She stood to look down at the torrent foaming among gray rocks below; then leaned back on the cushions, and fixed her eyes on the snow-peaks that seemed almost in the zenith.
“I remember so much that my grandfather used to say, though I seemed often to listen carelessly,” she said. “He sometimes made such an odd impression on my mind. It might be he would talk half to me and half to himself, as if thinking aloud. He would seem to open the door of a subject, look in curiously, find it unpromising, and come out again. Or he would brighten as if he had found a treasure, and go on talking beautifully. When some astronomer had discovered a new star, he said the Te Deum should be sung in the churches, and he gave an alms and kept a lamp burning all night in honor of it, and we had ices in the evening. And before we separated to go to our rooms, he read the Gloria, and said three times over the sentence, ‘We give thee thanks for thy great glory.’ Listening to him, I sometimes felt as though people’s minds were, for the greater part, like the tossing waves of a stormy sea. He said once of a crowd, ‘They do not think; some one has set them swinging. I wonder what sets them all swinging! There is God, of course. But what instrument does he use? The stress of circumstance? Or is the tidal wave that gives the impulse some human mind fully alive?’ I think the human mind was his idea. He said that some people were cooled off and crusted over like planets, and others all alive, like suns. He used to speak of reflective men and light-giving men. He was light-giving.”
They visited Germany and the North, France, Great Britain, Spain and Algiers; and Tacita was getting very tired, though she did not say so. Elena had acquaintances in all those countries, and appeared to have errands in some. A year passed. It was spring again when they reached Seville from Africa, saw the Holy Week processions, and laid in a store of fans, silver filigree buttons, sashes, and photographs. Already a large number of boxes had been sent “home” from the different countries they had seen.
The evening before setting out from Seville to Madrid, Elena, for the first time, asked Tacita concerning her mother’s relatives.
“If you do not know them, nor where they are,” she said, “how can you communicate with them?”
“Both my mother and grandfather told me to give myself no uneasiness,” Tacita replied. “I thought that it was all settled with you. We are soon to visit your home. After that, they will probably come, or send for me. Are you impatient?”
“Certainly not, my dear! I would most willingly keep you always with me. But you have money, and some dishonest person might attempt to deceive you.”
“Oh! I have no fear,” said Tacita with a reserve that savored of coldness. She was surprised that the subject had been introduced, and astonished at her companion’s persistence. It seemed to have been avoided by mutual consent.
“Tell me how you will know them, and we will seek them together,” said Elena.
“I have not to seek them,” said Tacita with decided coolness.