There was something fantastic in this passion. It reminds one of the famous eighteenth-century miller of Newhaven, described by Mark Antony Lower in his book about the strange customs and quaint characters in the Sussex of the old days. The miller used to pay weekly visits on horseback to his customers in the neighbouring towns and villages, his horse, originally a white one, having first been painted some brilliant colour—blue, green, yellow, orange, purple, or scarlet. The whole village would turn out to look at the miller's wonderful horse and speculate as to the colour he would exhibit on his next appearance. Gandara's horses were strangely coloured by nature aided by artificial selection, and I remember that as a boy I thought them very beautiful. Sometimes it was a black- or brown- or bay-and-white, or a chestnut- or silver-grey- or strawberry-red-and-white, but the main point was the pleasing arrangement and shading of the dark colour. Some of his best selected specimens were iron- or blue-grey- and-white; others, finer still, fawn-and-white and dun-and-white, and the best of all, perhaps, white and a metallic tawny yellow, the colour the natives call bronze or brassy, which I never see in England. Horses of this colour have the ears edged and tipped with black, the muzzle, fetlocks, mane, and tail also black. I do not know if he ever succeeded in breeding a tortoiseshell.
Gandara's pride in the horses he rode himself—the rare blooms selected from his equine garden—showed itself in the way in which he decorated them with silver headstalls and bit and the whole gear sparkling with silver, while he was careless of his own dress, going about in an old rusty hat, unpolished boots, and a frayed old Indian poncho or cloak over his gaucho garments. Probably the most glorious moment of his life was when he rode to a race-meeting or cattle- marking or other gathering of the gaucho population of the district, when all eyes would be turned to him on his arrival. Dismounting, he would hobble his horse, tie the glittering reins to the back of the saddle, and leave him proudly champing his big native bit and tossing his decorated head, while the people gathered round to admire the strangely-coloured animal as if it had been a Pegasus just alighted from the skies to stand for a while exhibiting itself among the horses of the earth.
My latest recollections of La Tapera are concerned more with Demetria than the piebalds. She was not an elegant figure, as was natural in a daughter of the grotesque Don Gregorio, but her countenance, as I have said, was attractive on account of its colour and gentle wistful expression, and being the daughter of a man rich in horses she did not want for lovers. In those far-off days the idle, gay, well-dressed young gambler was always a girl's first and often most successful wooer, but at La Tapera the young lovers had to reckon with one who, incredible as it seemed in a gaucho, hated gambling and kept a hostile and rather terrifying eye on their approaches. Eventually Demetria became engaged to a young stranger from a distance who had succeeded in persuading the father that he was an eligible person and able to provide for a wife.
Now it happened that the nearest priest in our part of the country lived a long distance away, and to get to him and his little thatched chapel one had to cross a swamp two miles wide in which one's horse would sink belly-deep in miry holes at least a dozen times before one could get through. In these circumstances the Gandara family could not go to the priest, but managed to persuade him to come to them, and as La Tapera was not considered a good enough place in which to hold so important a ceremony, my parents invited them to have the marriage in our house. The priest arrived on horseback about noon on a sultry day, hot and tired and well splashed with dried mud, and in a rather bad temper. It must also have gone against him to unite these young people in the house of heretics who were doomed to a dreadful future after their rebellious lives had ended. However, he got through with the business, and presently recovered his good temper and grew quite genial and talkative when he was led into the dining-room and found a grand wedding-breakfast with wine in plenty on the table. During the breakfast I looked often and long at the faces of the newly-married pair, and pitied our nice gentle Demetria, and wished she had not given herself to that man. He was not a bad-looking young man and was well-dressed in the gaucho costume, but he was strangely silent and ill at ease the whole time and did not win our regard. I never saw him again. It soon came out that he was a gambler and had nothing but his skill with a pack of cards to live by, and Don Gregorio in a rage told him to go back to his native place. And go he did very soon, leaving poor Demetria on her parents' hands.
Shortly after this unhappy experience Don Gregorio bought a house in Buenos Ayres for his wife and daughters, so that they could go and spend a month or two when they wanted a change, and I saw them on one or two occasions when in town. He himself would have been out of his element in such a place, shut up in a close room or painfully waddling over the rough boulder-stones of the narrow streets on his bow legs. Life for him was to be on the back of a piebald horse on the wide green plain, looking after his beloved animals.
CHAPTER XII
THE HEAD OF A DECAYED HOUSE
The Estancia Canada Seca—Low lands and floods—Don Anastacio, a gaucho exquisite—A greatly respected man—Poor relations—Don Anastacio a pig-fancier—Narrow escape from a pig—Charm of the low green lands—The flower called macachina—A sweet-tasting bulb— Beauty of the green flower-sprinkled turf—A haunt of the golden plover—The Bolas—My plover-hunting experience—Rebuked by a gaucho—A green spot, our playground in summer and lake in winter—The venomous toad-like Ceratophrys—Vocal performance of the toad-like creature—We make war on them—The great lake battle and its results.
In this chapter I wish to introduce the reader to the last but one of the half a dozen of our nearest neighbours, selected as typical of the smaller estancieros—a class of landowners and cattle-breeders then in their decay and probably now fast vanishing. This was Don Anastacio Buenavida, who was an original person too in his little way. He was one of our very nearest neighbours, his estancia house being no more than two short miles from us on the south side. Like most of these old establishments, it was a long low building with a thatched roof, enclosures for cattle and sheep close by, and an old grove or plantation of shade-trees bordered with rows of tall Lombardy poplars. The whole place had a decayed and neglected appearance, the grounds being weedy and littered with bleached bones and other rubbish: fences and ditches had also been destroyed and obliterated, so that the cattle were free to rub their hides on the tree trunks and gnaw at the bark. The estancia was called Canada Seca, from a sluggish muddy stream near the house which almost invariably dried up in summer; in winter after heavy rains it overflowed its low banks, and in very wet seasons lake-like ponds of water were formed all over the low-lying plain between Canada Seca and our house. A rainy season was welcome to us children: the sight of wide sheets of clear shallow water with a vivid green turf beneath excited us joyfully, and also afforded us some adventurous days, one of which will be related by and by.
Don Anastacio Buenavida was a middle-aged man, a bachelor, deeply respected by his neighbours, and even looked on as a person of considerable importance. So much did I hear in his praise that as a child I had a kind of reverential feeling for him, which lasted for years and did not, I think, wholly evaporate until I was in my teens and began to form my own judgments. He was quite a little man, not more than an inch or two over five feet high, slim, with a narrow waist and small ladylike hands and feet. His small oval face was the colour of old parchment; he had large dark pathetic eyes, a beautifully shaped black moustache, and long black hair, worn in symmetrical ringlets to his shoulders. In his dress too he was something of an exquisite. He wore the picturesque gaucho costume; a camiseta, or blouse, of the finest black cloth, profusely decorated with silver buttons, puffs and pleats, and scarlet and green embroidery; a chiripa, the shawl-like garment worn in place of trousers, of the finest yellow or vicuna-coloured wool, the white carsoncillos, or wide drawers, showing below, of the finest linen, with more fringe and lace-work than was usual in that garment. His boots were well polished, and his poncho, or cloak, of the finest blue cloth, lined with scarlet.