THE DISCORD CONTINUES TO INCREASE
A fresh attempt to see his cousin that evening failed, and Pepe Rey shut
himself up in his room to write several letters, his mind preoccupied
with one thought.
“To-night or to-morrow,” he said to himself, “this will end one way or
another.”
When he was called to supper Doña Perfecta, who was already in the
dining-room, went up to him and said, without preface:
“Dear Pepe, don’t distress yourself, I will pacify Señor Don Inocencio.
I know every thing already. Maria Remedios, who has just left the house,
has told me all about it.”
Doña Perfecta’s countenance radiated such satisfaction as an artist,
proud of his work, might feel.
“About what?”
“Set your mind at rest. I will make an excuse for you. You took a few
glasses too much in the Casino, that was it, was it not? There you
have the result of bad company. Don Juan Tafetan, the Troyas! This is
horrible, frightful. Did you consider well?”
“I considered every thing,” responded Pepe, resolved not to enter into
discussions with his aunt.
“I shall take good care not to write to your father what you have done.”
“You may write whatever you please to him.”
“You will exculpate yourself by denying the truth of this story, then?”
“I deny nothing.”
“You confess then that you were in the house of those----”
“I was.”
“And that you gave them a half ounce; for, according to what Maria
Remedios has told me, Florentina went down to the shop of the
Extramaduran this afternoon to get a half ounce changed. They could
not have earned it with their sewing. You were in their house to-day;
consequently--”
“Consequently I gave it to her. You are perfectly right.”
“You do not deny it?”
“Why should I deny it? I suppose I can do whatever I please with my
money?”
“But you will surely deny that you threw stones at the Penitentiary.”
“I do not throw stones.”
“I mean that those girls, in your presence--”
“That is another matter.”
“And they insulted poor Maria Remedios, too.”
“I do not deny that, either.”
“And how do you excuse your conduct! Pepe in Heaven’s name, have you
nothing to say? That you are sorry, that you deny--”
“Nothing, absolutely nothing, señora!”
“You don’t even give me any satisfaction.”
“I have done nothing to offend you.”
“Come, the only thing there is left for you to do now is--there, take
that stick and beat me!”
“I don’t beat people.”
“What a want of respect! What, don’t you intend to eat any supper?”
“I intend to take supper.”
For more than a quarter of an hour no one spoke. Don Cayetano, Doña
Perfecta, and Pepe Rey ate in silence. This was interrupted when Don
Inocencio entered the dining-room.
“How sorry I was for it, my dear Don José! Believe me, I was truly sorry
for it,” he said, pressing the young man’s hand and regarding him with a
look of compassion.
The engineer was so perplexed for a moment that he did not know what to
answer.
“I refer to the occurrence of this afternoon.”
“Ah, yes!”
“To your expulsion from the sacred precincts of the cathedral.”
“The bishop should consider well,” said Pepe Rey, “before he turns a
Christian out of the church.”
“That is very true. I don’t know who can have put it into his lordship’s
head that you are a man of very bad habits; I don’t know who has told
him that you make a boast of your atheism everywhere; that you ridicule
sacred things and persons, and even that you are planning to pull down
the cathedral to build a large tar factory with the stones. I tried my
best to dissuade him, but his lordship is a little obstinate.”
“Thanks for so much kindness.”
“And it is not because the Penitentiary has any reason to show you these
considerations. A little more, and they would have left him stretched on
the ground this afternoon.”
“Bah!” said the ecclesiastic, laughing. “But have you heard of that
little prank already? I wager Maria Remedios came with the story. And I
forbade her to do it--I forbade her positively. The thing in itself is
of no consequence, am I not right, Señor de Rey?”
“Since you think so----”
“That is what I think. Young people’s pranks! Youth, let the moderns
say what they will, is inclined to vice and to vicious actions. Señor
de Rey, who is a person of great endowments, could not be altogether
perfect--why should it be wondered at that those pretty girls should
have captivated him, and, after getting his money out of him, should
have made him the accomplice of their shameless and criminal insults to
their neighbors? My dear friend, for the painful part that I had in this
afternoon’s sport,” he added, raising his hand to the wounded spot,
“I am not offended, nor will I distress you by even referring to so
disagreeable an incident. I am truly sorry to hear that Maria Remedios
came here to tell all about it. My niece is so fond of gossiping! I
wager she told too about the half ounce, and your romping with the girls
on the terrace, and your chasing one another about, and the pinches and
the capers of Don Juan Tafetan. Bah! those things ought not to be told.”
Pepe Rey did not know which annoyed him most--his aunt’s severity or the
hypocritical condescension of the canon.
“Why should they not be told?” said Doña Perfecta. “He does not seem
ashamed of his conduct himself. I assure you all that I keep this from
my dear daughter only because, in her nervous condition, a fit of anger
might be dangerous to her.”
“Come, it is not so serious as all that, señora,” said the Penitentiary.
“I think the matter should not be again referred to, and when the one
who was stoned says that, the rest may surely be satisfied. And the blow
was no joke, Señor Don José. I thought they had split my head open and
that my brains were oozing out.”
“I am truly sorry for the occurrence!” stammered Pepe Rey. “It gives me
real pain, although I had no part in it--”
“Your visit to those Señoras Troyas will be talked about all over
the town,” said the canon. “We are not in Madrid, in that centre of
corruption, of scandal--”
“There you can visit the vilest places without any one knowing it,” said
Doña Perfecta.
