As Gallardo took his way through the narrow street on his way to San Gil he met the company of "Jews," that is to say, of armed men, fierce soldiers, their faces framed by their helmets' metal chin strap, wearing wine-coloured tunics, flesh-coloured cotton stockings and high sandals, round their waists was fastened the Roman sword, and over their shoulders, like a modern gun strap, was the cord which supported their lances. These soldiers, young and old, marched to the roll of drums and carried a Roman banner with the senatorial inscription.
An imposingly magnificent personage swaggered sword in hand at the head of this troup. Gallardo recognised him as he passed.
"Curse him!" said he, laughing beneath his mask. "No one will pay any attention to me. This 'gacho' will carry off all the palms to-night."
It was Captain Chivo, a gipsy singer, who had arrived that morning from Paris, faithful to his military discipline, to put himself at the head of his soldiers.
To fail in this duty would have been to forfeit the title of Captain, which El Chivo ostentatiously displayed on every music-hall placard in Paris, where he and his daughters danced and sang. These girls were as lively as lizards, graceful of movement, with large eyes, and a delicacy of colouring and suppleness of figure which drove men mad. The eldest had had the good fortune to run away with a Russian prince, and the Parisian papers for days were full of the despair "of that brave officer of the Spanish army," who intended to avenge his honour by shooting the fugitives. In a theatre on the boulevards a piece had been hastily mounted, on the "Flight of the Gipsy," with dances of toreros, choruses of friars, and other scenes of faithful local colouring. El Chivo soon compromised with his left-handed son-in-law in consideration of pocketing a good indemnity, and continued dancing in Paris with the other girls in hopes of another Russian prince. His rank as Captain made many foreigners, well informed as to what was going on in Spain, thoughtful. Ah! Spain! ... a decadent country which does not pay its noble soldiers, and forces its hidalgos to send their daughters on the stage.
On the approach of Holy Week, Captain Chivo could no longer bear his absence from Seville, so he took farewell of his daughters with the air of a severe and uncompromising "pére noble."
"My children, I am going.... Mind that you are good ... observe propriety and decency.... My company is waiting for me. What would they say if their Captain failed them?"
He thought with pride as he travelled from Paris to Seville of his father and grandfather, who had been captains of the Jews of la Macarena, and that to himself fresh glory accrued through this inheritance from his forefathers.
He had once drawn a prize of ten thousand pesetas in the National Lottery, and the whole of this sum he had spent on a uniform suitable to his rank. The gossips of the suburb rushed to have a look at the Captain, dazzling in his gold embroideries, wearing a burnished metal corselet, a helmet over which flowed a cascade of white feathers, and whose brilliant steel reflected all the light of the procession. It was the fantastic magnificence of a red skin; a princely dress, of which a drunken Auracanian might have dreamt. The women fingered the velvet kilt, admiring its embroideries of nails, hammers, thorns, in fact all the attributes of the Passion. His boots seemed trembling at every step from the flashing brilliancy of the spangles and paste jewels which covered them. Below the white plumes of the helmet, which seemed to make his dark Moorish colouring darker still, the gipsy's grey whiskers could be seen. This was not military. The Captain himself nobly admitted it. But he was returning to Paris, and something must be conceded to art.
Turning his head with warlike pride and fixing his eyes on the legionary eagle, he shouted: