"If that were only so!" exclaimed the woman. "She and Esteban-- what children! What tempers!--Just like their father's! They have never liked me; they disobey me at every opportunity; they exercise the most diabolical ingenuity in making my life miserable. They were to be their father's heirs, you know, and they blame me for his death, for our poverty, and for all the other misfortunes that have overtaken us. We live like cats and dogs."
Don Mario had been drumming his fat fingers impatiently upon the arm of his chair. Now he exclaimed: "Your pardon, senora, but I am just now very little interested in your domestic relations; they do not thrill me--as my own prospective happiness does. What you say about Rosa only makes me more eager, for I loathe a sleepy woman. Now tell me, is she--Has she any-affairs of the heart?"
"N-no, unless perhaps a flirtation with that young American, Juan O'Reilly." Dona Isabel gave the name its Spanish pronunciation of "O'Rail-ye."
"Juan O'Reilly? O'Reilly? Oh yes! But what has he to offer a woman? He is little more than a clerk."
"That is what I tell her. Oh, it hasn't gone far as yet."
"Good!" Don Mario rose to leave, for the exertion of his ride had made him thirsty. "You may name your own reward for helping me and I will pay it the day Rosa marries me. Now kindly advise her of my intentions and tell her I shall come to see her soon."
It was quite true that Johnnie O'Reilly--or "The O'Reilly," as his friends called him--had little in the way of worldly advantage to offer any girl, and it was precisely because of this fact that he had accepted a position here in Cuba, where, from the very nature of things, promotion was likely to be more rapid than in the New York office of his firm. He had come to this out-of-the-way place prepared to live the lonely life of an exile, if an O'Reilly could be lonely anywhere, and for a brief time he had been glum enough.
But the O'Reillys, from time immemorial, had been born and bred to exile; it was their breath, their meat and drink, and this particular member of the clan thrived upon it quite as well as had the other Johnnies and Michaels and Andys who had journeyed to far shores. The O'Reillys were audacious men, a bit too heedless of their own good, perhaps; a bit too light-hearted readily to impress a grave world with their varied abilities, but sterling men, for all that, ambitious men, men with lime in their bones and possessed of a high and ready chivalry that made friends for them wherever their wandering feet strayed. Spain, France, and the two Americas had welcomed O'Reillys of one sort or another; even Cuba had the family name written large upon her scroll. So Johnnie, of New York and Matanzas, although at first he felt himself a stranger in a strange land, was not so considered by the Cubans.