and now would bring me down to earth with a broken olive-bough that possibly had borne fruit for centuries and might have done so for ages yet to come. I never came to harm. A special providence watched over me—I record it with all reverence.

"As the bird flies my home was not so very far from here, though it was in France, not Spain. We lived in one of the loveliest spots of fair Provence, where indeed the earth brought forth abundantly all her fruits and flowers.

"My mother had offended her family by her marriage, yet in no sense of the word was my father her inferior. But she was of noble birth and he was not, though a patrician. He was a gentleman in all his thoughts and deeds, a great landed proprietor, a man of vast intellectual culture and refinement. The mésalliance her people chose to see in the matter existed only in their worldly minds and wicked ambitions. For to marry my father she had refused the Duke of G., an empty-headed bon vivant, with nothing but his title and wealth to recommend him. For fifteen years my mother's life was happy as life on earth can be. The day came when her people acknowledged the wisdom of her choice, the hollowness of theirs. But one circumstance in her father I have always thought condoned all his obstinacy. He finally yielded to her wishes. Without this the marriage would have been impossible. When he saw that her very existence depended upon it, he at length dismissed the duke and gave his consent—reluctantly, with a bad grace it must be admitted, but it was done. The duke married elsewhere. Wild, unprincipled, unstable as water, he entangled himself in all sorts of intrigues, gambled, and finally fell into embarrassment. Not until then was my father really and truly received without reservation as a son of the family—a position to which he was in every possible way entitled.

"Those were charmed and charming days of childhood and youth. It has been said that when the early years are specially happy, the after-life is the opposite. I cannot say that this has been my experience, though, as you will see, the hand of sorrow has sometimes been heavy upon me.