All the blood of his forefathers was here. Five or six generations of Barrets had passed their lives working this same soil. They had turned it over and over, taking care that its vital nourishment should not decrease, combing and caressing it with ploughshare and hoe; there was not one of these fields which had not been watered by the sweat and blood of the family.
The farmer loved his wife dearly, and even forgave her the folly of having given him four daughters and no son, to help him in his work. Not that he loved his daughters any the less, angels sent from God who passed the day singing and sewing at the door of their farm-house, and who sometimes went out into the fields in order to give their poor father a little rest. But the supreme passion of old Barret, the love of all his loves, was the land upon which the silent and monotonous history of his family had unrolled.
Many years ago, many indeed, in those days when old Tomba, an aged man now nearly blind, who took care of the poor herd of a butcher at Alboraya, went roaming about in the band of The Friar,[C] shooting at the French, these lands had belonged to the monks of San Miguel de los Reyes.
They were good, stout gentlemen, sleek and voluble, who were not in a hurry to collect their rentals, and appeared to be satisfied if when they passed the cabin of an evening, the grand-mother, who was a generous soul, would treat them to deep cups of chocolate, and the first fruits of the season. Before, long before, the owner of all this land had been a great lord, who upon dying, had unloaded both his sins and his estates upon the bosom of the community. Now, alas! they belonged to Don Salvador, a little, dried-up old man of Valencia, who so tormented old Barret, that he even dreamed of him at night.
The poor farmer kept his trouble hidden from his family. He was a courageous man of clean habits. If he went to the tavern of Copa for a while on Sundays, when all the people of the neighbourhood were gathered there together, it was in order to watch the card-players, to laugh heartily at the absurdities and brutalities of Pimentó, and the other strapping young fellows who played "cock o' the walk" about the huerta; but never did he approach a counter to buy a glass; he always kept his sash-purse tight around the waist, and if he drank at all, it was only when one of the winners was treating all the crowd.
Averse to discussing his difficulties, he always seemed to be smiling, good-natured and calm, with the blue cap which had won for him his nickname,[D] pulled well down over his ears.
He worked from daylight until dusk. While the rest of the huerta still slept, he tilled his fields in the uncertain light of dawn, but more and more convinced, all the time, that he could not go on working them alone.
It was too great a burden for one man. If he only had a son! When he sought aid, he took on servants who robbed him, worked but little, and whom he discharged when he surprised them asleep in the stable during the sunny hours.
Obsessed with his respect for his ancestors, he would rather have died in his fields, overcome by fatigue, than rent a single acre to strange hands. And since he could not manage all the work alone, half of his fertile land remained fallow and unproductive, while he tried to maintain his family and pay off his landlord by the cultivation of the other half.
A silent struggle was this, desperate and obstinate, to earn enough for the necessities of life and overcome the ebbing of his vitality.