All was said: they did not tell each other again that they loved each other, but this matter decided their betrothal, and Tonet no longer failed a single time to accompany her on the road.
The stout butcher of Alboraya bl.u.s.tered with anger at the sudden change in his servant, so far so diligent, and now ever inventing pretexts to pa.s.s hours and ever more hours in the _huerta_, especially at night.
But with the selfishness of happiness, Tonet cared no more for the oaths and threats of his master than the mill-girl did for her father, for whom she felt more fear than respect.
Roseta always had some nest or other in her bedroom, which she claimed to have found upon the road. This boy did not know how to present himself with empty hands, and explored all the cane-brake and the trees of the _huerta_ in order to present her, his betrothed, with round mats of straw and twigs, in whose depths were some little rogues of fledgelings whose rosy skin was covered with the finest down, peeping desperately as they opened their monstrous beaks, always hungry for more crumbs of bread.
Roseta guarded the gift in her room, as though it were the very person of her betrothed, and wept when her brothers, the little people who had the farm-house for a nest, showed their admiration for the birds so strenuously that they ended by stifling them.
At other times, Tonet appeared with his clothes bulging, his sash filled with lupines and peanuts bought in the tavern of Copa, and as they walked along the road, they would eat and eat, gazing into each other"s eyes, smiling like fools, without knowing why, often seating themselves upon a bank, without realizing it.
She was the more sensible and scolded him. Always spending money! There were two reals or a little less, which, in a week"s time, he had left at the tavern for such treats. And he showed himself to be generous. For whom did he want the money if not for her? When they would be married--which had to happen some day--he would then take care of his money. That, however, would not be for ten or twelve years; there was no need of haste; all the betrothals of the _huerta_ lasted for some time.
The matter of the wedding brought Roseta back to reality. The day her father would learn of it.... Most holy Virgin! he would break her back with a club. And she spoke of the future thrashing with serenity, smiling like a strong girl accustomed to this parental authority, rigid, imposing, and respected, which manifested itself in cuffs and cudgels.
Their relations were innocent. Never did there arise between them the poignant and rebellious desire of the flesh. They walked along the almost deserted road in the dusk of the evening-fall, and solitude seemed to drive all impure thoughts from their minds.
Once when Tonet involuntarily and lightly touched Roseta"s waist, he blushed as if he, not she, were the girl in question.
They were both very far from thinking that their daily meeting might result in something more than words and glances. It was the first love, the budding of scarcely awakened youth, content with seeing, speaking, laughing, without a trace of sensual desire.
The mill-girl, who on the nights of fear, had longed so for the coming of spring, saw with anxiety the arrival of the long and luminous twilights.
Now she met her betrothed in full daylight, and there were never lacking companions of the factory or some neighbour along the road, who on seeing them together smiled maliciously, guessing the truth.
In the factory, jokes were started by all her enemies, who asked her with sarcasm when the wedding was to take place and nicknamed her The Shepherdess, for being in love with the grandson of old Tomba.
Poor Roseta trembled with anxiety. What a thrashing she was going to bring upon herself! Any day the news might reach her father"s ears. And then it was that Batiste, on the day of his sentence in the Tribunal of the Waters, saw her on the road, accompanied by Tonet.
But nothing happened. The happy incident of the irrigation saved her.
Her father, contented at having saved the crops, limited himself to looking at her several times, with his eyebrows puckered, and to notifying her in a slow voice, forefinger raised in air, and with an imperative accent, that henceforth she should take care to return alone from the factory, or otherwise she would learn who he was.
And she came back alone during all the week. Tonet had a certain respect for Senor Batiste, and contented himself with hiding in the cane-brake, near the road, to watch the mill-girl pa.s.s by, or to follow her from a distance.
As the days now were longer, there were more people on the road.
But this separation could not be prolonged for the impatient lovers, and one Sunday afternoon, Roseta, inactive, tired of walking in front of the door of her house, and believing she saw Tonet in all who were pa.s.sing over the neighbouring paths, seized a green-varnished pitcher, and told her mother that she was going to bring water from the fountain of the Queen.
The mother allowed her to go. She ought to divert herself; poor girl!
she did not have any friends and you must let youth claim its own.
The fountain of the Queen was the pride of all that part of the _huerta_, condemned to the water of the wells and the red and muddy liquid which ran through the ca.n.a.ls.
It was in front of an abandoned farm-house, and was old and of great merit, according to the wisest of the _huerta_; the work of the Moors, according to Pimento; a monument of the epoch when the apostles were baptizing sinners as they went about the world, so that oracle, old Tomba, declared with majesty.
In the afternoons, pa.s.sing along the road, bordered by poplars with their restless foliage of silver, one might see groups of girls with their pitchers held motionless and erect upon their heads, reminding one with their rhythmical step and their slender figures of the Greek basket-bearers.
This defile gave to the Valencian _huerta_ something of a Biblical flavour; it recalled Arabic poetry, which sings of the woman beside the fountain with the pitcher on her head, uniting in the same picture the two most vehement pa.s.sions of the Oriental: beauty and water.
The fountain of the Queen was a four-sided pool, with walls of red stone, and the water below at the level of the ground. One descended by a half-dozen steps, always slippery and green with humidity. On the surface of the rectangle of stone facing the stairs a bas-relief projected, but the figures were indistinct; it was impossible to make them out beneath the coat of whitewash.
