Читать книгу A Wedding Trip - Emilia condesa de Pardo Bazán - Страница 4

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We have now to learn whose was the breath that kindled the nuptial-torch on the present occasion.

Señor Joaquin, then called plain Joaquin, had left his native place in the vigor of early manhood, strong as a bull and untiring in labor as a domesticated ox. Finding a place in Madrid as porter to a nobleman who had an ancestral estate in Leon, he became the broker, man of business, and confidential agent of all the people of repute of his native province. He looked up lodgings for them, found them a safe warehouse for their goods and was, in short, the Providence of Astorga. His undoubted honesty, his punctuality and zeal won for him so good a reputation that commissions poured in upon him in a constant and steady stream, and reals, dollars, and doubloons fell like a shower of hail into his pocket in such abundance, that fifteen years after his arrival in the capital Joaquin was able to unite himself in the indissoluble bonds of matrimony with a countrywoman of his own, a maid in the service of the nobleman’s wife, and the mistress, for a long time past, of the thoughts of the porter; and, after the marriage, to set up a grocery, over the door of which was inscribed in golden letters the legend: “The Leonese. Imported Provisions.” From a broker he then became the business manager of his compatriots in Madrid; he bought goods for them wholesale and sold them at retail, and everyone in Madrid who wished to obtain aromatic chocolate, ground by hand, or biscuits of feathery lightness, such as only the women of Astorga possess the secret of making, found themselves obliged to have recourse to him. It became the fashion to breakfast on the Carácas chocolate and the biscuits of the Leonese. The magnate, his former master, set the example, giving him his custom, and the people of rank followed, their appetites awakened by the old-fashioned present of a dainty worthy of the table of Carlos IV or of Godoy. And it was worth while to see how Señor Joaquin, the commercial horizon ever widening before him, gradually came to monopolize all the national culinary specialties—tender peas from Fuentesauco, rich sausages from Candelario, hams from Calderas, sweetmeats from Estremadura, olives from the olive-groves of Seville, honeyed dates from Almeria, and golden oranges that store up in their rind the sunshine of Valencia. In this manner and by this unremitting industry Joaquin accumulated a considerable sum of money, if not with honor, at least with honesty. But, successful as he had been in acquiring money, he was more successful still in investing it after he had acquired it, in lands and houses in Leon, for which purpose he made frequent journeys to his native city. After eight years of childless marriage he became the father of a healthy and handsome girl, an event which rejoiced him as greatly as the birth of an heiress to his crown might rejoice a king; but the vigorous Leonese mother was unable to support the crisis of her late maternity, and after clinging feebly to life for a few months after the birth of the child, let go her hold upon it altogether, much against her will. In losing his wife Señor Joaquin lost his right hand, and from that time forward ceased to be distinguished by the air of satisfaction with which he had been wont to preside at the counter, displaying his gigantic proportions as he reached to the highest shelf to take down the boxes of raisins, for which purpose he had but to raise himself slightly on the tips of his broad feet and stretch out his powerful arm. He would pass whole hours in a state of abstraction, his gaze fixed mechanically on the bunches of grapes hanging from the ceiling, or on the bags of coffee piled up in the darkest corner of the shop, on which the deceased was in the habit of seating herself at her knitting. Finally, he fell into so deep a melancholy that even his honest and lawful gains, acquired in the exercise of his business, became a matter of indifference to him, and the physicians prescribing for him the salubrious air of his native place and a change in his regimen and manner of life, he disposed of the grocery, and with magnanimity not unworthy of an ancient sage, retired to his native village, satisfied with the wealth he had already acquired and unambitious of greater gains.

He took with him the little Lucía, now the only treasure dear to his heart, who with her infantile graces had already begun to enliven the shop, carrying on a fierce and constant warfare against the figs of Fraga and the almonds of Alcoy, less white than the little teeth that bit them.

The young girl grew up like a vigorous sapling planted in fertile soil; it almost seemed as if the life she had been the cause of her mother’s losing was concentrated in the person of the child. She passed through the crises of infancy and girlhood without any of those nameless sufferings that blanch the cheeks and quench the light in the eyes of the young. There was a perfect equilibrium in her rich organism between the nerves and the blood, and the result was a temperament such as is now seldom to be met with in our degenerate society.

Mind and body in Lucía kept pace with each other in their development, like two traveling companions who, arm in arm, ascend the hills and help each other over the rugged places on their journey, and it was a curious fact that, while the materialist physician, Velez de Rada, who attended Señor Joaquin, took delight in watching Lucía and noting how exuberantly the vital current flowed through the members of this young Cybele, the learned Jesuit, Father Urtazu, was also her devoted admirer, finding her conscience as clear and diaphanous as the crystals of his microscope, neither of them being conscious that what they both admired in the young girl was, perhaps, one and the same thing seen from a different point of view, namely, perfect health.

Señor Joaquin desired to give Lucía a good education, as he understood it, and indeed did all in his power to cripple the superior nature of his daughter, though without success. Impelled on the one hand by the desire to bestow accomplishments on Lucía which should enhance her merit, fearing on the other lest it should be sarcastically said in the village that Uncle Joaquin aspired to have a young lady daughter, he brought her up in a hybrid manner, placing her as a day pupil in a boarding school, under the rule of a prudish directress who professed to know everything. There Lucía was taught a smattering of French and a little music; as for any solid instruction, it was not even thought of; knowledge of social usages, zero; and for all feminine knowledge—a knowledge much vaster and more complicated than the uninitiated imagine—some sort of fancy work, as tedious and useless as it was ugly, patterns of slippers in the worst possible taste, embroidered shirt-bosoms, or bead purses. Happily, Father Urtazu sowed among so many weeds a few grains of wheat, and the moral and religious instruction of Lucía, although limited, was as correct and solid as her school studies were futile. Father Urtazu had more of the practical moralist than of the ascetic, and the young girl learned more from him concerning ethics than dogma. So that although a good Christian she was not a fervent one. The absolute tranquillity of her temperament forbade her ever being carried away by enthusiasm; there was in the girl something of the repose of the Olympian goddesses; neither earthly nor heavenly matters disturbed the calm serenity of her mind. Father Urtazu used to say, pushing out his lip with his accustomed gesture:

“We are sleeping, sleeping, but I am very sure we are not dead; and the day on which we awaken there will be something to see; God grant that it may be for good.”

The friends of Lucía were Rosarito, the daughter of Doña Agustina, the landlady of the village inn; Carmen, the niece of the magistrate, and a few other young girls of the same class, many of whom dreamed of the gentle tranquillity, the peaceful monotony of the conventual life, forming to themselves seductive pictures of the joys of the cloister, of the tender emotion of the day of the profession, when, crowned with flowers and wearing the white veil, they should offer themselves to Christ with the exquisite sweetness of adding, “forever! forever!” Lucía had listened to them without a single fiber of her being vibrating responsive to this ideal. Active life called to her with deep and powerful voice. Nor did she feel any desire, on the other hand, to imitate others of her companions whom she saw furtively hiding love-letters in their bosoms or hurrying, eager and blushing, to the balcony. In her childhood, prolonged by innocence and radiant health, there was no room for any other pleasure than to run about among the shady walks that surrounded Leon, leaping for very joy, like a youthful nymph sporting in some Hellenic valley.

Señor Joaquin devoutly believed that he had given his daughter all the education that was necessary, and he even thought the waltzes and fantasies, which she pitilessly slaughtered with her unskillful fingers on the piano, admirably executed. However deeply he might hide it in the secret recesses of his soul, the Leonese was not without the aspiration, common to all men who have exercised humble occupations and earned their bread by the sweat of their brows—he desired that his daughter should profit by his efforts, ascending a step higher in the social scale. He would have been well contented, for his own part, to continue the same “Uncle Joaquin” as before; he had no pretensions to be considered a rich man, and both in his disposition and his manners, he was extremely simple; but if he were willing to renounce position for himself, he was not willing to do so for his daughter. He seemed to hear a voice saying to him, as the witches said to Banquo, “Thou shalt get kings though thou be none.” And divided between the modest conviction of his own absolute insignificance and the moral certainty he entertained that Lucía was destined to occupy an elevated position in the world, he came to the not unreasonable conclusion that marriage was to be the means whereby the desired metamorphosis of the girl into the lady of rank was to be accomplished. A distinguished son-in-law was from this time forth the ceaseless aspiration of the ex-grocer.

Nor were these the only weaknesses of Señor Joaquin. He had others, which we have no compunction in disclosing to the reader. Perhaps the strongest and most confirmed of these was his inordinate love of coffee, a taste acquired in the importing business, in the gloomy winter mornings, when the hoar frost whitened the glass-door of the show-case, when his feet seemed to be freezing in the gray atmosphere of the solitary shop, and the lately-abandoned, perhaps still warm bed, tempted him, with mute eloquence, back to his slumbers. Then, half-awake, solicited to sleep by the requirements of his Herculean physique and his sluggish circulation, Señor Joaquin would take the little apparatus, fill the lamp with alcohol, light it, and soon from the tin spout would flow the black and smoking stream of coffee which at once warmed his blood, cleared his brain, and by the slight fever and waste of tissue it produced, gave him the necessary stimulus to begin his day’s work, to make up his accounts, and sell his provisions. After his return to Leon, when he was free to sleep as long as he liked, Señor Joaquin did not give up the acquired vice but rather reinforced it with new ones; he fell into the habit of drinking the black infusion in the café nearest to his abode, accompanying it with a glass of Kummel, and by the perusal of a political journal—always and unfailingly the same.

On a certain occasion it occurred to the government to suspend the publication of this newspaper for a period of twenty days; a little more and Señor Joaquin would have given up his visits to the café through sheer desperation. For, Señor Joaquin being a Spaniard, it seems needless to say that he had his political opinions like the best, and that he was consumed by a zeal for the public welfare, as we all of us are. Señor Joaquin was a harmless specimen of the now extinct species, the progressionist. If we were to classify him scientifically, we should say he belonged to the variety of the impressionist progressionist. The only event that had ever occurred to him during his life as a political partisan was that one day a celebrated politician, a radical at that time, but who afterward passed over bag and baggage to the conservatives, being a candidate for representative to the Cortes, entered his shop and asked him for his vote. From that supreme moment our Señor Joaquin was labeled, classified, and stamped—he was a progressionist of Don ——’s party. It was in vain that years passed and political changes succeeded one another and the political swallows, always in search of milder climes, took wing for other regions; it was in vain that evil-disposed persons said to Señor Joaquin that his chief and natural leader, the aforesaid personage, was as much of a progressionist as his grandmother; that there were, in fact, no longer any progressionists on the face of the earth; that the progressionist was as much of a fossil as the megatherium or the plesiosaurus; it was in vain that they pointed out to him the innumerable patches sewed on the purple mantle of the will of the nation by the not impeccable hands of his idol himself. Señor Joaquin, even with all this testimony, was not convinced, but, change who might, remained firm as a post in his loyal attachment to the leader. Like those lovers who fix upon their memories the image of the beloved such as she appeared to them in some supreme and memorable moment, and in despite of the ravages of pitiless time, never again behold her under any other aspect, so Señor Joaquin could never get it into his head that his dear leader was in any respect different from what he had been at the moment when, with flushed face, he deigned to lean on the counter of the grocery, a loaf of sugar on the one side and the scales on the other, and with fiery and tribunitial eloquence ask him for his vote. From that time he was a subscriber to the organ of the aforesaid leader. He also bought a poor lithograph, representing the leader in the act of pronouncing an oration, and placing it in the conventional gilt frame, hung it up in his bed-room, between a daguerreotype of his deceased spouse and an engraving of the blessed Santa Lucía, who displayed in a dish two eyes resembling two boiled eggs. Señor Joaquin accustomed himself to look at political events from the point of view of his leader, whom he called, quite naturally, by his baptismal name. Did matters in Cuba assume a threatening aspect? Bah! Señor Don —— says that complete pacification is an affair of a couple of months, at the utmost. Was it rumored that armed men were marching through the Basque provinces? There was no need to be frightened. Don —— affirmed that the absolutist party was dead and the dead do not come to life again. Was there a serious split in the liberal majority, some supporting X, others Z? Very well, very well, Don —— will settle the question; he is the very man to do it. Was there fear of a famine? Do you suppose Don —— is sitting idly sucking his thumb all this time? This very moment the veins (of the public treasury) will be opened. Are the taxes too heavy? Don —— spoke of economizing. Are the Socialists growing troublesome? Only let them dare show themselves with Don —— at the head of affairs and he will soon put them down. And in this manner, without a doubt or a suspicion ever entering his mind, Señor Joaquin passed through the storm of the revolution and entered on the period of the restoration, greatly delighted to see that Don —— floated on the top of the wave and that his merits were appreciated, and that he held the pan by the handle to-day just as he had done yesterday.

Cherishing this sort of adoration for the leader, the reader may imagine what was the delight, confusion, and astonishment of Señor Joaquin at receiving a visit one morning from a grave and well-dressed person who had come to salute him in the name of Don —— himself.

