“It’s his way of keeping his end up,” Patsy maintained. “The Don expects to die rich, to leave his family rolling in money. He has an invention for a flying machine half worked out. On his paternal heredad—a piece of waste land in the Sierra Rondina—there’s a rich iron mine, and a spring of sparkling mineral water, better, he says, than apollinaris. The joke of it all is, I believe what he says is perfectly true. He will never ‘realize’ on spring or mine, though perhaps Candalaria’s eleven may!”
“You look festive this morning, Don; where did that sporty rose come from?” Patsy asked. The Don always had a flower in his buttonhole, though he often had not a dollar in his pocket.
“It is monthly roses,” said the Don, settling the bud in his coat; “they give every moon. Let us now to the parlor of the great Velasquez.”
We always began with the Velasquez room, studying some one picture, and passing the rest in review. Don Jaime professed great admiration for the portrait of the Fool of Coria, one of the hombres de placer—literally, men of pleasure—of the court. The fool is seated on a stone, with a gourd on either side; his hands rest idly on his knee. It is a wonderfully pathetic picture, with a heartache in it for those who have some knowledge of those weakest of our brothers, the feeble-minded.
“How dreary Philip’s court must have been,” sighed Patsy, “if that pitiful creature could add to its gaiety.”
“Claro,” said Don Jaime, “but, Canastos! It is a most fine portrait. Look again, you will see in the face the idiotness of that man.”
Canastos, baskets, was the Don’s favorite oath; it was the only exclamation of impatience either he or Candalaria had ever heard their mother use. That morning the Don insisted on our looking more carefully at Ribera’s pictures than suited Patsy. The Don himself felt little sympathy with them, but, as a Spaniard, it was his duty to interest us in all the well-known painters of the Spanish school. Ribera—we knew him better by his Italian nickname, Spagnoletto, little Spaniard—the Don said, painted for the Church. He was in no sense a court painter, was probably prejudiced against all court people on account of Don John of Austria’s unhandsome treatment of his daughter in their unfortunate love affair. The Church at that time was under the sway of the Inquisition, where we must lay the blame, if the Ribera room was, as Patsy insisted, a little like the chamber of horrors.
“This painter,” said Don Jaime, “lived in one epoca of inquisition and hell influences. In all his paintings are seen foreheads full of wrinkles for pain, eyes terrified by the fear, and naked flesh teared, or sullen martyrs, saints and gloomy friars.”
“Why couldn’t he always paint like that?” said Patsy, pausing before a fine poetic Magdalen. “The drawing is as good, the modelling as astonishing, the color as rich as in those morbid cruel pictures. The mission of art is to inspire, not to terrify; you can never make me like Ribera, Don.”
The Don himself was more depressed than any of us by what he had seen. He mopped his bald ivory poll with his silk handkerchief—it was scented with orris—and sighed as we left the room: