II.

Segundo García, the lawyer's son, and Leocadia Otero, the

schoolmistress of Vilamorta, had met each other for the first time in

the spring at a pilgrimage. Leocadia had gone with some girls to whom

she had taught their letters and plain sewing. Before the chorus of

nymphs Segundo had recited verses for more than two hours in an oak

grove far from the noise of the drum and the bagpipes, where the

strains of the music and the voices of the crowd came softened by

distance. The audience was as silent as if they were hearing mass,

although certain passages of a tender or passionate nature were the

occasion, among the children, of nudges, pinches, laughter

instantaneously suppressed; but from the black eyes of the

schoolmistress, down her cheeks, pitted by the smallpox and pale with

emotion, flowed two large, warm tears, followed so quickly and in

such abundance by others that she was obliged to take out her

handkerchief to wipe them away. And returning by starlight,

descending the mountain on whose summit stood the sanctuary, by

sylvan footpaths carpeted with grass and bordered with heather and

briars, the order of march was as follows: first the children,

running, jumping, pushing one another among the heather and greeting

every fall with shouts of laughter; Leocadia and Segundo behind,

arm-in-arm, pausing from time to time to talk in subdued tones,

almost in whispers.

A sad and ugly story was told about Leocadia Otero. Although,

without actually saying so, she had given it to be understood that

she was a widow, it was whispered that she had never been married;

that the puny Dominguito, the little cripple who was always sick, was

born while she lived in the house of her uncle and guardian at

Orense, after the death of her parents. What was certain was that her

uncle had died shortly after the birth of the child, bequeathing to

his niece a couple of fields and a house in Vilamorta, and Leocadia,

after passing the necessary examinations, had obtained the village

school and gone to settle in that town. She had lived in it now for

more than thirteen years, observing the most exemplary conduct,

watching day and night over Minguitos, and living with the utmost

frugality in order to rebuild the dilapidated house, which she had

finally succeeded in doing shortly before her meeting with Segundo.

Leocadia was a woman of notably industrious habits; in her wardrobe

she had always a good supply of linen, in her parlor bamboo furniture

with a rug before the sofa, grapes, rice, and ham in her pantry, and

carnations and sweet basil in her windows. Minguitos was always as

neat as a new pin; she herself, when she raised the skirt of her

habit of Dolores, of good merino, displayed underneath voluminous

embroidered petticoats, stiff with starch. For all which reasons,

notwithstanding her ugliness and her former history, the

schoolmistress was not without suitors--a wealthy retired muleteer,

and Cansin, the clothier. She rejected the suitors and continued

living alone with Minguitos and Flores, her old servant, who now

enjoyed in the house all the privileges of a grandmother.

The iniquitous wrong suffered by her in early youth had produced

in Leocadia, absorbed as she was in her bitter recollections, a

profound horror of marriage and an insatiable thirst for the

romantic, the ideal, which is as a refreshing dew to the imagination

and which satisfies the emotions. She had the superficial knowledge

of a village schoolmistress--rudimentary, but sufficient to introduce

exotic tastes into Vilamorta; that is to say, a taste for literature

in its most accessible forms--novels and poetry. She devoted to

reading the leisure hours of her monotonous and upright life. She

read with faith, with enthusiasm, uncritically; she read believing

and accepting everything, identifying herself with each one of the

heroines, in turn, her heart echoing back the poet's sighs, the

troubadour's songs, and the laments of the bard. Reading was her one

vice, her secret happiness. When she requested her friends at Orense

to renew her subscription to the library for her they laughed at her

and nicknamed her the "Authoress." She an authoress! She only wished

she were. If she could only give form to what she felt, to the world

of fancy she carried in her mind! But this was impossible. Never

would her brain succeed in producing, however hard she might squeeze

it, even so much as a poor _seguidilla_. Poetry and sensibility were

stored up in the folds and convolutions of her brain, as solar heat

is stored up in the coal. What came to the surface was pure

prose--housekeeping, economy, stews.