The visitor was called Don Aurelio Miranda, and he occupied in Leon one of those positions, numerous in Spain, which are none the less profitable for being honorable, and which, without entailing any great amount of labor or responsibility, open to the holder the doors of good society by conferring upon him a certain degree of official importance,—a species of laical benefice in which are united the two things that, according to the proverb, cannot be contained in one sack. Miranda came of a bureaucratic family, in which were transmitted by entail, as it were, important political positions, thanks to a special gift possessed by its members, perpetuated from father to son, a certain feline dexterity in falling always on their feet, and a certain delicate sobriety in the matter of expressing their opinions. The race of the Mirandas had succeeded in dyeing themselves with dull and refined colors, which would serve equally well as a background for white insignia or red device, so that there was no juncture of affairs in which they were the losers, no radicalism with which they could not make a compromise, no sea so smooth or so stormy that they could not fish successfully in its waters. The young Aurelio was born, it might be said, within the protecting shadow of the office walls. Before he had grown a beard or a mustache he had a position, obtained for him by paternal influence, aided by the influence of the other Mirandas. At first the employment was insignificant, with a salary that barely sufficed for the perfumes and neckties and other trifling expenses of the boy, who was naturally extravagant. Soon richer spoils fell to his share, and Aurelio followed in the route already marked out for him by his ancestors. Notwithstanding all this, however, it was evident that in him his race had degenerated somewhat. Devoted to pleasure, ostentatious and vain, Aurelio did not possess the delicate art of always and in everything observing the happy medium; and he was wanting in the outward gravity, the composure of manner, which had won for past Mirandas the reputation of being men of brains and of ripe political experience. Conscious of his defects, Aurelio adroitly endeavored to turn them to account, and more than one delicate white hand had written for him perfumed notes, containing efficacious recommendations to personages of widely differing quality and class. In like manner, he gave himself out to be the companion and bosom friend of several political leaders, among others of the Don —— whom we already know. He had never spoken ten consecutive words having any relation to politics with any of them. He retailed to them the news of the day, the newest scandal, the latest double entendre, and the most recent burlesque, and in this way, without compromising himself with any, he was favored and served by all. He caught hold, like an inexpert swimmer, of the men who were more experienced swimmers than himself, and, sinking here and floating there, he succeeded in weathering the fierce political storms which beat upon Spain, following the time-honored example of the Mirandas. But even political influence in time becomes exhausted, and there came a period in which such influence as Aurelio could command, now greatly diminished, was insufficient to keep him in the only place to his taste—Madrid, and he was compelled to go vegetate in Leon, between the government building and the cathedral, neither of which edifices interested him in the least. What was especially bitter to Aurelio was the consciousness that his decline in official life had its origin in another and an irreparable decline,—a decline in his personal attractions. After the age of forty he was no longer the subject of little notes of recommendation, or, at least, these notes were not so warm as before; in the offices of the notabilities his presence had come to be no more regarded than if he had been a chair or a table, and he himself was conscious that his fluency of speech was abandoning him. As he advanced in years he grew more like his ancestors. He began to acquire the seriousness of the Mirandas, and from an amiable rake he became a man of weight. Perhaps certain obstinate ailments, the protest of the liver against the unhealthy life—by turns sedentary, by turns full of feverish excitement—so long led by Aurelio, were not without their part in this metamorphosis. Therefore, profiting by his sojourn in Leon and by the knowledge and singular skill of Velez de Rada, he devoted himself to the work of repairing the breaches made in his shattered organization; and the methodical life and the increasing gravity of his manners and appearance, which had been prejudicial to him in the capital, betraying the fact that he was becoming a useless and worn-out instrument, served him as a passport with the timid Leonese villagers, winning for him their sympathy and the reputation of being a person of credit and responsibility.

Miranda was in the habit of making an occasional trip to Madrid by way of diversion, and on one of these trips he had met, not long since, the Don —— of Señor Joaquin, whom we shall call Colmenar, through respect for his incognito—furious, at the moment, with a Don —— who took pleasure in thwarting all his plans and in nullifying his appointments. There was no means of coming to an understanding with this demon of a man, who persisted in cutting and mowing down the flourishing field of the Colmenarist adherents. Miranda, at the time in question, was in imminent danger of losing his position, and the words of the leader made him jump from his seat on the luxurious divan. “It is just as I say,” continued Colmenar; “it is enough that I should have an interest in a man’s retaining his place for him to get him out of it. It is to be counted upon to a certainty. And there is no means of escaping it. He strikes without pity.”

“As for me,” answered Miranda, “if the worst were only to leave Leon—for, to tell the truth, that village bores me to death, although it is not without its advantages. But if matters go any further I shall be in a pretty fix.”

