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Vicente and recollections of the saint were still alive in their chronicles. Caragol proposed to visit this city also when the ship should return to Brest. Brittainy must be very holy ground, the holiest in the world, since the miracle-working Valencian, after traversing so many nations, had wished to die there.
We at once gave the renegade five hundred crowns to buy the vessel, and with eight hundred I ransomed myself, giving the money to a Valencian merchant who happened to be in Algiers at the time, and who had me released on his word, pledging it that on the arrival of the first ship from Valencia he would pay my ransom; for if he had given the money at once it would have made the king suspect that my ransom money had been for a long time in Algiers, and that the merchant had for his own advantage kept it secret.
He was the only representative of the guild's glories, the sole survivor of those blanquers who were an honor to Valencian history. The grandchildren of his former companions had become corrupted with the march of time; they were proprietors of large establishments, with thousands of workmen, but they would be lost if they ever had to tan a skin with their soft, business-man's hands.
We are no longer with Sorolla and his vibrating sunshine on Valencian sands, or under the hard blue dome of San Sebastian; the two-score canvases on view in 1909 at the Hispanic Museum were painted by a man of profounder intellect, of equally sensual but more restrained temperament than Sorolla; above all, by an artist with different ideals a realist, not an impressionist, Ignacio Zuloaga.
"We come," said he, "to free you from the insupportable yoke of the government of foreigners, and from the slavery to which you have been reduced and sold to France by ill designing persons." Several of the Spanish followers of the king landed to encourage the people, among them General Basset y Ramos, an active officer who was a Valencian by birth.
The Valencian, not less proud than poor, at first resented this proposal as an unseasonable pleasantry upon his forlorn condition; but at last finding that it was made in good faith, he took "the good the gods provided," and at once stepped from solitary indigence into the possession of a handsome wife, a comfortable home, a present field of profitable labor, and a prospect of future opulence.
The general, for so we shall call him, a Valencian gentleman of rank, gave him his hand and embraced him, saying, "I shall mark this day with a white stone as one of the happiest I can expect to enjoy in my lifetime, since I have seen Senor Don Quixote of La Mancha, pattern and image wherein we see contained and condensed all that is worthy in knight-errantry."
But their common affection for the captain, all being from the same land, and the employment of the Valencian dialect as the language of intimacy, made the two seek each other's company instinctively. For Toni, Caragol was the most congenial spirit aboard ... after himself.
In Spain, as already remarked, no one speaks of the language of the country as "Spanish"; it is always "Castellano," of which neither Valencian, Catalan, Galician, still less Basque, is a dialect they are all more or less languages in themselves. But Castellano is spoken with a difference both by the pueblo bajo of Madrid and also in the provinces.
On Sundays and the fiestas of the Valencian saints who for Uncle Caragol were the first in heaven, San Vicente Mártir, San Vicente Ferrer, La Virgin de los Desamparados and the Cristo del Grao would appear the smoking paella, a vast, circular dish of rice upon whose surface of white, swollen grains were lying bits of various fowls.
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