How I have laughed since when I have remembered the scene! and how true it is—in spite of all my respect for my companions in the game—that senile enthusiasm makes old men children once more and renews the puerile follies of the cradle even on the very brink of the tomb!
They were deep in their discussion when they heard Doña Francisca’s step returning from church.
“She is coming!” cried Marcial in an agony of alarm, and they folded up the maps and began to talk of indifferent matters. I, however, not being able to cool down my juvenile blood so rapidly or else not noticing my mistress’s approach soon enough, went on, down the middle of the room in my mad career, ejaculating with the utmost incoherence, such phrases as I had picked up: “Tack to starboard! Now Port! Broadside to the leeward! Fire! Bang! bom! boom! …” She came up to me in a fury and without any warning delivered a broadside on my figurehead with her right hand, and with such effect that for a few moments I saw nothing but stars.
“What! you too?” she cried, battering me unmercifully. “You see,” she added, turning on her husband with flashing eyes, “you have taught him to feel no respect for you!—You thought you were still in the caleta did you, you little ne’er do weel?”
The commotion ended by my running off to the kitchen crying and disgraced, after striking my colors in an ignominious manner, before the superior force of the enemy; Doña Francisca giving chase and belaboring my neck and shoulders with heavy slaps. In the kitchen I cast anchor and sat down to cry over the fatal termination of my sea-fight.
V
In opposing her husband’s insane determination to join the fleet, Doña Francisca did not rely solely on the reasons given in the last chapter; she had another and more weighty one which she did not mention in the course of that conversation, perhaps because it was wiser not. But the reader does not know it, and must be told.
I have mentioned that my master had a daughter; this daughter’s name was Rosita; she was a little older than I was, that is to say scarcely fifteen, and a marriage had been arranged for her with a young officer of artillery named Malespina, belonging to a family of Medina-Sidonia and distantly related to my master. The wedding had been fixed for the end of October and, as may be supposed, the absence of the bride’s father on so solemn an occasion would have been highly improper.
I must here give some account of my young lady, of her bridegroom, her love-affairs and her projected marriage; and alas! my recollections take a tinge of melancholy, recalling to my fancy many troublesome and faraway scenes, figures from another world—and stirring my weary old heart with feelings of which I should find it hard to say whether they were more pleasurable or sad. Those ardent memories which now lie withered in my brain, like tropical flowers exposed to a chill northern blast, sometimes make me laugh—but sometimes make me grave. However, to my tale, or the reader will be tired of these wearisome reflections which, after all, interest no one but myself.
Rosita was uncommonly pretty. I remember vividly how pretty she was, though I should find it difficult to describe her features. I fancy I see her now, smiling in my face; the curious expression of her countenance, unlike any other I ever saw, dwells in my mind—from the perfect distinctness with which it rises before me—like one of those innate ideas which seem to have come into the world with us from a former existence, or to have been impressed on our minds by some mysterious power while we were still in the cradle. And yet I cannot describe it, for what then was real and tangible remains now in my brain as a vague ideal; and while nothing is so fascinating as a beloved ideal, nothing so completely eludes all categorical description.
When I first went into the house I thought that Rosita belonged to some superior order of beings; I will explain my feelings more fully that you may form an idea of my utter simpleness. When we are little and a child comes into the world within our family the grown-up folks are apt to tell us that it has come from France, Paris, or England. I, like other children, having no notions as to the multiplication of the human race, firmly believed that babies were imported packed up in boxes like a cargo of hardware. Thus, gazing for the first time at my master’s daughter, I argued that so lovely a being could not have come from the same