“And the most likely thing is that they will go further. Fortune is the enemy of the old. You have changed greatly for the worse, of late. That hair—do you remember what a splendid head of hair you had? We shall both soon be obliged to have recourse to acorn-oil as a heroic remedy in extremis.”

“To hear you speak,” exclaimed Miranda, twisting the locks on his temples with his former martial air, “one would suppose that I was bald. I think I manage to ward off the attacks of time very well. My ailments have made me a little——”

“Are you ill?” interrupted Colmenar; “leaks in the roof, my boy; leaks in the roof!”

“An affection of the liver, complicated with—— But in that antiquated village of Leon I have stumbled upon one of the most modern of physicians, a savant,” Miranda hastened to add, observing the bored look of the leader, who feared he was going to be treated to a history of the disease. “I assure you that Velez de Rada is a prodigy. A confirmed materialist, it is true——”

“Like all doctors,” said Colmenar, with a shrug of the shoulders. “And how about other matters? Have you made many conquests in Leon? Are the Leonese girls susceptible?”

“Bah, hypocrites!” exclaimed Miranda, who, in the unreserve of confidential intercourse permitted himself to indulge in an occasional touch of irreverence. “The Jesuits have their heads turned with confraternities and novenas, and they go about devouring the saints with kisses. There is little social intercourse,—every one in his own house and God in the house of every one. But, after all, that suits me very well, since I require to rest and to lead a regular life.”

Colmenar listened in silence, tracing with his eyes the pattern on the soft, thick carpet.

At last he raised his head and slapped his forehead with his open palm.

“An unprecedented idea had just occurred to me,” he said, repeating the celebrated phrase of the Portuguese minister. “Why don’t you marry, my dear fellow?”

“A bright idea, truly! A wife costs so little in these days. And afterward? ‘For him who does not like soup, a double portion.’ I am going to lose my situation, it may be, and you talk to me of marrying!”

“I do not propose, to you a wife who will lighten your purse, but one who will make it heavy.”

And the leader laughed loud and long at his own wit. Miranda remained pensive, thinking over the solid advantages of the plan, which he was not long in discovering. There could be no better means of providing against the assaults of hostile fortune and securing the doubtful future, before the few hairs he had left should have disappeared and the superficial polish conferred by fashion and the arts of the toilet should have vanished. And then, Leon was a city that suggested of itself matrimonial ideas. What was there to do but marry in a place where dullness reigned supreme, where celibacy inspired mistrust, and where the most innocent adventure gave rise to the most outrageous slanders? Therefore he said aloud:

“You are right, my boy. Leon is a place that inspires one with the desire to marry and to live like a saint.”

“The truth is, that for you,” continued Colmenar, “marriage has now become a necessity. Aside from the fact that it is high time for you (here he smiled maliciously) to think of marrying, unless you want to be called an old bachelor, your health and your pocket both require it. If I cannot succeed in keeping you in your place what are you going to do? I suppose you have saved nothing?”

“Saved? I? Au jour le jour,” said Miranda, pronouncing with airy nonchalance the transpyrenean phrase.

“Well, then, il faut se faire une raison,” replied Colmenar, pleased to be able to display his learning in his turn.

“The question is to find the woman, the phoenix,” murmured Miranda, meditatively. “Girls of a marriageable age there are in plenty, but I have lost my reckoning here. Suggest some one you——”

“Some one here? God deliver you from the women of Madrid. They are more to be feared than the cholera? Do you know what the requirements are of any one of those angels? Do you know how much they spend?”

“So that——”

“The wife you require is in Leon itself.”

“In Leon! Yes, perhaps you are right, it might be easier there. But I don’t see—. The de Argas are already engaged; Concha Vivares is rich in expectations only; she has an aunt who intends to make her her heiress at her death, but before that event occurs—— The de Hornillos girl—no, she has nothing but patents of nobility, and they won’t make the pot boil.”

“You are flying too high; young ladies are at a discount. Wait a moment and I will show you——”

Colmenar rose, and opening one of the drawers of his desk, took from it a strip of paper, yellow with age and covered with names, like a proscription list. And it was in truth a list; in it were inscribed in alphabetical order the names of the feudatories of the great Colmenarian personality, residing in the various provinces of the Peninsula. Under some of the names was written a capital L, which signified, “Loyal”; others were marked V L, “Very loyal”; a few were marked, “Doubtful.”

The leader placed his forefinger on one of the names marked L.

“I offer you,” he said to Miranda, “a young girl who has a fortune of perhaps more than two millions.”

Miranda opened wide his eyes, and stretched out his hand to take the auspicious list.

“Two millions!” he exclaimed. “But there is no one like you for these finds.”

“You may have seen in Leon the person whose name is inscribed here,” continued Colmenar, indicating the line with his nail. “A robust, fine-looking old man, strong and vigorous still, Joaquin Gonzalez, the Leonese?”

“The Leonese! There is no one I know better. He has come to the government office of Leon several times, on business. Of course I know him. And now I remember that he has a daughter, but I have never taken any particular notice of her. She is very seldom seen.”

“They live very modestly. In ten years the fortune will double itself. He is a great man for business, the Leonese. A poor creature, a simpleton, in everything else; in politics he sees no further than his nose, but he has succeeded in making a fortune. This girl is his only child, and he adores her.”

“And don’t you think it likely that the girl may have formed some attachment already?”

“Bah, she is too young! The moment you present yourself—with your good address and your experience in such affairs——”

“Probably she is a ninny, and ugly into the bargain.”

“Her father was a magnificent-looking fellow in his youth, and her mother a handsome brunette,—why should the girl be ugly? No one is ugly at fifteen. She will need polishing, it is true; but between you and a dressmaker that is a question of a month. Women are much more readily civilized and polished than men. The desire to please teaches them more than a hundred masters could do.”

“And what would all my friends say of me—especially in Leon—if they saw me marry the daughter of the Leonese?”

“Bah! bah! that is simply a question of making a change. After you are married, petition privately to be transferred to some other position. The old man will remain there, taking care of the property, and you and the girl will go live where nobody will know whether her father was an archduke or the executioner. After the marriage, you and your bride can take a little trip to the continent and in this way you will escape gossip during the first few months. And be quick about it before you begin to grow rotund, and your hair—— Ah, how time passes! It is sad to think how old we are getting.”

Miranda gazed at the point of his elegant tan-colored boot in silence, thoughtfully scratching his forehead.

“Find me an excuse to visit the house,” he said at last, with resolution. “They are unaccustomed to society, and it will be necessary to have one. I shall not be required to parade the girl through the streets, I suppose.”

“You will make them a visit in my name. The old man will give you a warmer welcome than if you were the king himself!”

So saying, the leader seated himself at the table, which was littered with newspapers, letters, and books, and taking a sheet of stamped paper ran his hand over the white page, filling it with the rapid, almost unintelligible caligraphy of a man overwhelmed with business. He then folded the paper, slipped it into an envelope, and, without closing it, handed it to his friend.

When Miranda rose to take his leave he approached Colmenar, and speaking in a low voice, almost in a whisper, he murmured:

“Are you quite sure—quite certain about the—the two mill——”

“It is so likely I should be mistaken! All you have to do is to make inquiries in Leon. In conscience, you owe me a commission,” and the politician laughed and tapped Miranda on the cheek as if he were a child.

Under this exalted patronage Miranda presented himself in the peaceful abode of the Colmenarist feudatory, and was received as befitted a guest who came thus recommended. Naturally he resolved not to make himself known at once as a suitor for the hand of Lucía. Besides being a want of delicacy this would also be a want of tact, and then Miranda proposed to himself, before taking any decided step, to study carefully the ground on which he was treading. He found that what the leader had told him with regard to the money was the truth, and even less than the truth. He saw a house, old-fashioned in style, rude and plebeian in its usages, but in which honesty presided, and a solid and secure capital, daily augmented through the judicious management of Señor Joaquin and his simple and economical mode of living. It is true that the worthy Leonese seemed to Miranda a tiresome companion, vulgar in his manners, weak in character, and mediocre in intellect,—stupid even, at times; but he was obliged to put up with him, and he even adapted himself so skillfully to the ideas of the old man that the latter was soon unable to sip his coffee or to read El Progreso Nacional, the organ of Colmenar, without the sauce of the witty commentaries that Miranda made on every article, every paragraph, every item of news it contained. Miranda knew by heart the obverse side, the inner aspect of politics, and he explained amusingly the sly allusions, the artful reservations, the covert satire, that abound in every important newspaper, and that are a constant enigma for the simple-minded provincial subscriber. So that, since he had become intimate with Miranda, Señor Joaquin enjoyed the profound pleasure of being initiated into the mysteries, and he looked with disdain upon his Leonese co-religionists, who had not yet been admitted into the sanctuary of secret politics. In addition to these pleasures which he owed to Miranda’s friendship, the good old man swelled with pride—we already know how little of a philosopher he was—when he was seen walking side by side with a gentleman of so distinguished an appearance, the intimate friend of the governor, and the familiar companion of the highest people of the capital.

Lucía regarded the visit of the courteous and affable Miranda without displeasure, and noted with childish curiosity the neatness of his person, his well-polished shoes, his snowy linen, his scarf-pin, the curious trinkets attached to his watch-chain, for every woman—consciously or unconsciously—takes pleasure in these external adornments. Besides, Miranda possessed the art—and practiced it—of what we may call winning affection by diverting; he brought the young girl every day some new trifle, some novelty,—now a chromo, now a photograph, now rare flowers, now illustrated periodicals, now a novel by Fernan Caballero, or Alarcon,—and the pretty gifts that flowed through the doors of the antiquated house, messages as it were, from modern civilization, were so many voices praising the generous giver. The latter succeeded in bringing his conversation to the level of Lucía’s understanding, and showed himself very well informed regarding feminine, or rather infantile matters, and the young girl would sometimes even consult him with regard to the style in which she should wear her hair and the make of her gowns, and Miranda would very seriously make her raise or lower, by two centimeters, the waist of her gown or her chignon. Incidents like these served to vary a little the monotony of the life of the Leonese maiden, lending a charm to her intercourse with her undeclared lover.

At first it was matter of no little surprise in Leon that the fashionable Miranda should choose for his companion Señor Joaquin, a man on whose square shoulders the peasant’s jacket seemed unalterably riveted and fastened; but gossip was not long in arriving at a rational explanation of the phenomenon, and Lucía’s companions soon began to tease her unmercifully about Señor de Miranda’s passion, his attentions, his presents, and his devotion. She listened to them with a tranquil smile, never blushing, never losing a moment’s sleep on account of it all; nor did her heart beat a second faster when she heard Miranda’s ring at the bell, followed by the noise made by his resplendent boots as he entered the room. As no tender speech of Miranda’s came to confirm the words of her companions, Lucía continued tranquil and careless as ever. But Miranda, resolved now to bring his enterprise to a termination, and thinking that he had spent time enough in paving the way, one day, after sipping his coffee and reading El Progreso Nacional in the company of Señor Joaquin, asked the latter in plain terms for his daughter’s hand.

The Leonese was struck dumb with amazement and knew not what to say or do. His dream—Lucía’s entrance, so ardently desired, into the circles of polite society—was about to be realized. But we must be just to Señor Joaquin. He did not fail to perceive clearly, in this supreme moment, certain unfavorable points in the proposed marriage. He saw the difference in the ages of the prospective bride and bridegroom; he knew nothing of Miranda’s pecuniary position, while his daughter’s magnificent dowry was a matter of certainty; in short, he had a vague intuition of the base self-interest on which the demand was founded. The suitor showed himself a skillful strategist, forestalling suspicion, in a manner, and anticipating the thoughts of the Leonese.

“I myself,” he said, “have no fortune. I have my profession—it is true”; (Miranda, like most other Spaniards, had studied law and obtained his degree in early manhood) “and if I should some day lose my position I have energy enough, and more than enough, to work hard and open an office in Madrid, where I could have a fine practice. I desire ease and comfort for my wife, but for her alone; as for my own wants, what I have is sufficient to supply them. The difference in fortune deterred me for a long time from asking Lucía’s hand, but the sentiment with which so much beauty and innocence has inspired me was too powerful to resist; notwithstanding this, however, if Colmenar had not assured me that you were generous-minded and disinterested, I should never have summoned resolution——”

“Señor Colmenar has far too high an opinion of me,” responded the flattered Leonese; “but those things require consideration. Go take a little trip——”

“In a fortnight I will come back for your answer,” responded Miranda, discreetly, taking his hat to go.

He passed the fortnight in a Satanic frame of mind, for it was undoubtedly ridiculous for a man of his pretensions and his rank to have asked in marriage the daughter of a grocer and to be obliged to wait in the ante-chamber of the shop, so to say, until they should deign to open the door to admit him. Meanwhile Señor Joaquin, reading his newspaper and sipping his coffee alone, missed him greatly, and the idea of the marriage began to take root in his mind. Every day he thought the friend of Colmenar more and more desirable for a son-in-law. Notwithstanding this, however, he did what people usually do who desire to follow their inclinations without bearing the responsibility of their actions—he took counsel with some friends in regard to the matter, hoping to shelter himself under their approbation. In this expectation he was disappointed. Father Urtazu, who was the first person that he consulted, exclaimed, with his Navarrese frankness:

“For the old cat the tender mouse! The sweet-tongued, smooth-faced Don knows very well what he is about. But don’t you see, unhappy man, that the old fop might be Lucía’s father? Heaven knows what adventures he has had in the course of his life! Holy Virgin! who can tell what stories he may not have hidden away in the pockets of his coat!”

“But what would you do if you were in my case, Father Urtazu?”

“I? Take a year to think of it instead of a fortnight, and another year after that, for whatever might chance to turn up.”

“By the Constitution! You have not observed the merits of Señor Aurelio, father.”

“The merits—the merits—pretty merits, indeed! Pish, pish! Unless it be a merit to go dressed like a dandy, displaying a couple of inches of his shirt cuffs, and giving himself the airs of a young man, when he is older-looking than I, for, though it be true that my hair is gray, at least the tree has not dropped its leaves!”

And Father Urtazu pulled with energy the stout iron-gray locks that grew on his temples, bristly as brambles.

“What does the child herself say about it?” he asked, suddenly.

“I have not yet spoken to her——”

“But that is the first thing to be done, unhappy man! Ah, how true is it that the mind, becomes dull with age. What are you waiting for?”

Velez de Rada was even yet more decided and uncompromising.

“Marry your daughter to Miranda!” he cried, raising his eyebrows with an angry and indignant gesture. “Are you mad? The finest specimen of the race that I have met with here for the past ten years. A girl who has red globules enough in her blood to supply all the anæmic mannikins that promenade the streets of Madrid! Such a figure! Such a poise! Such proportions! And to Miranda who——” (here professional discretion sealed the lips of the physician, and silence reigned in the room).

“Señor Rada,”—Señor Joaquin, who was a little hard of hearing, began timidly.

“Do you know what is the duty of a father who has a daughter like Lucía?” the physician resumed. “To look, like Diogenes, for a man who, in constitution and exuberance of vitality, is her equal, and unite them. Do you consider that, with the indifference that prevails in this matter of marriage, with the sacrilegious unions we are accustomed to see between impoverished, sickly, and tainted natures and healthy natures, it is possible that at no distant date—in three or four generations more, perhaps—the utter deterioration of the peoples of Europe will be an assured fact? Or do you think that we can with impunity transmit to our descendants poison and pus in place of blood?”

Señor Joaquin left the doctor’s office a little frightened, but more confounded, consoling himself with the thought, however, that the misfortunes predicted for his race would not happen for a century to come, at the soonest. The last disappointment that awaited him in his matrimonial consultations came from a sister of his, a very old woman who, in her youthful days, had been a laundress, but who was now supported by her brother. The poor woman, whose deceased husband had led her a dog’s life, exclaimed, in her husky voice, raising her withered hands to heaven, and shaking her trembling head:

“Miranda? Miranda? Some rascal, I suppose; some villain. May a thunderbolt strike——”

The Leonese waited to hear no more, and regarded his consultation as at an end.

The most important part of the question—Lucía’s opinion—was still wanting. Her father was racking his brains to find a diplomatic means of discovering it, when the young girl herself provided him with the desired opportunity.

“Papa,” she asked one day, with the utmost innocence, “can Señor Miranda be ill? He has not been here for several days.”

Señor Joaquin seized the opportunity and laid before her Miranda’s proposal. Lucía listened attentively, with surprise depicted in her lustrous eyes.

“See there!” she said, at last. “Rosarito and Carmela were right, then, when they declared that Señor Miranda came here on my account. But who would have imagined it?”

“Come, child, what answer shall I give the gentleman?” asked the Leonese, with anxiety.

“Papa, how should I know? I never suspected that he wanted to marry me.”

“But, on your part, do you like Señor Miranda?”

“Like him? That I do. Though he is not so very young, he is still handsome,” answered Lucía, with the utmost naturalness.

“And his disposition, his manners?”

“He is very polite, very amiable.”

“Is the idea disagreeable to you that he should live here always—with us?”

“Not at all. On the contrary, he amuses me greatly when he comes.”

“Then, by the Constitution! you are in love with Señor Miranda?”

“See there! I don’t think that, though I have never thought much about those things, or what it may be like to fall in love; but I imagine it must be more exciting like, and that it comes to one more of a sudden—with more violence.”

“But these violent attachments, what need is there of them to be a good wife?”

“None, I suppose. To be a good wife, Father Urtazu says, the most needful thing is the grace of God—and patience, a great deal of patience.”