The Sight
Of His Dignified Desolation Was Insupportable, And We Tried What A
Copper Of The Big-Dog Value Would Do To Comfort Him.
He took it without
looking up and ran away to the peanut-stand which is always steaming at
the first corner all over Christendom.
Late in the evening - in fact,
after the night had fairly fallen - we saw him making his way into a
house fronting on the plaza. He tried at the door with one hand and in
the other he held an unexhausted bag of peanuts. He had wasted no word
of thanks on us, and he did not now. When he got the door open he backed
into the interior still facing us and so fading from our sight and
knowledge.
He had the touch of comedy which makes pathos endurable, but another
incident was wholly pathetic. As we came out of an antiquity shop near
the cathedral one afternoon we found on the elevated footway near the
Gate of Pardon a mother and daughter, both of the same second youth, who
gently and jointly pronounced to us the magical word _encajes._ Rather,
they questioned us with it, and they only suggested, very forbearingly,
that we should come to their house with them to see those laces, which
of course were old laces; their house was quite near. But that one of us
twain who was singly concerned in _encajes_ had fatigued and perhaps
overbought herself at the antiquity shop, and she signified a regret
which they divined too well was dissent. They looked rather than
expressed a keen little disappointment; the mother began a faint
insistence, but the daughter would not suffer it. Here was the pride of
poverty, if not poverty itself, and it was with a pang that we parted
from these mutely appealing ladies. We could not have borne it if we had
not instantly promised ourselves to come the next day and meet them and
go home with them and buy all their _encajes_ that we had money for. We
kept our promise, and we came the next day and the next and every day we
remained in Seville, and lingered so long that we implanted in the
cabmen beside the curbing the inextinguishable belief that we were in
need of a cab; but we never saw those dear ladies again.
These are some of the cruel memories which the happiest travel leaves,
and I gratefully recall that in the case of a custodian of the Columbian
Museum, which adjoins the cathedral, we did not inflict a pang that
rankled in our hearts for long. I gave him a handful of copper coins
which I thought made up a peseta, but his eyes were keener, and a sorrow
gloomed his brow which projected its shadow so darkly over us when we
went into the cathedral for one of our daily looks that we hastened to
return and make up the full peseta with another heap of coppers; a whole
sunburst of smiles illumined his face, and a rainbow of the brightest
colors arched our sky and still arches it whenever we think of that
custodian and his rehabilitated trust in man.
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