“Dear Doña Elena, you are too good to me,” she said, returning my embrace with effusion; “how glad I am Papa let me come to stay with you. Paz and I were both getting so dreadfully fat sitting indoors all day, and oh! so triste. My mother liked society and amusement, as you know, and she took us out every day to the Promenade or to pay visits, and now we can never go out at all, except to Mass, and we were getting fatter and fatter. Paz has her novio, but I had nothing to distract me till you brought me here. If it were not for my dear Papa I should like to stop with you all the summer.”
Her “dear Papa” was a distinguished-looking man who earned a good income in a Government office, but having perpetrated a poem or two when younger, went through life posing as a soul astray in a desert of uninteresting fact. He wore rather long hair thrown back from his forehead in picturesque disarray. The picturesqueness was, however, somewhat discounted by my simple Rosa, who, seeing a bottle of a favourite Spanish hair-wash on my table, naïvely observed—
“My Papa is using this. His hair has got thin on the top of his head, and he is so worried about it! Do you think this stuff is any good? Paz and I take turns to rub it on his scalp every night for half an hour before he goes to bed, but I don’t see much difference.”
“My Papa” was by no means a disconsolate widower. While the women of the family carry their mourning to the exaggerated lengths I have described, the men resume their usual habits a very short time after the funeral. Thus Papa’s daughters would often have to sit up very late at night to attend to his hyacinthine locks before he went to bed, but they took it all as a matter of course, and would have been extremely surprised had I hinted that Rosa’s delicate health and over-strained nerves might be a sufficient excuse for her release from these nocturnal duties. This is another aspect of the Oriental tradition—the inability of both men and women to realise that the husband or the father has not the right, simply because he is the husband or the father, to demand from his women-folk the service of slaves at all hours of the day or night, regardless of their convenience, happiness, or health.
When their mother had been dead a year, and Rosa and Paz had recovered their natural spirits and were ready to enjoy life again, their father had an attack of influenza, and both the girls got into a panic lest they were to be left doubly orphaned. He was not seriously ill, but very sorry for himself, and for months afterwards, whenever he caught the slightest cold or felt the least little indigestion, he would come home from his office and go straight to bed, and then he expected both his daughters to be ready to wait upon him. Paz always had to prepare his meals, because she knew better than the cook how he liked them flavoured; and Rosa had to be on hand to sit with him, read to him, and generally anticipate his every requirement. And as they never knew when he might feel unwell and come home to bed, and as he, of course, never dreamed of sending them notice beforehand from his office, it ended in his daughters literally never daring to go out at all after lunch.
I was shocked when I discovered the life they were leading. The novio of Paz had broken off the engagement, nominally because she could not pay her weekly duty calls on his mother, who was a stickler for etiquette and had no sympathy with “my Papa’s” hypochondria, and the only gleam of brightness on the poor girls’ horizon was the appearance of a lover for Rosa, the quiet one of the sisters, who had never attracted attention like handsome Paz. It was quite useless to ask them out, to suggest their taking turns in keeping Papa company, to make impromptu calls on the way to cinematographs or theatres on the chance of finding them free. Papa always either had just gone to bed or was just expected home to dinner; their duty to him had become an obsession, and the obsession was encouraged by him from purely selfish motives, and by the old aunt because in her view the girls would be committing a grave breach of decorum in going into society so soon (well over a year!) after their mother’s death. And worst of all, papa, from pure jealousy, objected to Rosa’s lover and forbade him the house, professing to have discovered that his means were uncertain, and announcing that he had no intention of spending his own hard-earned money on the support of an idle son-in-law.
But for once Papa met his match. The lover was neither idle nor impecunious, but a man of strong character and good position, and he was genuinely attached to our placid Rosa. So one fine morning the lovers met at Mass, and got married after a fashion peculiar, I believe, to Spain.
Just before the Mass ended they stepped forward, declared themselves man and wife, and asked for a blessing on their union. The priest may object, but he cannot refuse, for he must pronounce the benediction after saying Mass, and that serves as the blessing which sanctions these stolen marriages.
So Rosa went away with her husband and was happy, and soon fined down to her normal soft but shapely plumpness, while poor Paz stayed at home and pandered to her father until she came to weigh something like two hundredweight.
I met her quondam novio shortly after Rosa’s marriage, and gently reproached him for deserting the girl whom he had “pretended to” for so long.