Señora de Pardiñas was now pronounced entirely well, and the
advisability of her going out for a walk was being considered, when one
morning, at the hour when Rogelio had his lecture on Political Economy,
an hour which was unusually early for visitors, Don Nicanor arrived,
smiling, and seemingly in a very good humor. He pretended to be
surprised at finding none of the accustomed visitors there, whereupon
Doña Aurora, who was knitting a woolen stocking, answered with much show
of reason that as it wanted at least two hours to the usual time of
their arrival, it was not strange that none of them had yet come. But
apparently Lain Calvo did not hear this answer, for he had kept his ear
trumpet in his pocket, using his hand as a substitute.
“Tell me, Doña Aurora, have you not noticed something?” he asked,
settling himself comfortably in his easy-chair, whose broad back already
bore the impress of his form.
Doña Aurora raised her eyes with an expression that seemed to say:
No--that is to say, I don’t know. Do me the favor to explain yourself.
“Did you not notice the other day, the day that Pacha and I were
here----”
“Yes, yes; I know--Friday.”
“How dejected the wife of Rojas seemed?”
“Poor woman! She is never very cheerful; but she never seems
discontented, either. She is an excellent woman! As good as gold!”
“Well, she tried hard to conceal her grief, but it was very evident,
especially to those of us who were already aware of the circumstances.”
“Why, what has happened? Have they had any trouble?” asked Señora de
Pardiñas in alarm, for she sincerely esteemed and liked Señora de Rojas.
“Joaquin--the son, the judge--they have transferred him again from one
end of Spain to the others, two months after the first transfer, and
just when his wife is about to be confined. That will convince him that
one cannot play the Quixote here, _carapuche_. Fancy a young man, who is
beginning his career, making his début by opposing so powerful a chief
as Colmenar, who has at his back the Minister of the Department. He will
soon see, he will soon see that they are not the people to be trifled
with. And he will see, too, of how much consequence the law is. A judge
can be transferred only at his own instance? Well, put in the royal
order, ‘at his own instance,’ and that settles it. Why, there have been
people who were placed on the retired list ‘at their own instance.’ And
when they protested, they were told they were wanting in respect for the
Minister.”
“But, Señor Don Nicanor, that is very creditable to the Rojases. It is
evident the young man is of his father’s school. People as upright as
that are seldom seen nowadays. I understand nothing about those things,
but I remember the affair was discussed here, and it was said that they
wanted Joaquin Rojas to be a party to a dreadful piece of dishonesty--a
robbery of----”
“The idea of a jackanapes like that,” continued Lain Calvo, persisting
in his deafness, “wishing to set himself up in opposition to the
Minister. The Rojases are as stubborn as mules. _Talis pater_--a fanatic
the father, a fanatic the son. That is to say, a still greater fanatic,
although that might seem to be impossible. For the father at least does
not get himself into a fix; he adheres to the letter of the law and
that is the end of it. The code says white? White let it be, then. Does
it say black? Then let it be black. Rojas is a machine for carrying out
the law. If the law to flog criminals or to cut off their ears were
still in force, Rojas would himself go about seeing it carried into
execution. But the boy! Because he has read a few trashy German and
Italian books, translated into worse gibberish, he plays the learned man
and the phi-los-o-pher. A judge a phi-los-o-pher! Fancy! What
pretentiousness!”
“Well, for my part,” protested Doña Aurora, without raising her voice,
for she knew how much faith to put in the Crown Solicitor’s deafness, “I
think that in every situation in life a man should behave himself with
dignity and propriety. For that reason I have a great deal of sympathy
for the Rojases.”
“And as a natural consequence,” continued Lain Calvo, “they are very
straitened in their circumstances. They never light a fire in that
house, they eat only the plainest food, they drink no coffee. The salary
is not enough to meet the expenses of moving from one place to another;
he has married a girl without a penny, and as soon as things come to a
crisis the young gentleman will lower his tone. Necessity teaches more
than all the universities put together. They will tame him yet. He will
be as soft as a glove before the year is over.”
Convinced that she would gain nothing by argument, Doña Aurora went on
narrowing the heel of her stocking, contenting herself with shaking her
head in dissent from time to time, for her quick temper would not allow
her to listen quietly to the spiteful remarks of the malicious Asturian.
“We all begin life with the idea that we are going to reform the world,”
he went on, “but very soon we take in our sails. Oh, yes, we soon take
in our sails. Or if we do not, we lead a miserable existence. You will
see that the storm that has caught Joaquin will reach his father also.
