“You were wrong,” said Teresa, in an even voice, “I should like to talk to them about Seville.”
“Good Lord!” muttered Concha.
“Give them a description of a bull-fight, Teresa. It would amuse me to watch the face of Mrs. Moore and the Vicar,” said the Doña.
Teresa and Concha laughed, and Jollypot shuddered, muttering, “Those poor horses!”
The Doña looked at her severely. “Well, Jollypot and what about the poor foxes and hares in England?”
This amœbæan dirge was one often chanted by the Doña and Jollypot.
“Oh! look at the birds’ orchard ... all red with haws. Poor little fellows! They’ll have a good harvest,” cried Jollypot, pointing to the double hedge of hawthorn that led to the garage, and evidently glad to turn from man’s massacring of beasts to God’s catering for birds.
“Seville!” said Concha meditatively; and a silence fell upon them while the word went rummaging among the memories of the mother and her daughters.
Tittering with one’s friends behind one’s reja, while Mr. Lane down below (though then only twenty-three, already stout and intensely prosaic), self-consciously sang a Spanish serenade with an execrable English accent; gipsy girls hawking lottery tickets in the Sierpes; eating ices in the Pasaje del Oriente; the ladies in mantillas laughing shrilly at the queer English hats and clumsy shoes; the wall of the Alcazar patined with jessamine; long noisy evenings (rather like poems by Campoamor), of cards and acrostics and flirtation; roses growing round orange trees; exquisite horsemanship; snub-nosed, ill-shaven men looking with laughing eyes under one’s hat, and crying, Viva tu madre! Dark, winding, high-walled streets, called after Pedro the Cruel’s Jewish concubines; one’s milk and vegetables brought by donkeys, stepping as delicately as Queen Guinevere’s mule. One by one the candles of the Tenebrario extinguished to the moan of the miserere, till only the waxen thirteenth remains burning; goats, dozens of wooden Virgins in stiff brocade, every one of them sin pecado concebida, city of goats and Virgins ... yes, that’s it—city of goats and Virgins.