There were family portraits, too, before three of which he broke down into weeping—the son who had died in the prime of manhood, the daughter lost in her fair maidenhood, and, where the stormy sobs shook him from head to foot, the Benjamin of his heart, a clear-eyed young officer who had fallen in the Cuban war. The tears were still streaming down the quivering old face when we turned silently away—for what word of comfort would Americans dare to speak?—and followed him to his study.
He was of extravagant repute in his locality as a scholar and a man of letters, and his study was what a study ought to be,—well furnished with desk, pigeon-holes, all the tools of literary labor, and walled with books. Among these was an encyclopædia in which, to his frank astonishment, he found an article of fifteen pages on Calderon. The great volume we had come to see lay open on a reading stand. It was a Spanish Bible, with the Doré illustrations. I wanted to look at the title-page, but our eager host, proud to exhibit and explain, tossed over the leaves so fast that I had no opportunity.
As he was racing through the Psalms, impatient because of their dearth of pictures, my eye was caught by the familiar passage, "As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after Thee, O God."
With prompt curiosity, he popped down his white head, in its close-fitting skullcap, to see what I was noting, and instantly went off into an immoderate gust of laughter.
"Muy bien!" he wheezed, as soon as he could recover anything like a voice. "But that is very cleverly put. He was a witty fellow who wrote that. Just so! Just so! The deer goes to the water because he means to get something for himself, and that is why the young men go into the priesthood, and why the women go to mass. It's all selfishness, is religion. But how well he says it!"
"No, no!" I exclaimed, for once startled into protest. "He is saying that religion is the impulse of thirst."
The incorrigible old worldling took this for another jest, and, as in gallantry bound, laughed harder at my sally than at poor King David's.
"Excellent! Perfect! So it is! So it is! Religion is the impulse to fill one's own stomach. Just what I have always said! 'As the hart panteth after the water brooks'—ho, ho! I must try to remember that."
His enthusiasm for Calderon soon kindled to a flame. As the plot thickened he ceased to be of the slightest help in any difficulties that the text might offer. In vain I would beseech him to clear up some troublesome passage.
"Oh, never mind!" he would say, vexed at the interruption. "They didn't write very well in those old days. And I want to know which of her three suitors Justina took. Three at once! What a situation! Vamos á ver! I hope it will be Cipriano."