of sunlight struck across a pink-plumed almond and slanted down to Pilarica’s swinging feet.
“Sunbeams! Yellow paths!” cried Pilarica, clapping her hands.
The sunbeam danced a little, just a little, but enough to awake in those small sandalled feet an irresistible desire to run and play. So the child slipped away from Grandfather’s knee and left him to doze again, one withered hand still straying on the strings of his guitar and calling out notes of dreamy music even as he slept.
Pilarica tripped along by a hedge of boxwood, in which Rodrigo had amused himself by cutting out, some five feet apart, queer shapes of peacocks and lions and eagles. To each of these she gave a swift caress in passing, for they seemed, in a way, like playmates, and their rustling green faces were very pleasant to kiss. A shade of anxiety was gathering in her eyes, for her other brother, Rafael, was a seeker for hid treasure. The boy had often annoyed some ancient snail in its hermitage and sent the lizards scampering like flashes of green light by his groping about the bottom of cracked marble cisterns and flower-choked baths, but he had never yet found any riches of the Moors, not one alabaster jar full of rubies and emeralds nor even a single nest of pearls as large as hen’s eggs, – no, not although he had dug by moonlight with a spade dipped three times in the Sultana Fountain and rubbed dry with bunches of pungent rosemary. Perhaps Rafael might have been more successful if the Sultana had been less dilapidated. She was now merely a slender foot poised on the basin rim and a white arm clasping the central shaft of porphyry. All else had been broken away ages since, but this mainly missing Sultana was none the less the lady of Rafael’s homage and he would not allow Pilarica, never once, to kiss that uptilted marble heel.
But although Rafael was not fortunate in finding the buried treasure of the Moors, he was always coming upon buried treasure of Pilarica’s, to her great indignation and concern. All over the garden were hidden her little hoards of such childish wealth as Tia Marta’s well-worn broom would send spinning out of the house, – fragments of ruddy pottery, bits of sunrise-hued mosaic, choice feathers shed by the garden birds, feathers that might some day be fashioned into a fan, beads and ribbons that had come traveling up the Alhambra hill in Rodrigo’s pocket when there chanced to be a fair going on in Granada.
So Pilarica’s eyes, those great, changeful Andalusian eyes, that gleam like jewels but are in color nearest to the deep purple of pansies, grew dark, like dusky velvet, with the fear that Rafael might have found her latest gift from Big Brother, her castanets. Stepping softly from one broken piece of paving to another, along a mere thread of a path that wound in and out of the scented shrubbery, the child came to what had once been a summer-house with silken awnings, enclosed by a low marble colonnade. The blue sky roofed it now and only one of those graceful white columns was still standing and still – O happy Pilarica! – keeping safe watch and ward over the little yellow clappers, adorned with red tassels, which had been buried at its foot under a drift of perfumed leaves and petals. Pilarica caught them to her heart, those shells of hollowed wood, with a gasp of joy. Running her thumbs through the loops of red cord that bound each pair together, she flung her arms above her head and, beating out with the middle finger a sharp, clicking music from the castanets, began to dance. It was a wonderful sight to see Pilarica dance, whirling about and about, her feet as light as her heart, in the circle of the summer-house, but there was only one column to look on, and he was not greatly impressed, for he was old and weather-worn and tired and, besides, he had seen grand Moorish ladies, with castanets of ivory and pearl, dancing very much like Pilarica, hundreds of Aprils ago.
II
THE MAGIC CAP
“WHOOP!” sounded suddenly from over Pilarica’s head, and a red Turkish fez came flying down from the high garden-wall, alighting neatly on the top of the solitary column. At the edge of that wall a sturdy, square-chinned boy, by way of getting up his courage for the leap, was chanting an old nursery rhyme:
“There was a Señor Don Cat.
In a chair of gold he sat.
In a suit of silk he was clad,
And pointed shoes he had.
His Godfather came and said:
‘If you would like to wed
A beautiful Moorish tabby,
Take a walk on the roof of the abbey.’
But when he saw her there,
He tumbled into the air,
And on the cloister stones
Arrived with broken bones.”
Thump! The boy was sitting on the ground, in the very center of the summer-house, vigorously rubbing those portions of his body which had suffered most in the adventure; but as Pilarica, with the deference due to an athlete as well as to a brother, sprang up and handed him his cap, he flung it on, cocked it jauntily and shook back the gilt tassels that were tickling his ears.
“This is a magic cap and, when I wear it, I am anybody I choose to be,” announced the new-comer, somewhat breathlessly. “I am now,” he continued, still sitting on the ground but waving his arms suggestively, “Rafael the Archangel.”
“You are welcome to your house, my lord Archangel,” faltered Pilarica, not forgetting her manners, but holding her precious castanets tightly clasped behind her back.
“What have you there?” queried Rafael, pulling off his hempen sandals and anxiously inspecting the soles of his feet.
Poor little Pilarica, into whom courtesy had been instilled as the first of all the virtues, winked hard, but held out the castanets toward her brother.
“They are at your service,” she faltered. But Rafael, too, could practise the Andalusian graces when he had a mind.
“They are very well placed where they are,” he returned affably in the set phrase proper to the occasion and, giving his gay fez a twirl, he added: “I am not the Archangel any more, but the high and mighty Moor Abdorman Murambil Xarif, master of this palace. You are my Christian captive and will now dance for me.”
“But I do not want to be a Christian captive,” protested Pilarica.
“Would you rather be a dog of an infidel, a follower of false Mahound?” demanded Rafael, in a tone of shocked reproach. “If so, I shall have to sweep you into the sea.”
“But ar’n’t you a dog of an infidel, too, since you are a Moor?” asked Pilarica in that keen way of hers, which her brother often found disconcerting.
Rafael caught off his red cap with a pettish gesture and tossed it aside.
“Your tongue is too full of words, Pilarica,” he grumbled. “It is unseemly to answer back. I am a year older than you. What’s more, I am a boy and you are a girl. As Tia Marta says, the fingers of the hand are not equal.”
Pilarica spread out the little brown fingers of her right hand and considered them so seriously that Rafael was encouraged to go on.
“Besides, I have heard Rodrigo say that a woman who speaks Latin always comes to a bad end.”
“But I do not speak Latin,” pleaded Pilarica. “Isn’t Latin the gori-gori-goo that the priests sing in the church? I do not see why anyone should learn it, for Grandfather says that in heaven the angels all speak Spanish.”
“Of course they do,” assented Rafael proudly. “Spanish is the most beautiful language that ever was spoken, just as the Spaniards are the best and bravest people on the earth.”
“Who are the other people on the earth? Are they all followers of false Mahound, like the Moors?” asked Pilarica.
Rafael frowned. There never was a girl like Pilarica for asking inconvenient questions.
“Child,” he said, looking as ancient and impressive as any eight-year-old could, “did Grandfather ever tell you the story of Juan Cigarron?”
“Not yet,” replied Pilarica meekly, “but it would give me great pleasure to hear it, if you please.”
“Grandfather tells me many more stories than he tells