It is brewing for him. Before the year is out they will give him a
lesson he won’t forget. They cannot transfer him? They will superannuate
him, then. I am no lover of the past like Don Gaspar and the others, but
I must acknowledge that in my day politics had less to do with the
magistracy than it has now. That is the way things come and that is how
we must take them. Those gentlemen are always in the clouds,
_carapuche_. Complete fools! The new generation understand things
better. I am the only one of our circle who lives in the world. If it
were not for this cursed deafness----”
“Don’t come to me with stories about your deafness,” protested Señora
de Pardiñas. “God deliver me from deaf people like you. You hear more
than you ought to hear. Give over your nonsense with me, eh? I wasn’t
born in the year of the fools.”
“And the craziest of them all,” continued Lain, pretending not to have
heard, “is the worthy Don Gaspar. He is a perfect simpleton. He has gone
back to his childhood. We shall have to give him a nurse, or at the
least a maid to take care of him. That is what he wants, and that is
what he sighs for, and he is trying to steal away from you the one you
have chosen for your boy. I am speaking in earnest; as sure as my name
is Nicanor he is crazy for your maid, for Esclava, or whatever her name
is. No boy of twenty could be more desperately in love than he is with
her. I am certain that Rogelio is not half so deeply smitten.”
On hearing Rogelio’s name, and observing the tone in which it was
uttered by Candás, Señora de Pardiñas started, and let her knitting fall
on her lap.
[Illustration: “On hearing Rogelio’s name ... Señora de Pardiñas started
and let her knitting fall on her lap.”]
“As for Rogelio,” continued the Asturian, with the same affectation of
indulgence, “what has happened to him is so natural at his age that the
wonder would be if it had not happened. It is plain. A woman of
twenty-five, good-looking and affectionate; a boy of twenty, what was to
happen? A glance to-day, a touch to-morrow, a caress in the hall, a
romp in the reception-room--youthful follies that come to an end of
themselves.”
Señora de Pardiñas jumped in her chair as if she had been moved by a
spring.
“Do you know what you are saying?” she exclaimed. “Do you think it is
right to say such things for no other reason than your own pleasure,
without any proof or foundation whatever? Are you to let your tongue
gallop away with you without caring whom you knock down? Rogelio, poor
boy, is incapable of such conduct in his mother’s house.”
“Of course I can understand your attaching little importance to the
matter, and turning it into ridicule, for those things are follies
natural to youth; and for that reason when I caught them the other day
in the reception-room billing and cooing like a pair of turtle-doves, I
said to them in my own mind: ‘That’s right, children, amuse yourselves;
that is the law of God.’ But when I think of that other driveler, with
his eighty odd years, playing the love-sick swain, I vow I could lay him
across my knee and give him a sound flogging for an arch fool.”
And Doña Aurora felt that she could with the greatest pleasure have
performed the same operation on the person of the incorrigible Asturian.
To say these dreadful things to her and to say them in that treacherous
way, that did not even give her a chance to set him right, for with the
pretense of his deafness, he might assert what he chose regardless of
all that might be said either in denial or disproof of his words. It was
enough to make one’s blood boil with rage. It was a stupid, shameless,
insufferable jest. And was she going to let it pass? No, indeed. Señora
de Pardiñas’s anger was aroused; the blood boiled in her veins.
“Hypocrite! liar! fire-brand! tale-bearer! fox!” she said to the
Asturian in her own mind. “Now I am going to settle accounts with you.”
She rose from her chair, went up quickly to him, put her hand in the
pocket of his coat with the dexterity of a professional pickpocket, and
took from it the case which contained his ear-trumpet. And before the
astonished Lain Calvo could make a movement to defend himself, Doña
Aurora had taken the silver tube out of its case, introduced it into his
ear, and screamed with all her might:
“Whenever you talk to me in future, either use your trumpet or else make
up your mind to hear what I say in answer to you. All that about Rogelio
and Esclava is the suggestion of your own vile thoughts, do you hear? My
boy is not in the habit of flirting with his mother’s servants, do you
hear? People are not so loose and so shameless in their conduct as you
try to make them out to be, do you hear? do you hear? And decent people
are not the same as villains, do you hear? And I am not so great a
simpleton, listen well to what I say, that such things could take place
under my very nose without my seeing them. And malicious people are not
to my taste, do you hear? For I always think of the saying, ‘Ill-doers,
ill-deemers,’ do you hear?”
Her philippic ended, she let herself fall on the sofa, agitated and
unstrung, while the Asturian, putting both his hands up to his bald
crown, exclaimed in distressed accents:
“_Carapuche_, Aurorina, you have broken the drum of my ear. Another such
outbreak as that and you would leave me deaf.”