When she met Segundo, chance applied the lighted torch to the

formidable train of feelings and dreams shut up in the soul of the

schoolmistress. She had at last found a worthy employment for her

amorous faculties, an outlet for her affections. Segundo was poetry

incarnate. He represented for her all the graces, all the divine

attributes of poetry--the flowers, the breeze, the nightingale, the

dying light of day, the moon, the dark wood.

The fire burned with astounding rapidity. In its flames were

consumed, first her honorable resolution to efface by the

blamelessness of her conduct the stigma of the past, then her strong

and deep maternal affection. Not for an instant did the thought

present itself to Leocadia's mind that Segundo could ever be her

husband; although both were free the difference in their ages and the

intellectual superiority of the young poet placed an insurmountable

barrier in the way of the aspirations of the schoolmistress. She fell

in love as into an abyss, and looked neither before nor behind.

Segundo had had in Santiago, during his college days, youthful

intrigues, adventures of a not very serious nature, such as few men

escape between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, occasionally

taking part, also, in what in that romantic epoch were called

_orgies_. Notwithstanding all this, however, he was not vicious. The

son of a hysterical mother, whose strength was exhausted by repeated

lactations, and who at last succumbed to the debility induced by

them, Segundo's spirit was much more exacting and insatiable than his

body. He had inherited from his mother a melancholy temperament and

innumerable prejudices, innumerable instinctive antipathies,

innumerable superstitious practices. He had loved her, and he

cherished her memory with veneration. And more tenacious even than

his loving remembrance of his mother was the invincible antipathy he

cherished for his father. It would not be true to say that the lawyer

had been the murderer of his wife, and yet Segundo clearly divined

the slow martyrdom endured by that fine nervous organization, and had

always before his eyes, in his hours of gloom, the mean coffin in

which the dead woman was interred, shrouded in the oldest sheet that

was to be found.

Segundo's family consisted of his father, an aunt, advanced in

years, two brothers, and three sisters. The lawyer García enjoyed the

reputation of being wealthy--in reality this fortune was

insignificant--a village fortune accumulated penny by penny, by

usurious loans and innumerable sordid privations. His practice

brought him in something, but ten mouths to feed and the professional

education of three sons swallowed up not a little. The eldest of the

boys, an officer in an infantry regiment, was stationed in the

Philippine Islands, and, far from expecting any money from him, they

were thankful if he did not ask for any. Segundo, the second in age

as well as in name, had just been graduated--one lawyer more in

Spain, where this fruit grows so abundantly. The youngest was

studying at the Institute at Orense, with the intention of becoming

an apothecary. The girls spent the days running about in the gardens

and cornfields, half the time barefooted, not even attending

Leocadia's school to save the slight expense that would be incurred

in procuring the decent clothing which this would necessitate. As for

the aunt--Misía Gáspara--she was the soul of the house, a narrow and

sapless soul, a withered old woman, silent and ghost-like in

appearance, still active, in spite of her sixty years, who, without

ceasing to knit her stockings with fingers as yellow as the keys of

an old harpsichord, sold barley in the granary, wine in the cellar,

lent a dollar at fifty per cent. interest to the fruit-women and

hucksters of the market, receiving their wares in payment, measured

out the food, the light, and their clothing to her nieces, fattened a

pig with affectionate solicitude, and was respected in Vilamorta for

her ant-like abilities.

It was the lawyer's aspiration to transmit his practice and his

office to Segundo. Only the boy gave no indication of an aptitude for

stirring up law-suits and prosecutions. How had he achieved the

miracle of passing with honor in the examinations without ever having

opened a law-book during the whole term, and failing in attendance at

the college whenever it rained or whenever the sun shone? Well, by

means of an excellent memory and a good natural intelligence;

learning by heart, when it was necessary, whole pages from the

text-books, and remembering and reciting them with the same ease, if

not with as much taste, as he recited the "Doloras" of Campoamor.

