The Professor, noting the sweet unkemptness of it, had his New England doubts, but he had none when Francisco, bareheaded, warm, and beautiful, came up from irrigating the oranges, "kissed the hands" of the Professor, and turning his own supple palms outward made him a present of the house and all in it, which at that moment included Francisca, standing under the roses of the porch, and more beautiful even than Francisco.
The professional ears were pricked at the soft organ-tones of speech. If he should not decide to take the Chair, at least his time need not be lost, he argued. That, indeed, had been his motive for seeking a Spanish household.
When he packed his trunk in Boston a Spanish dictionary was included, as became a professor of languages; and now as he unpacked it in the little roof-bedroom with the red, round eyes of oranges staring levelly in, and a drifting cascade of perfume and green and white outside, he was well content.
Perhaps it was that foreign ancestress of his, to whom he was fond of ascribing his bent for languages, who made this foreign corner of his own country so instantly attractive to him.
When he went downstairs later he stepped into an open world. There were untold windows, all wide to the air, and through the green curtains of vines nodded the heads of many roses. Francisca, and the ancient relative to whom the orphans gave a home, and who served as a nominal duenna, were giving the last touches to a table laid in the corner of the broad veranda, which ran about three sides of the house. The grassy space it enclosed was of brave Bermuda, brown, but never-dying, and returning green thanks for a cupful of water. The Professor's foot came to love the touch of that thick carpet in after days.
Beyond, the orange-grove stretched to the lime-hedge, and over that the peppers drooped their ferny branches.
Nothing in all the place was trimmed. Where the long trailing arms of the Lady Banksia fell by their own weight, or clambered by their own daring, there they remained. The Professor stooped under the same trailing branch each time he passed around the veranda. A dozen times he took out his knife impatiently to cut it, but an involuntary compunction arrested his hand. It was so in keeping with the place—it was so in keeping with Francisco and Francisca.
And with an incredible ease and swiftness, the Professor found himself growing in keeping, too.
In another corner of the deep rose-covered veranda all his writing materials quickly congregated. An Indian basket of oranges stood on the little stand by the hammock's elbow, near the rocking-chair in which Francisca sat daily, converting fine linen into finer lace, and cultivating the Professor's Spanish at the same time.
Francisca "kept the house," not with semi-yearly upheavals and the terrible cleanliness of the Professor's ancestral memories, but in a leisurely, sweet fashion of her own, leaving much to the sun and air, ignoring brasses and other troublous matters, perhaps, but never failing—wise Francisca!—to put a rose in her hair, and to set hot, savoury dishes with tropical names before her men-folk. Therefore no man ever found a flaw in Francisca's housekeeping.