The poor farmer kept his trouble hidden from his family. He was a courageous man of clean habits. If he went to the tavern of Copa for a while on Sundays, when all the people of the neighbourhood were gathered there together, it was in order to watch the card-players, to laugh heartily at the absurdities and brutalities of Pimentó, and the other strapping young fellows who played "cock o' the walk" about the huerta; but never did he approach a counter to buy a glass; he always kept his sash-purse tight around the waist, and if he drank at all, it was only when one of the winners was treating all the crowd.
Averse to discussing his difficulties, he always seemed to be smiling, good-natured and calm, with the blue cap which had won for him his nickname,[D] pulled well down over his ears.
He worked from daylight until dusk. While the rest of the huerta still slept, he tilled his fields in the uncertain light of dawn, but more and more convinced, all the time, that he could not go on working them alone.
It was too great a burden for one man. If he only had a son! When he sought aid, he took on servants who robbed him, worked but little, and whom he discharged when he surprised them asleep in the stable during the sunny hours.
Obsessed with his respect for his ancestors, he would rather have died in his fields, overcome by fatigue, than rent a single acre to strange hands. And since he could not manage all the work alone, half of his fertile land remained fallow and unproductive, while he tried to maintain his family and pay off his landlord by the cultivation of the other half.
A silent struggle was this, desperate and obstinate, to earn enough for the necessities of life and overcome the ebbing of his vitality.
He now had only one wish. It was that his little girls should not know; that no one should give them an inkling of the worries and troubles which harassed their father; that the sacred joy of this household, the joy enlivened at all hours by the songs and laughter of the four sisters, who had been born in four successive years, should not be broken.
And they, in the meantime, had already begun to attract the attention of the young swains of the huerta, when they went to the merrymakings of the village in their new and showy silk handkerchiefs and their rustling ironed skirts. And while they were getting up at dawn and slipping off barefooted in their chemises in order to look down, through the cracks of the little windows, at the suitors who were singing the albaes,[E] or who wooed them with thrummings of the guitar, poor old Barret, trying harder and harder to balance his accounts, drew out ounce by ounce the handful of gold which his father had amassed for him farthing by farthing, and tried in vain to appease Don Salvador, the old miser who never had enough, and who, not content with squeezing him, kept talking of the bad times, the scandalous increase in taxes, and the need of raising his rent.
Barret could not possibly have had a worse landlord. He bore a detestable reputation throughout the entire huerta, since there was hardly a district where he did not own property. Every evening he passed over the roads, visiting his tenants, wrapped up even in springtime in his old cloak, shabby and looking like a beggar, while maledictions and hostile gestures followed after him. It was the tenacity of avarice which desired to be in contact with its property at all hours; the persistency of the usurer, who has pending accounts to settle.
The dogs howled from a distance when they saw him, as though Death itself were approaching; the children looked after him with frowning faces; men hid themselves in order to avoid painful excuses, and the women came to meet him at the door of the cabin with their eyes upon the ground and the lie ready to entreat him to be patient, while they answered his blustering threats with tears.
Pimentó who, as the public bully, interested himself in the misfortunes of his neighbours, and who was the knight-errant of the huerta, muttered something through his teeth which sounded like the promise of a thrashing, with a cooling-off later in a canal. But the very victims of the miser held him back, telling him of the influence of Don Salvador, warning him that he was a man who spent his mornings in court and had powerful friends. With such, the poor are always losers.
Of all his tenants, the best was Barret, who at the cost of great effort owed him nothing at all. And the old miser, even while pointing him out as a model to the other tenants, carried his cruelty toward him to the utmost extreme. Aroused by the very meekness of the farmer he showed himself more exacting, and was evidently pleased to find a man upon whom he could vent without fear all his instincts of robbery and oppression.
Finally he raised the rent of the land. Barret protested, even wept as he recited to him the merits of the family who had worked the skin from their hands in order to make these fields the best of the huerta. But Don Salvador was inflexible. Were they the best? Then he ought to pay more. And Barret paid the increase; he would give up his last drop of blood before he would abandon those fields which little by little were taking his very life.
At last he had no money left to tide him over. He could count only upon the produce from the fields. And completely alone, poor Barret concealed the real situation from his family. He forced himself to smile when his wife and daughters begged him not to work so hard, and he kept on like a veritable madman.
He did not sleep; it seemed to him that his garden-truck was growing less quickly than that of his neighbours; he made up his mind that he, and he alone, should cultivate all the land; he worked at night, groping in the darkness; the slightest threatening cloud would make him tremble, and be fairly beside himself with fear; and finally, honourable and good as he was, he even took advantage of the carelessness of his neighbours and robbed them of their share of water for the irrigation.
But if his family were blind, the neighbouring farmers understood his situation and pitied him for his meekness. He was a big, good-natured fellow, who did not know how to put on a bold front before the repellent miser, who was slowly draining him dry.
And this was true. The poor fellow, exhausted by his feverish existence and mad labour, became a mere skeleton of skin and bones, bent over like an octogenarian, with sunken eyes. That characteristic cap, which had given him his nickname, no longer remained settled upon his ears, but as he grew leaner, drooped toward his shoulders, like the funereal extinguisher of his existence.
But the worst of it was that this insufferable excess of fatigue only served to pay half of what the insatiable monster demanded. The consequences of his mad labours were not slow in coming. Barret's nag, a long-suffering animal, the companion of all his frantic toil, tired of working both day and night, of drawing the cart with loads of garden-truck to the market at Valencia, and of being hitched to the plough without time to breathe or to cool off, decided to die rather than to attempt the slightest rebellion against his poor master.
Then indeed the poor farmer saw himself lost! He gazed with desperation at his fields which he could no longer cultivate; the rows of fresh garden-truck which the people in the city devoured indifferently without suspecting the anxiety the produce had caused the poor farmer, in the constant battle with his poverty and with the land.
But Providence, which never abandons the poor, spoke to him through the mouth of Don Salvador. Not vainly do they say that God often derives good from evil.
The insufferable miser, the voracious usurer, offered his assistance with touching and paternal kindness on hearing of Barret's misfortune. How much did he need to buy another beast? Fifty dollars? Then here he was, ready to aid him, and to show him how unjust was the hatred of those who despised and spoke ill of him.
And he loaned money to Barret, although with the insignificant detail of demanding that he place his signature (since business is business), at the foot of a certain paper in which he mentioned interest, the accumulation of interest, and security for the debt, listing to cover this last detail, the furniture, the implements, all that the farmer possessed on his farm, including the animals of the corral.