Seven years passed in this manner. Lucia was fifteen, and had blossomed into one of those exquisite and fragile creatures that, in hot climates, appear so rarely and vanish so soon. Lucas, who was twenty, had developed admirably. He was a youth of manly appearance, and so judicious and industrious that farmers and managers of haciendas employed him in preference to others. Both inherited their mother’s type—the oval face, fine aquiline nose, large and expressive black eyes, small mouth, adorned with perfect teeth, broad high forehead, and the bearing of mingled grace and nobility that distinguish the Andalusian.
Their father had yielded completely to the influence of La Leona, who absorbed his living, and had made him a drunkard in order to rule him the more effectually. Too enervated and lazy to enter upon a new path, he went on selling his possessions to satisfy the woman’s exactions, as an exhausted stream continues to flow in the channel it made when it was full and strong, without either the will or the force to open another. From the time that Lucas was able to work, he had maintained the house alone, with that mysterious day’s wages of the laborer which God seems to bless, as he did the loaves and fishes destined to feed so many poor people. Else, how the peseta, sometimes two reals[2] a day can support husband, wife, generally half a dozen robust children; an old father or mother, or widowed mother-in-law, clothe them all and the head of the family in a very expensive
manner,[3] pay house-rent and the costs of child-birth, sickness, and unemployed days; and still yield the copper they never refuse to God’s-namers,[4] is a thing past comprehension, and belongs to the list of those in which, if we see not the finger of God or his immediate intervention, is because we are very thoughtless or voluntarily blind.
Lucas, who loved his sister above all things, seeing her entirely neglected by her father, had assumed over her the sort of tutelage, recognized and incontestable among the people, which belongs to the eldest brother—a tutelage which is annexed to the obligation of maintaining younger brothers and sisters if they are fatherless. This obligation and right instinctive do not constitute a law, nor are they laid down in any code, but are impressed by tradition on the heart, and have, no doubt, given rise to the institution of entails.[5] Lucas
presented, also, the uncultivated type of those chivalrous and poetical brothers that Calderon, Lope, and other contemporary writers have given us in their delightful pictures of Spanish manners as models of nobility, delicacy, and punctilious honor.
As for Lucia, she was, as her mother had been, loving, impressible, and yielding. She regarded her brother with the deepest affection, in which respect mingled, without lessening its tenderness.
One evening, when several neighbors, who tenanted Juan Garcia’s house, were met together in the yard, one of them—it was the kinswoman of the departed Ana—said:
“Have you heard the news? It is reported that La Leona’s husband is dead. What do you say to it?”
“That La Leona is just now singing:
‘My spouse is dead, and to heaven has flown,
Wearing the thorns of a martyr’s crown,’”