On Segundo's table lay, side by side, the works of Zorrilla and

Espronceda, bad translations of Heine, books of verse of local poets,

the "Lamas-Varela," or, _Antidote to Idleness_, and other volumes of

a no less heterogeneous kind. Segundo was not an insatiable reader;

he chose his reading according to the whim of the moment, and he read

only what was in conformity with his tastes, thus acquiring a

superficial culture of an imperfect and varied nature. Quick of

apprehension, rather than thoughtful or studious, he had learned

French without a teacher and almost by intuition, in order to read in

the original the works of Musset, Lamartine, Proudhon, and Victor

Hugo. His mind was like an uncultivated field in which grew here and

there some rare and beautiful flower, some exotic plant; of the

abstruse and positive sciences, of solid and serious learning, which

is the nurse of mental vigor--the classics, the best literature, the

severe teachings of history--he knew nothing; and in exchange, by a

singular phenomenon of intellectual relationship, he identified

himself with the romantic movement of the second third of the

century, and in a remote corner of Galicia lived again the

psychological life of dead and gone generations. So does some

venerable academician, over-leaping the nineteen centuries of our

era, delight himself now with what delighted Horace and live

platonically enamored of Lydia.

Segundo composed his first verses, cynical and pessimistic in

intention, ingenuous in reality, before he had reached the age of

seventeen. His classmates applauded him to the echo. He acquired in

their eyes a certain prestige, and when the first fruits of his muse

appeared in a periodical he had, without going beyond the narrow

circle of the college, admirers and detractors. Thenceforth he

acquired the right to indulge in solitary walks, to laugh rarely, to

surround his adventures with mystery, and not to play or take a drink

for good-fellowship's sake except when he felt in the humor.

And he seldom felt in the humor. Excitation of the senses, of a

purely physical nature, possessed no attraction for him; if he drank

at times through bravado, the spectacle of drunkenness, the

winding-up of student orgies--the soiled tablecloth, the maudlin

disputes, his companions lying under the table or stretched on the

sofa, the shamelessness and heartlessness of venal women--repelled

him and he came away from such scenes filled with disgust and

contempt, and at times a reaction proper to his complex character

sent him, a sincere admirer of Proudhon, Quinet, and Renan, to the

precincts of some solitary church, where he drew in with delight long

breaths of the incense-laden air.

The lawyer García made no protest against his son's literary

inclinations because he regarded them as a passing amusement proper

to his age, a youthful folly, like dancing at a village feast. He

began to grow uneasy when he saw that Segundo, after graduation,

showed no inclination to help him in the conduct of his tortuous

law-suits. Was the boy, then, going to turn out good for nothing but

to string rhymes together? It was no crime to do this, but--when

there was not a pile of law-papers to go through and stratagems to

think of to circumvent the opposing party. Since the lawyer had

observed this inclination of his son he had treated him with more

persistent harshness and coldness than before. Every day at table or

whenever the occasion offered, he made cutting speeches to him about

the necessity of earning one's own bread by assiduous labor, instead

of depending upon others for it. These continual sermons, in which he

displayed the same captious and harassing obstinacy as in the conduct

of his law-suits, frightened Segundo from the house. In Leocadia's

house he found a place of refuge, and he submitted passively to be

adored; flattered in the first place by the triumph his verses had

obtained, awakening admiration so evidently sincere and ardent, and

in the second place attracted by the moral well-being engendered by

unquestioning approval and unmeasured complacency. His idle, dreamy

brain reposed on the soft cushions which affection smoothes for the

beloved head; Leocadia sympathized with all his plans for the future,

developing and enlarging them; she encouraged him to write and to

publish his verses; she praised him without reserve and without

hypocrisy, for, for her, whose critical faculty was situated in her

cardiac cavities, Segundo was the most melodious singer in the

universe.

