For Breakfast There Was
Good And True (Or True Enough) Coffee With Rich Milk, Which If We
Sometimes Doubted It To Be Goat's Milk We Were None The Worse If None
The Wiser For, As At Dinner We Were Not Either If We Unwittingly Ate Kid
For Lamb.
There were not many people in the hotel, but the dining-room was filled
by citizens who came in with the air of frequenters.
They were not
people of fashion, as we readily perceived, but kindly-looking
mercantile folk, and ladies painted as white as newly calcimined house
walls; and all gravely polite. There was one gentleman as large round as
a hogshead, with a triple arrangement of fat at the back of his neck
which was fascinating. He always bowed when we met (necessarily with his
whole back) and he ate with an appetite proportioned to his girth. I
could wish still to know who and what he was, for he was a person very
much to my mind. So was the head waiter, dark, silent, clean-shaven, who
let me use my deplorable Spanish with him, till in the last days he came
out with some very fair English which he had been courteously concealing
from me. He looked own brother to the room-waiter in our corridor, whose
companionship I could desire always to have. One could not be so
confident of the sincerity of the little _camarera_ who slipped out of
the room with a soft, sidelong "_De nada"_ at one's thanks for the hot
water in the morning; but one could stake one's life on the goodness of
this _camarero._ He was not so tall as his leanness made him look; he
was of a national darkness of eyes and hair which as imparted to his
tertian clean-shavenness was a deep blue. He spoke, with a certain
hesitation, a beautiful Castilian, delicately lisping the sibilants and
strongly throating the gutturals; and what he said you could believe. He
never was out of the way when wanted; he darkled with your boots and
shoes in a little closet next your door, and came from it with the
morning coffee and rolls. In a stress of frequentation he appeared in
evening dress in the dining-room at night, and did honor to the place;
but otherwise he was to be seen only in our corridor, or in the cold,
dark chamber at the stair head where the _camareras_ sat sewing, kept in
check by his decorum. Without being explicitly advised of the fact, I am
sure he was the best of Catholics, and that he would have burnt me for a
heretic if necessary; but he would have done it from his conscience and
for my soul's good after I had recanted. He seldom smiled, but when he
did you could see it was from his heart.
His contrast, his very antithesis, the joyous concierge, was always
smiling, and was every way more like an Italian than a Spaniard.
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