Juan Cigarron, who lived a long, long while ago, before you, and even I, had been born, made believe that he was a great magician and could see anything, even if it was hidden in the very depths of the earth, unless, to be sure, there was a blue cloth wrapped around it.”
“Why blue?” asked Pilarica.
“Why not?” retorted Rafael, quite angrily. “Will you listen to my story, or will you be forever chattering? The King sent for Juan Cigarron and asked him many questions and, by great good luck, he was able to answer every one. Then the King, for a reward, promised to grant him whatever he might wish, even though it were the gold crown on the King’s head, but Juan Cigarron did not wish for the crown. He wished that His Majesty might never ask him anything again. Oh! And that reminds me,” exclaimed Rafael, jumping up quite forgetful of his bumps and bruises and tossing on his cap once more, “that the Gypsy King is to tell me my fortune this very afternoon.”
Pilarica clasped her hands in silent appeal, and her eyes grew so starry with hope that Rafael, already beyond the limits of the summer-house, looked back, swaying doubtfully on one foot.
“Tia Marta does not allow you to go over to the gypsy quarter,” he objected.
“Nor you, either,” was on the tip of Pilarica’s tongue, but she wisely bit it back, urging:
“The Gypsy King will not have gone home so early. He will be waiting near the Alhambra, sitting on the fountain-steps, looking for tourists who may buy his photograph for a peseta. And besides,” she added with innocent tact, “Tia Marta knows that I am safe anywhere with you.”
Rafael swaggered.
“Of course you are,” he announced grandly. “You are my little sister, and I, even though a bull should charge upon me, would stand before you as strong as the columns in the temple of Solomon. Come on! I will ask Tia Marta if you may go with me.”
So the children raced gleefully across the garden, dodging in and out among geraniums, heliotrope and fuchsias that had grown into great shrubs like trees, but paused at the fretted Moorish arch that now performed the humble office of their kitchen door, to see what Grandfather was doing. The old man, whom the circle of the years had brought back near to childhood, was playing happily with a snail that found itself halted in some important journey of its own by his protruding foot.
“A riddle! a riddle for the snail!” coaxed Pilarica, throwing herself down on the ground to lift the wee round traveller over that meddlesome mountain; and Grandfather, after strumming a minute on his guitar, recited:
“I was roaming in the meadow and there, upon my soul,
I met a little mansion out for a stroll.
The dignified Lord Mayor was sitting in his hall.
I said: ‘Come take a walk with me.’ He answered: ‘Not at all.
My office is so serious I never leave my chair,
But the city hall goes with me when I need to take the air.’ ”
Meanwhile Rafael, who felt himself quite too grown-up for riddles, had dived into the darkness of the house, whence he soon came scampering out, followed by the shrill tones of Tia Marta.
“The Gypsy King, indeed! And what sort of a king is that? Everyone is as God has made him, and very often worse.”
“But may Pilarica go?” called Rafael.
“Ask her grandfather. Am I a donkey, to bear all the burdens of this household?”
“May I go, Grandfather?” teased Pilarica. The old man nodded at least twenty times and, catching up the word donkey, struck with his quavering voice into a popular tune:
“Little I am, but everywhere
Blows and burdens I have to bear.
Haw-hee!
“That is why my voice of long protest
Has grown to be bigger than all the rest
Of me.”
“Haw-hee!” echoed Rafael, with such a good imitation of a bray that a genuine ass made sonorous answer from the highroad beyond.
“Grandfather says I may go,” cried Pilarica joyfully into the arched doorway.
“Bah!” responded Tia Marta. “His heart is softer than a ripe fig.”
But she did not take back the permission, and Pilarica had the rare delight of an excursion with Rafael outside the garden.
Half ashamed of his condescension, the boy did not spare her, but tore at his full speed along the dusty road, between giant hedges of aloes, with their blue, sworded leaves, and lances tipped with yellow blossoms, so that it was a very hot, panting little girl who arrived, hardly a minute behind him, at the fountain on whose steps was enthroned the Gypsy King.
This was a very splendid personage indeed, with his high, peaked hat sparkling all over with pendants of colored glass that flashed back the sun like crown jewels. His slashed jacket was wondrously embroidered and spangled and his broad sash was of scarlet silk. Even his trousers and stockings looked as if he had been wading in a sunset. Smiling on Pilarica, he drew a bright cup from his wallet and, leaning toward the fountain, filled it with water that could not have looked more deliciously fresh and cold if the cup had been made of purest silver instead of gypsy tin. But thirsty as she was, the little Andalusian maiden handed the cup back to the giver.
“After you, please,” she said as sweetly as if her throat were not almost choked with the white dust.
The Gypsy King bowed with much majesty and touched the cup to his lips, but then she insisted on passing it to Rafael, who made short work of draining its contents to the last drop. He did not fail, however, to fill it again for his sister, so that, at last, Pilarica found herself seated on the lowest step, at the feet of the fortune teller, quite cool and comfortable.
But the picturesque old gypsy, although he could not help being kind to Pilarica, was in a gloomy mood. He had sold only one of his photographs all day long, and that to a rude young foreigner – we hope it was not an American – who had laughed at his kingship to his face and spun him the silver coin so carelessly that it had rolled into a crevice of the stone work and joined the lost treasures of the Alhambra. And well the poor old gypsy knew that, however much he might pose as a king in his flaunting hat and gaudy jacket by day, with twilight he must make his way back to the rows of human dens that burrow into the hillside across the river Darro. And there, as soon as he should draw back the dirty flap of cloth from the entrance of his own cave, his swarthy young wife, Xarifa, would demand the amount of his day’s earnings and, when he confessed to an empty wallet, would fly into such a passion that the heavy silver earrings would pound against her raven hair and every flounce on her bright orange petticoat would seem to bristle with rage. He could tell his own fortune, for that evening, only too well, – a shame-faced old fellow perched on a stool in the corner, trying with trembling hands to mend a cooking tin or a piece of harness, while Xarifa’s furious voice went on and on, until at last he should be suffered to fall asleep on the heap of ragged sheepskins that served him for a royal couch.
So although on yesterday, when he had sold three photographs and had three pesetas jingling in his purse, the Gypsy King had promised to tell Rafael’s fortune as an act of friendship, to-day he was stubbornly silent, holding out his palm to be crossed with silver. Rafael’s flush met the red edges of his fez. The only silver he had was a little watch and chain that his father had given him when, three years ago, that gallant naval engineer left his children, whose mother had just died, in the care of Grandfather and Tia Marta and sailed away, under the red and yellow flag of Spain, to do his part for king and country. No one guessed how deeply Rafael loved that absent father, the hero of all his dreams, but the boy had even more than the usual share of Spanish pride and, with a sudden gulp that was not far from a sob, he dropped the watch and chain into that greedy palm.
And he could make nothing of the fortune, after all. The Gypsy King, muttering strange words that only gypsies know, bent forward and with his staff traced rude figures in the sand, – a train of mules, a cockle-shell,