I threw my arms around her neck, and gave her three or four hearty smacks, while she pretended to ward me off, exclaiming: “You clown, you schemer, go out to walk, little boy!”
With the ten dollars, I bought in the city a brooch with two crossed anchors and a little Cupid in the center, with a small ruby and two pearls. It was one of those senseless trinkets which fashion invents, but which good taste casts aside. But at least, now I was not going to the wedding empty-handed.
CHAPTER VII.
From Pontevedra to San Andrés de Louza, and thence to the country seat of Tejo, was a pleasant excursion rather than a journey. I crossed at the mouth of the river in a launch, which I hired in Pontevedra. Landing on the opposite bank, I resolved to go on foot for about a quarter of a league, through the most beautiful country one can imagine. From the beach, showing the footprints so clearly marked in the fine, silvery sand, and lined by great clumps of flowering aloes, to the foot paths overrun with honeysuckle, and the cornfields rustling in the breeze, it all seemed like an oasis; and my soul was filled with that vague joy which, when one is young, is born of the excitement of the senses, and with a sort of inexplicable presentiment, a messenger of the future—a presentiment, which without necessarily being a forerunner of happy days, yet excites us as though they really would follow.
As the country-seat of my uncle’s prospective father-in-law was situated on high ground, I could see it from the very cove where I landed. To be more exact, all that I could see clearly was the square, turreted tower and the windows, stained red and gold by the setting sun. The rest of the building was hidden by a mass of verdure, probably a group of trees. Anyhow, I could see enough to guide me on my way. I left my valise in the village, saying that I would send after it on the following day, and went on.
I was ascending the sloping path, whipping with my cane the rustling corn and bushes, whence the startled butterflies flew; when, at a turn of the road, I was greatly surprised to see a man sitting on a rock. My surprise may seem strange at first, but the fact is the man was a friar. For the first time in my life I was looking at a friar in flesh and blood. I was astonished, as if I had thought that friars were no longer to be met with, except in the canvases of Zurbarán or Murillo.
All the knowledge I had of a friar’s dress was derived from pictures I had seen in the museum, or from having seen Rafael Calvo, once, in the Duke of Rivas’s drama, Don Alvaro, or The Force of Destiny. I perceived that the friar seated on the rock was a Franciscan. His coarse gown fell in statuesque folds over his limbs, his hood had fallen on his shoulders, and in his hand was one of those coarse felt hats, with the brim looped up like a French abbé’s, with which he was fanning his brow, wet with perspiration, breathing heavily all the time. Soon, putting his hat on the ground, turning his elbows out, and resting his open hands on his knees, he remained plunged in thought.
I observed him with eager curiosity, imagining that by the simple fact of his being a friar, his mind must be filled with strange or sublime thoughts.
He lifted his right hand, and thrusting it into his left sleeve, took out an enormous blue-and-white checked handkerchief from a kind of pocket formed in the folds of the sleeve, and blew his nose vigorously. Then he arose, took up his hat, and began to go on, just as I came up to him.
I did not know whether to come close to his side, or to fall back, or to pass on simply wishing him good afternoon. Without any known cause, that man attracted, interested and fascinated me. I had two antagonistic ideas about friars: on one side was the friar of the cheap chromos after Ortego—a gluttonous, drunken, dissolute creature, a man without any sense of decency looking out from under his cowl; on the other, was the friar of novels and poems,—gloomy, mystical, visionary, with his mind enfeebled by fasting, and his nerves shaken by abstinence; fleeing from womankind, avoiding men; dyspeptic, assaulted by temptations and scruples. And I was eager to know to which of the two classes my friar belonged.