A Traveller in Little Things | Page 6

must be ugly too, _unless the expression is good_. Thus, we may know numbers of persons who would certainly be ugly but for the redeeming expression; and this good expression, which is "feature in the making," is, like good features, an "outward sign of inward perfections."
To continue with the description of my young gentleman of blue blood and plebeian countenance, his expression not only saved him from ugliness but made him singularly attractive, it revealed a good nature, friendliness, love of his fellows, sincerity, and other pleasing qualities. After meeting and conversing with him I was not surprised to hear that he was universally liked, but regarding him critically I could not say that his manner was perfect. He was too self-conscious, too anxious to shine, too vain of his personal appearance, of his wit, his rich dress, his position as a de la Rosa and a landowner. There was even a vulgarity in him, such as one looks for in a person risen from the lower orders but does not expect in the descendant of an ancient and once lustrous family, however much decayed and impoverished, or submerged.
Shortly afterwards a gossipy old native estanciero, who lived close by, while sitting in our kitchen sipping mat��, began talking freely about his neighbour's lives and characters, and I told him I had felt interested in the brothers de la Rosa; partly on account of the great affection these two had for one another, which was like an ideal friendship; and in part too on account of the ancient history of the family they came from. I had met one of them, I told him,--Cyril--a very fine fellow, but in some respects he was not exactly like my preconceived idea of a de la Rosa.
"No, and he isn't one!" shouted the old fellow, with a great laugh; and more than delighted at having a subject presented to him and at his capture of a fresh listener, he proceeded to give me an intimate history of the brothers.
The father, who was a fine and a lovable man, married early, and his young wife died in giving birth to their only child--Ambrose. He did not marry again: he was exceedingly fond of his child and was both father and mother to it and kept it with him until the boy was about nine years old, and then determined to send him to Buenos Ayres to give him a year's schooling. He himself had been taught to read as a small boy, also to write a letter, but he did not think himself equal to teach the boy, and so for a time they would have to be separated.
Meanwhile the boy had picked up with Cyril, a little waif in rags, the bastard child of a woman who had gone away and left him in infancy to the mercy of others. He had been reared in the hovel of a poor gaucho on the de la Rosa land, but the poor orphan, although the dirtiest, raggedest, most mischievous little beggar in the land, was an attractive child, intelligent, full of fun, and of an adventurous spirit. Half his days were spent miles from home, wading through the vast reedy and rushy marshes in the neighbourhood, hunting for birds' nests. Little Ambrose, with no child companion at home, where his life had been made too soft for him, was exceedingly happy with his wild companion, and they were often absent together in the marshes for a whole day, to the great anxiety of the father. But he could not separate them, because he could not endure to see the misery of his boy when they were forcibly kept apart. Nor could he forbid his child from heaping gifts in food and clothes and toys or whatever he had, on his little playmate. Nor did the trouble cease when the time came now for the boy to be sent from home to learn his letters: his grief at the prospect of being separated from his companion was too much for the father, and he eventually sent them together to the city, where they spent a year or two and came back as devoted to one another as when they went away. From that time Cyril lived with them, and eventually de la Rosa adopted him, and to make his son happy he left all he possessed to be equally divided at his death between them. He was in bad health, and died when Ambrose was fifteen and Cyril fourteen; from that time they were their own masters and refused to have any division of their inheritance but continued to live together; and had so continued for upwards of ten years.
Shortly after hearing this history I met the brothers together at a house in the village, and a