“That’s the bullet I’m going to dodge,” laughed Rodrigo. “There are more bullets than wounds in every battle. Eh, Tia Marta?”
“A shut mouth catches no flies,” returned the old woman tartly. But she bundled Grandfather into the house where he was still heard crooning to his guitar:
“I would not be afraid of Death,
Though I saw him walking by,
For without God’s permission
He can not kill a fly.”
Suddenly Don Carlos turned to Rodrigo, holding out both hands:
“My noble boy, I beg your pardon,” he said. “I will tell you frankly that I have thought it was your fault to lay overmuch stress on your own concerns and your own career, a career whose promise has indeed been bright, and now you have cast it all away that a peasant lad may not be torn from his mother.”
“I have no mother, sir,” replied Rodrigo, blushing like a girl and speaking in a hesitating way most unlike his usual fluency. “If there had been anyone to grieve over me like that—and yet I don’t know. Something happened—happened inside of me. It was as if a candle-flame went out and the daylight flooded in. After all, a life is a life.”
“Bah!” sniffed Tia Marta. “All trees are timber, but pine is not mahogany.”
Yet the children reasoned that she was not displeased, for she spared no pains to prepare a festival supper that evening, serving all the dishes that Rodrigo liked best, even to spiced wine and fritters.
X
TIA MARTA’S REBELLION
WHEN they gathered in the garden that evening, the grown people would still keep talking. Rafael and Pilarica, who were tired and drowsy after all the excitement of the day, missed the silence that usually fell as their father smoked and Rodrigo puzzled out his problems. To-night it seemed that nobody could keep quiet for ten seconds together.