“Here we are very observant of one another,” continued Don Inocencio.
“We take notice of everything our neighbors do, and with such a system
of vigilance public morals are maintained at a proper height. Believe
me, my friend, believe me,--and I do not say this to mortify you,--you
are the first gentleman of your position who, in the light of day--the
first, yes, señor--_Trojoe qui primus ab oris_.”
And bursting into a laugh, he clapped the engineer on the back in token
of amity and good-will.
“How grateful I ought to be,” said the young man, concealing his anger
under the sarcastic words which he thought the most suitable to answer
the covert irony of his interlocutors, “to meet with so much generosity
and tolerance, when my criminal conduct would deserve--”
“What! Is a person of one’s own blood, one who bears one’s name,” said
Doña Perfecta, “to be treated like a stranger? You are my nephew, you
are the son of the best and the most virtuous of men, of my dear brother
Juan, and that is sufficient. Yesterday afternoon the secretary of the
bishop came here to tell me that his lordship is greatly displeased
because I have you in my house.”
“And that too?” murmured the canon.
“And that too. I said that in spite of the respect which I owe the
bishop, and the affection and reverence which I bear him, my nephew is
my nephew, and I cannot turn him out of my house.”
“This is another singularity which I find in this place,” said Pepe Rey,
pale with anger. “Here, apparently, the bishop governs other people’s
houses.”
“He is a saint. He is so fond of me that he imagines--he imagines that
you are going to contaminate us with your atheism, your disregard for
public opinion, your strange ideas. I have told him repeatedly that, at
bottom, you are an excellent young man.”
“Some concession must always be made to superior talent,” observed Don
Inocencio.
“And this morning, when I was at the Cirujedas’--oh, you cannot imagine
in what a state they had my head! Was it true that you had come to
pull down the cathedral; that you were commissioned by the English
Protestants to go preaching heresy throughout Spain; that you spent the
whole night gambling in the Casino; that you were drunk in the streets?
‘But, señoras,’ I said to them, ‘would you have me send my nephew to
the hotel?’ Besides, they are wrong about the drunkenness, and as for
gambling--I have never yet heard that you gambled.”
Pepe Rey found himself in that state of mind in which the calmest man is
seized by a sudden rage, by a blind and brutal impulse to strangle some
one, to strike some one in the face, to break some one’s head, to crush
some one’s bones. But Doña Perfecta was a woman and was, besides, his
aunt; and Don Inocencio was an old man and an ecclesiastic. In addition
to this, physical violence is in bad taste and unbecoming a person of
education and a Christian. There remained the resource of giving vent
to his suppressed wrath in dignified and polite language; but this last
resource seemed to him premature, and only to be employed at the moment
of his final departure from the house and from Orbajosa. Controlling his
fury, then, he waited.
Jacinto entered as they were finishing supper.
“Good-evening, Señor Don José,” he said, pressing the young man’s hand.
“You and your friends kept me from working this afternoon. I was not
able to write a line. And I had so much to do!”
“I am very sorry for it, Jacinto. But according to what they tell me,
you accompany them sometimes in their frolics.”
“I!” exclaimed the boy, turning scarlet. “Why, you know very well that
Tafetan never speaks a word of truth. But is it true, Señor de Rey, that
you are going away?”
“Is that the report in the town?”
“Yes. I heard it in the Casino and at Don Lorenzo Ruiz’s.”
Rey contemplated in silence for a few moments the fresh face of Don
Nominative. Then he said:
“Well, it is not true; my aunt is very well satisfied with me; she
despises the calumnies with which the Orbajosans are favoring me--and
she will not turn me out of her house, even though the bishop himself
should try to make her do so.”
“As for turning you out of the house--never. What would your father
say?”
“Notwithstanding all your kindness, dearest aunt, notwithstanding the
cordial friendship of the reverend canon, it is possible that I may
myself decide to go away.”
“To go away!”
“To go away--you!”
A strange light shone in Doña Perfecta’s eyes. The canon, experienced
though he was in dissimulation, could not conceal his joy.
“Yes, and perhaps this very night.”
“Why, man, how impetuous you are; Why don’t you at least wait until
morning? Here--Juan, let some one go for Uncle Licurgo to get the nag
ready. I suppose you will take some luncheon with you. Nicolasa, that
piece of veal that is on the sideboard! Librada, the señorito’s linen.”
“No, I cannot believe that you would take so rash a resolution,”
said Don Cayetano, thinking himself obliged to take some part in the
question.
“But you will come back, will you not?” asked the canon.
“At what time does the morning train pass?” asked Doña Perfecta, in
whose eyes was clearly discernible the feverish impatience of her
exaltation.
“I am going away to-night.”
“But there is no moon.”
In the soul of Doña Perfecta, in the soul of the Penitentiary, in the
little doctor’s youthful soul echoed like a celestial harmony the word,
“To-night!”
“Of course, dear Pepe, you will come back. I wrote to-day to your
father, your excellent father,” exclaimed Doña Perfecta, with all the
physiognomic signs that make their appearance when a tear is about to be
shed.
“I will trouble you with a few commissions,” said the savant.
“A good opportunity to order the volume that is wanting in my copy of
the Abbe Gaume’s work,” said the youthful lawyer.
“You take such sudden notions, Pepe; you are so full of caprices,”
murmured Doña Perfecta, smiling, with her eyes fixed on the door of
the dining-room. “But I forgot to tell you that Caballuco is waiting to
speak to you.”