Señana and Centeno, who, after many struggles, had contrived to earn their "morsel of bread" in the mines of Socartes, were able to make, with the added toil of their four children, a daily wage which they would have regarded as a princely fortune in the days when they wandered from fair to fair selling pots and pipkins. It should be mentioned with regard to the intellectual powers of Centeno, that his head, in the opinion of many persons, rivalled the steam-hammer in the workshops for sheer hardness; with no disparagement to that of dame Ana, his wife, who seemed to be a woman of much prudence and discrimination, and who governed her household as carefully as the wisest prince could govern his dominions. She bagged the wages, earned by her husband and children, with the best grace in the world, and they amounted to a neat little sum; and each time the money was brought home, she felt as if the very sacrament itself were being carried in, so intense was her delight at the mere sight of coin.
Señana afforded her children very little comfort in return for the fortune she was accumulating by the labor of their hands; however, as they never complained of the utter and debasing misery in which they lived, as they betrayed no wish for emancipation, nor for a breath of any nobler life worthier of intelligent beings, Señana let the days slip on. Many indeed had slipped away before her children slept in beds, and many, many more before their brawny limbs were covered with decent garments. She gave them regular and wholesome meals, following in this respect the rules most in vogue; but eating in her house was a melancholy ceremony nevertheless, a mere doling out of fodder, as it were, to human animals.
So far as mental nourishment was concerned, Señana firmly believed that her husband's erudition, acquired by much miscellaneous reading, was amply sufficient to credit the whole family with learning, and for that reason she forbore to cram the minds of her progeny even with the amount of instruction which is given in schools. The elder ones helped her, and the youngest lived free of pedagogues, buried alive for twelve hours out of every twenty-four in brutalizing toil in the mines, so that the whole family swam at large and at leisure in the vast and stagnant ocean of dulness.
The two girls, Mariuca and Pepina, were not destitute of charms, though youth and robust growth were the chief. One of them read fluently, but not the other, and, so far as knowledge of the world was concerned, it is easy to suppose that some rudimentary information, at least, was not lacking to girls who lived with a perfect chorus of nymphs of all ages and every grade of respectability—or the contrary—perpetually employed in mechanical work which left their tongues free to wag. Mariuca and Pepina were buxom and well grown, and as erect and strong as Amazons. They wore short petticoats, displaying half the calf of the leg which, as well as their broad feet, was bare, and their rough heads might have supported an architrave as stoutly as those of Caryatides. The russet dust of the iron ore which colored them from head to foot, like all in the mines, gave them the appearance of massive figures in terra-cotta.
Tanasio was a lethargic being; his want of character and ambition verged on idiocy. Confined to the house from his earliest years, incapable of taking any exercise, of feeling either annoyance or pleasure, or of fulfilling any task, the boy, who was born to be a machine, had sunk into something not superior to the roughest tool. The day which found such a creature able to originate an idea, would infallibly see the total subversion of the order of nature; for, hitherto, no stone has been known to think.
The relation of this family to their mother was that of abject submission on their part, and unlimited despotism on hers. The only child who ever dared to show symptoms of rebellion was the little one. Señana, with her narrow capacities, could not at all understand this diabolical ambition to be something better than a stone. Was there—did he suppose—any happier or more exemplary life than that of a stone? She would not admit that it might be changed, even for that of a rolling stone. Señana loved her children—but there are so many ways of loving. She placed them above every other consideration—so long as they submitted to work perpetually in the mines, to pour all their earnings into one bowl, to obey her blindly, to cherish no wild aspirations nor wish to appear in fine clothes, not to marry too young, nor to learn any mischievous trash and cram their heads with school-work, since "poor folks"—she would say—"must always remain poor and behave as such, and not be wanting to jabber in the style of the rich city folks, who were eaten up with vices and rotten with sin."
I have described the manners and customs which prevailed in the Centeno's house in order that the reader may understand the life to which Nela was doomed, a helpless, forsaken creature, alone, useless, incapable of earning a day's wages; alike without a past and without a future, with no right to anything on earth beyond a bare subsistence. Señana gave her this, and firmly believed that her generosity was nothing short of heroic. Many a time would she say, as she filled Nela's little platter: "What a reward I am laying up for myself hereafter in Heaven!" And she believed it as if it were Gospel. No true light could penetrate her thick skull as to the saintly exercise of charity; she could never have understood that a kind word, a caress, a loving and gentle action, which may make a wretch forget his misery, are infinitely more precious—aye, and more heroic—than the broken meat left from a bad meal. It was but a chance that she did not give them to the cat, who, at least, was far more kindly spoken to. Nela never heard herself addressed as michita, little pet, precious darling—nor by any other of the sweet and endearing names that were lavished on the cat.
Nothing ever suggested to Nela that she was born of human beings, like the other inhabitants of the house. She was never punished; but she felt that this immunity arose from their contemptuous pity for her feeble frame, and certainly not from any special esteem or care for her person. No one had ever taught her that she had a soul ready to bring forth good fruit if she cultivated it with care, nor that she bore within herself, like other mortals, that spark of the divine fire which is called human intelligence, and that this spark might be fanned to beneficent light and flame. No one had ever told her that her grotesque smallness included in itself the germ of every noble and delicate sentiment, and that those tiny buds might open out to lovely flowers, with no more cultivation than a herb that we glance at now and again. No one had told her that she had a right, by the very sternness of Nature in creating her, to certain tender cares which the strong can dispense with—the healthy and those who have parents and a home; since under the laws of Christian jurisprudence the helpless, the poor, the orphan, and the destitute, are all alike worthy of protection.
On the other hand, everything combined to impress upon her, her absolute resemblance to a rolling stone, which has not even a shape of its own, but takes that which the waters give it or the kick of the man that spurns it. Everything told her that her place in the house was something below the cat, whose sleek back received the only caresses ever bestowed on anyone, and the blackbird that hopped about its cage. And of them, at any rate, no one said in heartless compassion: "Poor creature! it is a pity she did not die!"
CHAPTER V.
LABOR AND A LANDSCAPE WITH FIGURES.
The smoke of the furnaces, which all night through were wide awake and panting out their hot, hoarse breath, caught a silvery gleam as its wreaths rolled into the distance; the faint smile of dawn fell upon the remotest peaks of the mountains, and, by degrees, the hills that guard Socartes came out of the darkness, the huge slopes of rust-colored earth and the blackened buildings. The bell of the works rang out shrilly its call "to work, to work," and hundreds of sleepy souls came out of the houses, huts, hovels, holes even. Doors creaked on their hinges; the mules came reluctantly out of the stables, making their way to their watering-place, and the whole establishment, which had just now looked like a city of the dead lighted up by the infernal glare of the furnaces, came to life and began to stir its thousand arms.
The steam soon was seething in the boilers of the great steam-engine, which supplied the motive power both for the workshops and the washing-mills. The water, which performed the principal part in the operations, began to flow through the raised conduits from which it fell on the cylinders. Files of men and women just risen from their beds, made their way down to the scene of labor, and at