“You hire your caseta for the week,” Pemberton explained, “and send out what furniture you need from your town house.” As it grew dark, garlands of many-colored lights festooned the way; firefly lamps twinkled among the shrubbery, lanterns like great, illuminated fruits bloomed out from the dark trees; it seemed that we were wandering in Aladdin’s palace. Between the Moorish arches of the Circole de Labradores we caught a glimpse of a pretty ball-room, where a crowd of waltzers swayed to the music of the Thousand and One Nights. Outside a private caseta painted like a Japanese tea house, Patsy halted and stood immovable, till, as one by one the crowd moved on, we edged our way to the front. The caseta was open to the street. Across a tiny verandah we saw the charming interior. An elderly, bald gentleman sat at a piano playing the letter air from La Perichole. In a corner a group of ladies talked together; a little girl in white came and hung over the piano, watching the musician’s fingers.
A tall young officer with a roving blue eye and gold hair lying in crisp little curls on an ivory forehead, stood leaning against the wall, talking with a small, dark youth with a hawk nose, and black, impenetrable eyes where the fire smouldered but did not flash.
“That good-looking boy is Martin O’Shea,” said Pemberton; “Irish—need you ask? The family has been settled here a hundred, perhaps three hundred years; his eye has not lost the Celtic light, or his tongue the edge. The other is Benamiel, Moorish descent, of course; they’re both dangling after a certain girl, a friend of Concepcion’s. Oh! that is part of the fascination of this wonderful, aloof, old Spain; you can trace the races here so clearly; somehow the strains don’t seem to have become so blurred, so mixed, as in most parts of Europe.”
The two young men cast impatient looks at a curtained door at the back. “Pronto,” the signal came from the inner room. The music changed to a throbbing seguidilla, the curtain trembled, and out tripped two pretty girls vestida de maya.
“Do you see who it is?” whispered Patsy.
The taller was Luz, the other could only be her sister. Their castanets clicked, almost as naturally as fingers snap, as they took the first pose of the dance. One foot advanced, the other behind supporting the weight of the body; the right arm raised, the left extended, just as you see it in the dancing faun of Herculaneum. O’Shea took down a guitar from the peg where it hung, and swept the chords with that curious ringing touch of the Spaniard; Benamiel marked time by beating with his feet, clapping with his hands. The dance began. It was very graceful, above all very expressive, that was the great quality; it seemed the natural, spontaneous expression of those two lovely young creatures’ joy in life, of their super-abundant vitality, of the young blood coursing through their veins. Though every posture, each bold advance and timid retreat was old as Egypt, the dance had all the beautiful freshness of a primitive art.
“Viva la gracia!” The cry came from a man in the crowd, Miquel, the farmer of Huelva.
“Good work for amateurs,” said Pemberton, “but wait till you’ve seen the Imperio, then you will have an idea of what Spanish dancing is!”
“Why,” Patsy asked, “doesn’t that other girl dance?”
“Just because she is not a girl; she was married two years ago. It would not be good form; she has had her turn, now she must take a back seat and give the others a chance. Thank God we’re still at that stage of social development.” The young woman, a small morena (brunette) with a skin like a creamy magnolia blossom just beginning to turn brown, was very little older, and quite as pretty as the twin dancing stars; her foot tapped the floor, while her sisters danced and she sat talking with the elders.