Tona was fond of her boy, but he wouldn't be getting into trouble again for a while! What a pity, though, for that poor girl Rosario, so modest and unassuming and never saying a word, who took her sewing down to the beach with Roseta, and was always timidly asking whether siñá Tona had had any word from Tonet. As time went on, the three women from the old hulk there on the shore followed all the voyages and stops of the schoolship Villa de Madrid with Tonet on board as able seaman. And how excited they would get when the postman would throw down on the wet counter a narrow envelope, sometimes sealed with red wax and then again with bread dough, and a complicated address written all over it in huge fat letters: "For siñora tona The Woman who keeps The little café near The barn on the Beach."
A strange exotic perfume seemed to come from the four pages of rough paper – a suggestion of trees and flowers the poor women did not know, of tempestuous seas, of shores draped in rosy mists under skies of fire, of Cuban negroes and Philippine Chinese, or of great cities of South America. What a boy, eh? What a lot he would have to talk about when he came home! Perhaps that crazy idea he had had of going away to see the world would be the making of him in the end. And siñá Tona, with a return of the preference which made her idolize her younger son, felt an occasional flare of jealous anger as she pictured her Tonet, her fine brave little boy, off on that navy vessel under the strict discipline of cross officers, while the other one, the Rector, whom she had always thought a sleepy-head, was getting on in the world like anything, and had come to be quite a person in fishing circles.
Whenever Pascualet went out now, it was on shares with the skipper of his boat; and he had his secrets with tio Mariano, the important individual whom Tona fell back on in all her plights. The boy was making money, I'll bet you, and siñá Tona was hurt to the quick that he never brought a cent home any longer, and, indeed, now called at the tavern-boat, and sat a moment or two under the shelter outside, more for appearance's sake than anything else. He was saving his earnings, then! Well, who was keeping the money for him! Dolores! Dolores, of course, that witch who had given love-philters to both her boys – otherwise, why were they always following round after her as if they didn't dare say their soul was their own?
The Rector stuck to the teamster's house as if the poor fool thought he had some business there! Didn't he know, idiot, that Dolores was for the other one? Hadn't he seen Tonet's letters and the answers she got a neighbor who had been to school to write for her? But three times donkey that he was, without paying the least attention to his mother's gibes, the Rector kept on going there and taking the favored place his brother had enjoyed, and apparently without appreciating the progress he was making. Dolores was now attending to him as she had to Tonet. She kept his clothes mended, and, – something she had never been troubled with in the case of that roistering loafer – she also was taking care of his savings.
One day tio Paella was brought home dead. He had got drunk and fallen from the seat of his cart, both wheels passing over him. But he died true to his reputation and just as he had lived, his whip clutched in one hand, sweating brandy from every pore, and the wagon full of the girls he spoke of, sacrilegiously, as his "flock." Dolores had no one else to lean on in her trouble than her tia Picores, the fish-woman, a chaperone not in every sense desirable, for she tempered kindness with fisticuffs.
Then it was, some two years after Tonet had gone away, that the big surprise occurred. Dolores, gran diós! and the Rector, were getting married. The Cabañal sat up nights discussing the overwhelming piece of news. And she did the proposing, I'll have you know! And people added other spicy bits of information that kept the laughing going. Tona talked more picturesquely than she had ever talked before. So Her Royal Highness of the Horseshoe, that wench of a teamster's daughter, was getting into the family, as she had always meant to do! Well, that Queen Virtuous knew which side her bread was buttered on. Just what she needed – a husband with a thick skull and nothing inside it, who would be able to work like a cart-horse from morning till night. The pickpocket! Just like her to steal the only man in the family that could earn a cent!
But then suddenly Tona thought of something, and she broke off her tirade. Better let them get married! That simplified the situation and favored her own plans. Tonet would now take Rosario! Though it was hard to swallow it all, she consented even to attend the wedding and say filla mehua to that scheming hussy who changed her men as she changed her clothes!
But what would Tonet say, what would Tonet do, when he heard the glad tidings? That was something to worry about, because everybody remembered the kind of temper he had when he got angry. So another surprise was due when the boy wrote back that everything was all right and that he was glad of it. Been away so long, you see, new faces, new places! That, doubtless, was why he found it so natural that Dolores should take a husband, since she had no one else to fall back on. Besides, – and this is what Tonet himself said – it was better for her to marry his brother than run any risk on some one else; and the Rector was a good sort, too.
And the sailor showed himself just as reasonable when he turned up in the Cabañal one evening, with his discharge papers in his pocket and his bundle of clothes slung over his shoulder, surprising everybody with the fine appearance he made and with the reckless way he threw money around from the back pay he had just collected. Dolores he greeted affectionately as a sister he was fond of. Oh, that? What the devil! Don't even think of that! It was all right, all right! He had not been having a bad time himself on his trip around the world! And, in the midst of the popularity he was enjoying as a returned hero, Tonet seemed to forget all about Dolores and the Rector.
In front of the door of tio Paella's old place, now occupied by Pascualet, the villagers would sit in the open air all night sometimes, on low stools or on the ground, listening open-mouthed while the sailor told about the countries he had visited, embroidering his adventures with harmless embellishments to rouse greater thrills in his simple-minded audience. As compared with the uncouth fishermen they knew, dull and stupid from the routine of daily toil, or with the stevedores he used to work with in Valencia, Tonet looked like an aristocrat to the girls of the Cabañal, with his palish-dark face, his carefully curled mustache, his hands clean and well manicured, his hair sleek and neatly brushed with a parting in the middle and – pasted down on his forehead – two cowlicks just visible under a silk cap!
Siñá Tona, for her part, was quite satisfied with her boy. As much of a scamp as ever, but he had himself more in hand, and it was evident that the navy discipline had done him good. The same old Tonet, but he had been taught to dress better and cleaner, and he could drink without drinking too much. A dandy still, but not sure to be getting into jail every other minute, and less bent on venting the caprices of a law-breaking daredevil than on satisfying the selfish cravings of a rake!
Proof of such progress was that he now took kindly to his mother's suggestions. Marry Rosario? No objection! Good girl, and a penny or two, that would be just the thing for a man of ideas, and the brains to carry them out. Money, after all, was what he needed. You couldn't expect a fellow fresh from the Royal Navy to go back to lugging bags and boxes on a wharf! Anything but that! And to siñá Tona's unbounded delight, Tonet took Rosario to wife.
Everything went finely. That was a handsome pair now, wasn't it? – a tiny little thing, Rosario, timid, obedient, believing in her husband as she believed in God; and Tonet, proud of his good luck, carrying himself as stiffly as if, under his flannel shirt, he had a coat-of-mail, made of his wife's silver dollars, dispensing favors to right and left, living like a village squire, smoking his pipe all afternoon and evening in the tavern, and sporting long rubber boots on days when it rained!
Dolores showed no trace of emotion in the presence of her former sweetheart – only in her domineering eyes one might have seen an intenser sparkle, a glint of golden fire, – telltale evidence of yearnings unconfessed. And a happy year went rapidly by. But the money which penny by penny had been painfully assembled in the wretched store where Rosario had been born, streamed away between the fingers of the spendthrift husband; and the cow was running dry, as the mistress of the tavern-boat observed to her son one day,