Gradually the loving prevision of the schoolmistress extended to

other departments of Segundo's existence. Neither the lawyer García

nor Aunt Gáspara supposed that a young man, once his education was

finished, needed a penny for any extraordinary expense. Aunt Gáspara,

in particular, protested loudly at every fresh outlay--after filling

her nephew's trunk one year she thought he was provided with shirts

for at least ten years to come: clothes had no right to tear or to

wear out, without any consideration, in that way. Leocadia took note

of the wants of her idol; one day she observed that he was not well

supplied with handkerchiefs and she hemmed and marked a dozen for

him; the next day she noticed that he was expected to keep himself in

cigars for a year on half a dollar, and she took upon herself the

task of making them for him, furnishing the material herself gratis.

She heard the fruit-women criticising Aunt Gáspara's stinginess; she

inferred from this that Segundo had a poor table, and she set herself

to the task of devising appetizing and nutritious dishes for him; in

addition to all which she ordered books from Orense, mended his

clothes, and sewed on his buttons.

All this she did with inexpressible delight, going about the

house with a light, almost youthful step, rejuvenated by the sweet

maternity of love, and so happy that she forgot to scold the

school-children, thinking only of shortening their tasks that she

might be all the sooner with Segundo. There was in her affection much

that was generous and spiritual, and her happiest moments were those

in which, as they sat side by side at the window, his head resting on

her shoulder, she listened, while her imagination transformed the

pots of carnations and sweet basil into a virgin forest, to the

verses which he recited in a well-modulated voice, verses that seemed

to Leocadia celestial music.

The medal had its obverse side, however. The mornings were full

of bitterness when Flores would come with an angry and frowning face,

her woolen shawl twisted and wrinkled and falling over her eyes, to

say in short, abrupt phrases:

"The eggs are all used; shall I get more? There is no sugar;

which kind shall I buy--that dear loaf sugar that we bought last

week? To-day I got coffee, two pounds of coffee, as if we had a gold

mine. I won't buy any more cordial--you can go for it yourself--I

won't."

"What are you talking about, Flores? What is the matter with

you?"

"I say that if you like to give Ramon, the confectioner,

twenty-four reals a bottle for _anisette_, when it is to be had for

eight at the apothecary's, you can do so, but that I am not going to

put the money in that thief's hand; he will be asking you five

dollars a bottle for it next."

Leocadia would come out of her reverie with a sigh, and go to the

bureau drawer for the money, not without thinking that Flores was

only too right; her savings, her couple of thousand reals laid by for

an emergency, must be almost gone; it was better not to examine into

the condition of the purse; better put off annoyances as long as

possible. God would provide. And she would scold the old woman with

feigned anger.

"Go for the bottle; go--and don't make me angry. At eight the

children will be here and I have my petticoat to iron yet. Make

Minguitos his chocolate; you would be better employed in seeing that

he has something to eat. And give him some cake."

"Yes. I'll give him some, I'll give him some. If I didn't give

the poor child something----" grumbled the servant, who at Minguitos'

name felt her anger increase. In the kitchen could be heard the

furious knock given to the chocolate-pot to settle it on the fire and

the angry sound of the mill, afterward, beating the chocolate into

froth. Flores would enter the room of the deformed boy, who had not

yet left his bed, and taking his hand in hers, say:

"Are you warm, child? I have brought you your chocolate; do you

hear?"

"Will mamma give it to me?"

"I will give it to you."

"And mamma--what is she doing?"

"Ironing some petticoats."

The little humpback would fix his eyes on Flores, raising his

head with difficulty from between the double arch of the breast and

back. His eyes were deep set, with large pupils; on his mouth, with

its prominent jaws, rested a melancholy and distorted smile. Throwing

his arms around the neck of Flores, and putting his lips close to her

ear:

"Did the _other one_ come yesterday?" he asked.

"Yes, child, yes."

"Will he come again to-day?"

"He'll come. Of course he'll come! Stop talking, _fillino_, stop

talking and take your chocolate. It's as you like it--thin and with

froth."

"I don't think I have any appetite for it. Put it there beside

me."