' " He turned his
face to the sun. "I have been going to India fifty-six years."
Juan Lepe asked, "Why, on yesterday, were you not content
with the King and Queen's terms? They granted honor
and competence. It was the estate of a prince that you
asked."
Some moments passed before he answered. The sun was
shining, the road white and dusty, the mountains of Elvira
purple to the tops and there splashed with silver. When he
spoke, his voice was changed. Neither now nor hereafter
did he discourse of money-gold and nobility flowing from
earthly kings with that impersonal exaltation with which he
talked of his errand from God to link together east and west.
But he drew them somehow in train from the last, hiding
here I thought, an earthly weakness from himself, and the
weakness so intertwined with strength that it was hard to
divide parasite from oak.
"Did you see," he asked, "a boy with me? That was my
son Diego whom I have left with a friend in Santa Fe.
Fernando, his half-brother, is but a child. I shall see him in
Cordova. I have two brothers, dear to me both of them,
Diego and Bartholomew. My old father, Dominico Colombo,
still lives in Genoa. He lives in poverty, as I have
lived in poverty these many years. And there is Pedro
Correo, to whom I owe much, husband of my wife's sister.
My wife is dead.
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