John Bull on the Guadalquivir | Page 6

space were really a portion of the house. It
was here that we used to take our cup of coffee and smoke our
cigarettes, I and old Mr. Daguilar, while Maria sat by, not only
approving, but occasionally rolling for me the thin paper round the
fragrant weed with her taper fingers. Beyond the patio was an open
passage or gallery, filled also with flowers in pots; and then, beyond
this, one entered the drawing-room of the house. It was by no means a
princely palace or mansion, fit for the owner of untold wealth. The
rooms were not over large nor very numerous; but the most had been
made of a small space, and everything had been done to relieve the heat
of an almost tropical sun.
"It is pretty, is it not?" she said, as she took me through it.
"Very pretty," I said. "I wish we could live in such houses."
"Oh, they would not do at all for dear old fat, cold, cozy England. You
are quite different, you know, in everything from us in the south; more
phlegmatic, but then so much steadier. The men and the houses are all
the same."
I can hardly tell why, but even this wounded me. It seemed to me as
though she were inclined to put into one and the same category things
English, dull, useful, and solid; and that she was disposed to show a
sufficient appreciation for such necessaries of life, though she herself

had another and inner sense--a sense keenly alive to the poetry of her
own southern chime; and that I, as being English, was to have no
participation in this latter charm. An English husband might do very
well, the interests of the firm might make such an arrangement
desirable, such a mariage de convenance--so I argued to myself--might
be quite compatible with--with heaven only knows what delights of
superterrestial romance, from which I, as being an English thick-headed
lump of useful coarse mortality, was to be altogether debarred. She had
spoken to me of oranges, and having finished the survey of the house,
she offered me some sweet little cakes. It could not be that of such
things were the thoughts which lay undivulged beneath the clear waters
of those deep black eyes-- undivulged to me, though no one else could
have so good a right to read those thoughts! It could not be that that
noble brow gave index of a mind intent on the trade of which she spoke
so often! Words of other sort than any that had been vouchsafed to me
must fall at times from the rich curves of that perfect month.
So felt I then, pining for something to make me unhappy. Ah, me! I
know all about it now, and am content. But I wish that some learned
pundit would give us a good definition of romance, would describe in
words that feeling with which our hearts are so pestered when we are
young, which makes us sigh for we know not what, and forbids us to be
contented with what God sends us. We invest female beauty with
impossible attributes, and are angry because our women have not the
spiritualised souls of angels, anxious as we are that they should also be
human in the flesh. A man looks at her he would love as at a distant
landscape in a mountainous land. The peaks are glorious with more
than the beauty of earth and rock and vegetation. He dreams of some
mysterious grandeur of design which tempts him on under the hot sun,
and over the sharp rock, till he has reached the mountain goal which he
had set before him. But when there, he finds that the beauty is
well-nigh gone, and as for that delicious mystery on which his soul had
fed, it has vanished for ever.
I know all about it now, and am, as I said, content. Beneath those deep
black eyes there lay a well of love, good, honest, homely love, love of
father and husband and children that were to come--of that love which

loves to see the loved ones prospering in honesty. That noble brow--for
it is noble; I am unchanged in that opinion, and will go unchanged to
my grave--covers thoughts as to the welfare of many, and an intellect
fitted to the management of a household, of servants, namely, and
children, and perchance a husband. That mouth can speak words of
wisdom, of very useful wisdom--though of poetry it has latterly uttered
little that was original. Poetry and romance! They are splendid
mountain views seen in the distance. So let men be content to see them,
and not attempt to tread upon the fallacious heather of the mystic hills.
In the first week of my sojourn