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Updated: May 19, 2025
When she saw her son coming, she began at him angrily. "I've just heard, and it's a pretty father you are! So Pascualet is going 'cat' on the Mayflower! A boy of eight, who might better be at home with his mother, or at least playing down at the tavern with me! The idea! A baby like that going to sea and made to do a man's work, and Lord knows what else! Well, I'm not going to stand it, I'm not!
To earn money for that wench of a woman who had been making a public fool of him all this time? And create a future for Pascualet, leave him the richest fisherman in the Cabañal? No, no, no! There was nothing left for him to live for.
For when Pascualet came ashore of late he would barely look in at the tavern-boat and then be off to the truckman's house where, evidently, he was a far from troublesome witness to what the lovers were doing.
Christ! And how man's illusions vanish!... One Saturday, as Pascualet was coming home from his sweetheart's house, along one of the paths of the huerta, about midnight, a dog had bitten him; a wretched, silent animal that jumped out from behind a sluice; as the young man crouched to throw a stone at it, the dog bit into his shoulder.
Tonet should go and get his pack ready and say good-by to Rosario; so as to be on the beach an hour before dawn. There would be no waiting in such times! Dolores looked at her husband and then at Tonet. She said she would be going along. Pascualet did not want to go with her, when she called. He would rather stay down at the boat with papa.
His apprenticeship started auspiciously. Up to that time Pascualet had gotten along on the old clothes his father had left. But siñá Tona wanted him to begin his new trade with real dignity; so she closed the tavern, one afternoon, and went off to a ship chandler's bazaar at the Grao. The boy remembered the excitement of that visit to the stores for years and years.
Tona was kept posted on all his adventures, and was immensely flattered at the boy's popularity and "social position." A bit too fond of brandy, yes and what a pity! but a regular fellow, quite different from that big good-natured booby of a Pascualet, who wouldn't say a word if a cart ran over him.
If they weren't her children, she wouldn't look them in the face, they were so brutal! But the Rector, letting the old lady grumble on, sat down to his bowl of steaming soup. "What do you say to dinner, Pascualet! Don't mind her! Your daddy is going to make the best sailor in the Cabañal out of you! Tell us, mama, what you got in that bundle?"
Pascualo was at last on the road to money, and he, well, at least, he could see his way through the summer. The good-natured Rector kept reflecting to himself on what an unselfish fellow his brother was, and almost felt like hugging him. Yes, that boy's heart was in the right place! Fond as could be of him and of Dolores, and he loved little Pascualet as though the baby were his own child!
Pascualet was little Tonet all over again, the frail nervous child he had tended like a nurse-maid in the tavern-boat. No, that was Tonet's boy, no use denying it, the living, visible proof of his dishonor!
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