Outside, in the Plaza del Pacifico, the sun lay hot on the tawny earth; among the glossy green leaves of the orange trees, golden fruit and waxen blossom hung side by side. The air was sweet with the smell of them. A little boy took off his jacket and fluttered it like a muleta (the matador’s red cloak) in his companion’s face. In a moment the two boys were hard at it—playing at bull-fighting. We lingered to watch them.
“Seville is even better than I remembered,” said Patsy. “I must have been here before (I knew that he had not); I seem to have known it all my life. What a lot of our friends, dead and alive, came from here! The Emperor Trajan was a Sevilliano, so were Don Juan and Velasquez, so is Villegas. Figaro, brass basin, white apron, and all, met us at the gate last night when we arrived, and ran beside the carriage, pointing out the black arrows at the corners showing the way.”
Was Rossini ever in Seville? Not that it signifies; he devined it all, if he did not see it. His creatures, Figaro, Rosina, Don Bartolo, are of the glorious company of its ghosts.
Seville is a siren city. The river Guadalquiver throws an arm about her; genius, when it may, follows suit and embraces the darling of Andalusia.
“I’ll show you Figaro’s barber shop some day,” said Pemberton over his shoulder. “It’s near my place. Yes, I’m a householder. You know the proverb? ‘Whom God loves, he gives a house in Seville.’”
“Find us one, and we’ll settle here, too!” Patsy exclaimed.
“We will talk about that later,” said Pemberton. “Now, I am taking you to the cathedral. Before you see it, I ask you to consider the immortal resolution passed by its founders before the first stone was laid. ‘Let us build,’ they resolved, ‘a monument that shall make posterity declare that we were mad.’ That was a good bluff, wasn’t it?”
“The only thing about posterity that you can bank on,” Patsy sagely put in, “is that it won’t say what is expected of it!”
“Claro! Posterity, you and I and Concepcion here, say those men were the sanest of their time. They, their architects, and their artists support this city to-day. I don’t know how the taxes could get paid without the money you travelers bring. The cathedral is the thing that draws you, and the pageants and fiestas—they have all grown up out of it, are part and parcel of it. The ‘monument’ of those ‘madmen’ is the Heart of Seville. I wish we had a few such lunatics at home. They only thought about building the house of God. We waste ourselves in inventing ingenious devices for heating and lighting the churches of men, and let slip the great opportunity!”
We were walking, while Pemberton poured out his vehement torrent of talk, through a narrow, twisting calle, innocent of sidewalks, between tall Morisco houses with openwork gates, catching tantalizing glimpses of patios where roses riot, fountains sing, cedars whisper. If there be jealous iron-bound doors in gracious Seville, like those of grim, old Moorish Ronda, they stand hospitably ajar. As we turned a corner, Pemberton stopped us with a gesture: