“To-morrow,” she said, “I shall
think this has all been a dream.”
“So shall I,” said Marcos gravely.
He lifted her into the window, and she stood listening
for a moment while she took from her finger the wedding
ring she had worn for half an hour and gave it back
to him.
“It is of no use to me,” she said; “I
cannot wear it at school.”
She laughed, and held up one finger to command his
attention.
“Listen!” she whispered. “Sor
Teresa is still snoring.”
She watched him bend the bars back again to their
proper place.
“By the way,” she asked him. “What
was the name of the chapel where we were married—I
should like to know?”
Marcos hesitated a moment before replying.
“It is called Our Lady of the Shadows.”
The mattress beater
Englishmen are justly proud of their birthright.
The less they travel,
moreover, the prouder they are, and the stronger is
their conviction that
England leads the world in thought and art and action.
They are quite unaware, for instance, that no country
in the world is behind England (unless it be Scotland)
in a small matter that affects very materially one-third
of a human span of life, namely beds. In any
town of France, Germany or Holland, the curious need
not seek long for the mattress-maker. He is usually
to be found in some open space at the corner of a
market-place or beneath an arcade near the Maine exercising
his health-giving trade in the open air. He lives,
and lives bountifully, by unmaking, picking over and
re-making the mattresses of the people. Good
housewives, moreover, stand near him with their knitting
to see that he does it well and puts back within the
cover all the wool that he took out. In these
backward countries the domestic mattress is remade
once a year if not oftener. In our great land
there is a considerable vagueness as to the period
allowed to a mattress to form itself into lumps and
to accumulate dust or germs. Moreover, there
are thousands of exemplary housekeepers who throw
up the eye of horror to their whitewashed ceiling
at the thought of a foreign person’s personal
habits, who do not know what is inside their mattress
and never think of looking to see from year’s
end to year’s end.
In Spain, a country rarely visited by those persons
who pride themselves upon being particular, the mattress-maker
is a much more necessary factor in domestic life than
is the sweep or the plumber in northern lands.
No palace is too royal for him, no cottage is too
humble to employ him.
He is, moreover, the only man allowed inside a nunnery.
Which is the reason why he finds himself brought into
prominence now. He is usually a thin, lithe man,
somewhat of the figure of those northerners who supply
the bull-ring with Banderilleros. He arrives in
the early morning with a sheathe knife at his waist,
a packet of cigarettes in his jacket pocket and two
light sticks under his arm. All he asks is a courtyard
and the sunshine that Heaven gives him.
