In the bottom of the barranco lie maize-fields and vines. Tall green palms fling streaks of shadow over them, and close beneath the black crags stands a little ancient church and odd cubes of lava houses tinted with delicate pink or ochre or whitewashed dazzlingly. They nestle among their fig trees shut in by tall aloes, and oleanders, and a drowsy quietness which is intensified by the murmur of running water pervades the rock-walled hollow. It is the stillness of a land where nothing matters greatly, and there is in it the essence of the resignation which regards haste and effort and protest as futile, that is characteristic of old world Spain, for Spain was never until lately bounded by the confines of the Peninsula.
Las Palmas down beside the smoking beach is no longer Spanish. It is filled with bustle and a rampant commercialism, and English is spoken there; but the quietness of the ages lingers among the hills where the grapes of Moscatel are still trodden in the winepress by barelegged men in unstarched linen who live very much as one fancies the patriarchs did, plowing with oxen and wooden plows, and beating out their corn on wind-swept threshing floors. They also comport themselves, even towards the wandering Briton, who does not always deserve it, with an almost stately courtesy, and seldom trouble themselves about the morrow. All that is essentially Spanish is Eastern, too. The life in the hill pueblos is that portrayed in the Jewish scriptures, and the olive-skinned men whose forefathers once ruled half the world have also like the Hebrew the remembrance of their departed glory to sadden them.
It is, however, scarcely probable that any fancies of this kind occurred to Mrs. Ratcliffe as she lay in a somewhat rickety chair under a vine-draped pergola outside a pink-washed house in that aldea one afternoon. She was essentially modern, and usually practical, in which respects Ada, who sat not far away, was not unlike her. A man, at least, seldom expects to find the commercial instinct and a shrewd capacity for estimating and balancing worldly advantages in a young woman of prepossessing appearance with innocent eyes, which is, perhaps, a pity, since it now and then happens that the fact that she possesses a reasonable share of both of them is made clear to him in due time. Then it is apt to cause him pain, for man being vain prefers to believe that it is personal merit that counts for most where he is concerned.