It was probably the Virgin surrounded by angels; a work of the rough and simple art of the Middle Ages; some votive offering of the time of the conquest: but with some generations picking at the stones, in order to mark better the figures obliterated by the years, and others white-washing them with the sudden impulse of barbaric curiosity, had left the slab in such condition that nothing except the shapeless form of a woman could be distinguished, the queen who gave her name to the fountain: the queen of the Moors, as all queens necessarily must be in all country-tales.
Nor was the shouting and the confusion a small matter here on Sunday afternoons. More than thirty girls would crowd together with their pitchers, desiring to be the first to fill them, but then in no hurry to go away. They pushed each other on the narrow stairway, with their skirts tucked in between their limbs, in order to bend over and sink the pitcher into the pool, whose surface trembled with the bubbles of water which incessantly surged up from the bottom of the sand, where clumps of gelatinous plants were growing, green tufts of hair-like fibres, waving in the prison of crystal liquid, trembling with the impulse of the current. The restless water-skippers streaked across the clear surface with their delicate legs.
Those who had already filled their pitchers sat down on the edge of the pool, hanging their legs over the water and drawing them in with scandalized screams whenever a boy came down to drink and looked up at them.
It was a reunion of turbulent gamin. All were talking at the same time; they insulted each other, they flayed those who were absent, revealing all the scandal of the _huerta_, and the young people, free from parental severity, cast off the hypocritical expression a.s.sumed for the house, revealing an aggressiveness characteristic of the uncultured who lack expansion. These angelic brunettes, who sang songs to the Virgin and litanies in the church of Alboraya so softly when the festival of the unmarried women was celebrated, now on being alone, became bold and enlivened their conversation with the curses of a teamster, speaking of secret things with the calmness of old women.
Roseta arrived here with her pitcher, without having met her betrothed upon the road, in spite of the fact that she had walked slowly and had turned her head frequently, hoping at every moment to see him come forth from a path.
The noisy party at the fountain became silent on seeing her. The presence of Roseta at first caused stupefaction: somewhat like the apparition of a Moor in the church of Alboraya in the midst of high ma.s.s. Why did this pauper come here?
Roseta greeted two or three who were from the factory, but they pinched their lips with an expression of scorn and hardly answered her.
The others, recovered from their surprise, and not wishing to concede to the intruder even the honour of silence, went on talking as though nothing had happened.
Roseta descended to the fountain, filled the pitcher and stood up, casting anxious glances above the wall, around over all the plain.
"Look away, look away, but he won"t come!"
It was a niece of Pimento who said this; the daughter of a sister of Pepeta, a dark, nervous girl, with an upturned and insolent nose, proud of being an only daughter, and of the fact that her father was n.o.body"s tenant, as the four fields which he was working were his own.
Yes; she might go on looking as much as she pleased, but he would not come. Didn"t the others know whom she was expecting? Her betrothed, the nephew of old Tomba: a fine arrangement!
And the thirty cruel mouths laughed and laughed as though every laugh were a bite; not because they considered it a great joke, but in order to crush the daughter of the hated Batiste.
The shepherdess!... The divine shepherdess!
Roseta shrugged her shoulders with indifference. She was expecting this: moreover, the jokes of the factory had blunted her susceptibility.
She took the pitcher and went down the steps, but at the bottom the little mimicking voice of the niece of Pimento held her. How that small insect could sting!
"She would not marry the grandson of old Tomba. He was a poor fool, dying of hunger, but very honourable and incapable of becoming related to a family of thieves."
Roseta almost dropped her pitcher. She grew red as if the words, tearing at her heart, had made all the blood rise to her face; then she became deathly pale.
"Who is a thief? Who?" she asked with trembling voice, which made all the others at the fountain laugh.
Who? Her father. Pimento, her uncle, knew it well, and in the tavern of Copa nothing else was discussed. Did they believe that the past could be hidden? They had fled from their own _pueblo_ because they were known there too well: for that reason they had come here, to take possession of what was not theirs. They had even heard that Senor Batiste had been in prison for ugly crimes.
And thus the little viper went on talking, pouring forth everything that she had heard in her house and in the _huerta_: the lies forged by the dissolute fellows at the tavern of Copa, all invented by Pimento, who was growing less and less disposed to attack Batiste face to face, and was trying to annoy him, to persecute and wound him with insults.
The determination of the father suddenly surged up in Roseta. Trembling, stammering with fury, and with bloodshot eyes, she dropped the pitcher, which broke into pieces drenching the nearest girls, who protested in a chorus, calling her a stupid creature. But she was in no mood to take notice of such things!
"My father ..." she cried, advancing toward the one who had insulted her. "My father a thief? Say that again and I will smash your face!"
But the dark-haired girl did not have to repeat it, for before she could open her lips, she received a blow in the mouth, and the fingers of Roseta fixed themselves in her hair. Instinctively, impelled by pain, she seized the blond hair of the mill-girl in turn, and for some time the two could be seen struggling together, bent over, pouring forth cries of pain and madness, with their foreheads almost touching the ground, dragged this way and that by the cruel tugs which each one gave to the head of the other. The hair-pins fell out, loosening the braids; the heavy heads of hair seemed like banners of war, not floating and victorious, but crumpled and torn by the hands of the opponent.