We had to sit down and kiss her tear-drenched cheek and say what a beautiful and charming girl her Belén had been, and offer a conventional prayer for divine consolation, and then some one else came in to take our place, amid a fresh burst of sobs and moans. The poor soul had worked herself into a state of hysterics, but through it all was conscious that she was fulfilling her friends’ expectations and doing the right thing by her daughter in thus proving herself helplessly broken down by her trouble. Self-restraint on such an occasion is considered to show coldness of heart and a lack of respect and affection for the dead.
When I came out after my painful interview with the mother, I found all the young cousins and companions of poor Belén in shrieks of laughter, and they all turned on me exclaiming—
“Oh Doña Elena, how funny your Olivita is! What amusing things she says! And what strange customs you have in your country!”
It appeared that my “Olivita” had been trying to explain in her still imperfect Spanish that in England young men and maidens were allowed to go out walking together, unchaperoned as here by “Mamma” on one side and “my aunt” on the other. And in mistake for pasear, to go out walking, she had used the word besar, which means to kiss. So that our mourners took her to say that it was the custom in England for the men and girls to kiss each other whenever they met in the street, and their amusement at the idea had completely blotted out of their minds for the time being the melancholy reason for their meeting.
The elder ladies took it all as a matter of course.
“Poor children,” they remarked; “they are very tired, and they laugh easily. It is quite natural, and generally happens on these sad occasions.”
As may be imagined, such vociferous grief does not long endure; but well as I thought I understood the Spanish temperament, I was rather shocked when on one occasion two girls in black masks and dominoes accosted me at a Carnival dance, and revealed themselves as the sisters of a youthful bride who had died, with her baby, less than a month before.
They threw themselves on my mercy, fearing that I might recognise them, and begged me not to betray their escapade to their mother, who believed them to be spending the evening with a sick friend, and whose consent had been with difficulty obtained for them to go out even on that errand, so soon after their sister’s death. I think this was an exceptional instance of “quick frost, long thaw,” but one often finds women in deep mourning speaking bitterly of the restrictions imposed by custom on their social and even their home life when a near relative dies.
I have heard of the whole house, from the street door to the ladies’ boudoir, being hung with black draperies for the nine days of rigorous mourning after the sudden death of the master of the house, and during all that time the women had to sit in semi-darkness, morning, noon, and night. The daughters were not allowed to touch the piano for three full years after their father’s death. A friend of theirs and mine told me that the girls, who were very fond of music, and good pianists, moped themselves into actual illness, so keenly did they feel the loss of their favourite occupation after their first grief had worn off, but nothing would induce the mother to have the piano unlocked. They were fresh young girls in their teens when the father died, full of life, of good social position, and with plenty of money to gratify every whim. When I saw them after their three years’ seclusion they were pale, thin, and melancholy, and looked like women nearer thirty than twenty in their enveloping chiffon veils, for although they had left off crape they were still clad in black from head to foot.
The friend in question, a young married woman with a devoted husband and two pretty little girls, had herself just emerged from a year’s strict retirement after losing her mother. She told me she was looked on by the older generation as an unnatural creature, because she had now begun to play her beloved piano again.