Above the chattering of the sparrows and the rustle
of the wind in the trees, Rafael could hear the sound
of a piano—the keys barely touched by the
player’s fingers—and a soft, timid
voice, as if the song were meant for the singer alone.
It was she. Rafael knew the music: a Lied
by Schubert—the favorite composer of the
day; a master “whose best work was still unknown,”
as she said in the cant she had learned from the critics,
alluding to the fact that only the least subtle of
the melancholy composer’s works had thus far
been popularized.
The young man advanced slowly, cautiously, as if afraid
lest the sound of his footsteps break in upon that
melody which seemed to be rocking the garden lovingly
to sleep in the afternoon’s golden sunlight.
He reached the open space in front of the house and
once more found there the same murmuring palms, the
same rubblework benches with seats and backs of flowered
tile that he knew so well. There, in fact, she
had so often laughed at his feverish protestations.
The door was closed; but through a half-opened window
he could see a patch of silk; a woman’s back,
bending slightly forward over the music.
As Rafael came up a dog began to bark at the end of
the garden. Some hens that had been scratching
about in sand of the drive, scampered off cackling
with fright. The music stopped. A chair scraped
as it was pushed back. The lady was rising to
her feet.
At the balcony a flowing gown of blue appeared; but
all that Rafael saw was a pair of eyes—green
eyes, that seemed to fill the entire window with a
flood of light.
“Beppa! Beppina!” cried a firm, a
warm, a sonorous, soprano voice. “Apri la
porta. Open the door.”
And with a slight inclination of her splendid head
of thick auburn hair that seemed to crown her with
a helmet of old gold, she smiled to him with a friendly,
somewhat mocking, intimacy:
“Welcome, Rafaelito. I don’t know
why, but I was expecting you this afternoon.
We have heard all about your triumphs; the music and
the tumult reached even to our desert. My congratulations
to the Honorable don Rafael Brull. Come right
in, I su senoria.”
From Valencia to Jativa, in all that immense territory
covered with rice-fields and orange groves which Valencians
embrace under the general and rather vague designation
of La Ribera, there was no one unfamiliar with
the name of Brull and the political power it stood
for.
As if national unity had not yet been effected and
the country were still divided into taifas
and waliatos as in the days when one Moorish
King reigned over Carlet, another over Denia, and a
third over Jativa, the election system maintained
a sort of inviolable rulership in every district;
and when the Administration people came to Alcira in
forecasting their political prospects, they always
said the same thing:
