Читать книгу The Strange Friend of Tito Gil - Pedro Antonio de Alarcón - Страница 3

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Tito Gil was a poor boy, tall, thin and sallow, with great black eyes, and a frank, open face; badly dressed and awkward, but possessed of a bright happy disposition.

At the time our story opens, he was about nineteen years of age; the son, nephew, grand-nephew, cousin and Heaven knows what more, to the best of the old Court shoemakers.

His mother, Crispina Lopez, died in giving him birth, and her husband, Juan Gil, did not regard the child with much affection until he learned that he might be left a widower, from which it may be inferred that the poor shoemaker and Crispina Lopez were an example of brief but bad marriages.

Nevertheless, and judging only from appearances Crispina Lopez deserved to be more sincerely mourned by her husband; for when she left the paternal roof, she brought him as “dot,” an almost exceptional beauty, abundance of clothes and house-linen and,—a very wealthy customer, nothing less than a Count, the Count of Rionuevo, who for some months had had the extraordinary caprice of covering his small delicate feet with the good Juan’s rough work.

This naturally caused gossip, which however at present has nothing to do with my story; but what is important for us to know is, that at the age of fourteen, on discovering Tito to be a good cobbler, the noble Count of Rionuevo, either pitying his orphanhood, or attracted by his winning ways (no one really understood exactly why), brought him to his own palace as page after much opposition on the part of the Countess, who had heard of the child born to Crispina Lopez.

Tito had received some instruction in reading, writing, arithmetic and Christian doctrine, so that he was soon able to commence the study of Latin under a friar who was a frequent visitor at the Count’s home.

It may truly be said that these years were the happiest of his life, not because he lacked troubles (for the Countess took pains to remind him constantly of the shoemaker’s awl and strap), but because he accompanied his protector every evening to the palace of the aged Duke of Monteclaro, whose daughter, sole heiress to all his vast possessions, was extremely beautiful, although the child of a very ugly and ungainly father.

Elena had seen but twelve summers when she first met Tito; and as the poor page passed for the son of a noble, but ruined family (pitiful lie of Count Rionuevo), the aristocratic girl did not disdain to engage in childish games with him, playfully calling him “fiancé,” and perhaps sometimes allowing an embrace, when her twelve years had changed to fourteen, and his fourteen to sixteen.

So passed three years. The shoemaker’s son lived in an atmosphere of luxury and pleasure; went to Court, conversed with the nobility, acquired an elegant manner, delighted in a smattering of French (then very fashionable), and in fact learned to ride, to dance, to fence, something of chess and a little of necromancy.

Then came death for the third time, but now with less pity than before, to dash the poor boy’s future to the ground. The Count of Rionuevo died intestate, and the widowed Countess, cordially hating his “protégé,” hastened to tell him, with tears of feigned sorrow in her eyes, and hidden venom in her heart, that he must leave the palace without delay, as his presence only saddened her by reminding her of her husband.

Feeling as though waking from a beautiful dream, or as if the victim of a horrible nightmare, Tito, weeping bitterly, gathered together what clothes were left him, and abandoned the no longer hospitable roof. Poor, without family, and no home to shelter him, he suddenly remembered that in a certain alley of the Vistillas quarter, he owned a cobbler’s stall, and some shoemaker’s tools, which had been left in charge of an old woman of the neighborhood, in whose humble home he had found a tender welcome and even sweet-meats, during the life of the virtuous Juan Gil.

He went there; the old woman still lived; the tools were in good condition, and during those years, the rent of the stall had brought in some seven doubloons: these the good woman gave him, not without having previously moistened them with tears of joy.

Tito decided to remain there, to devote himself to his trade, to forget completely the riding, the fencing, the dancing and the chess, but by no means Elena de Monteclaro. This last would have been impossible, although he fully appreciated that he was dead to her, or that she was to him; but before drawing the funeral veil of hopelessness over that inextinguishable love, he wished to say a last “adieu,” to her who had been for so long the very soul of his soul. One evening therefore he dressed himself carefully, and set out for the Duke’s palace.

A travelling coach, drawn by four mules, was before the door. Elena, followed by her father, entered it.

“Tito!”—she exclaimed, sweetly, on seeing him.

“Drive on!”—shouted the Duke to the coachman, without hearing Elena, or seeing Rionuevo’s former page.

The mules dashed off.

The unhappy boy extended his arms towards his love without having a chance to even say “good-bye.”

“Good night!” growled the porter—“I must close the doors!”

“Are they going away?”—asked Tito, recovering from his bewilderment.

“Yes, sir,—to France,”—replied the porter dryly, shutting the door in his face.

The ex-page went home, more downhearted than ever, took off and carefully laid away his fine clothes, donned the worst he had, cut off his long curls, and shaved a youthful mustache that had just commenced to appear. The next day he took possession of the rickety chair which Juan Gil had occupied for forty years, surrounded by lasts, scissors, straps and wax.

Thus we find him at the beginning of this tale, which, as I have already said, is called, “The Strange Friend of Tito Gil.”