“And where do you hang them out to dry?”
“On the river bank, near the palace of the King.”
When Pedra the Vestal knelt on the hearth blowing the bellows, she looked more than ever like a Tanagra figurine. She built up the fire with odd little chunks of dark red wood that give out a strange perfume of the forest, and burn as slowly as soft coal.
“What sort of wood is that?” I asked.
“Who knows? The wood of a tree,” Pedra looked over her shoulder with the flashing smile that made everything she said pass for wit.
“I know; it is ilex,” said her mother. “In Segovia I used to gather it on the mountain. Here it costs too much, we burn charcoal.”
“Is Madrid dearer than Segovia?”
“Madrid is the dearest place in the world, and the coldest.” She wrapped her faded plaid shawl about her shoulders. There had been a slight snow flurry that morning; it was proper Christmas weather, but Pedra and her mother took it as seriously as we take a blizzard. Pedra was straight as a lance, hard as marble, built of stuff that wears well, judging from her mother. The elder woman was not one of those mothers who serve as a dreadful warning of what a daughter may become, if she had lost youth and freshness; she had kept her health and strength, a fiery spirit, a tough fibre.
The next time she came in to mend the fire, Pedra’s bright eyes were dull and red. It took only a little coaxing to find out her trouble.
“My mother brought bad news,” she said. “My brother has married a girl who is not worthy of him. Though we are poor, Señora, our family is an old one; there is none more respected in Segovia. After all the sacrifices we made for Juan to keep on the little shop that was my father’s,—to marry beneath him, it was unworthy, it was ignoble!” The tears came to her eyes again. Here was Castilian pride, indeed.