Бенито Перес Гальдос
Dona Perfecta
CHAPTER XIII
A CASUS BELLI
After this prank the Troyas commenced a conversation with their visitors about the people and the affairs of the town. The engineer, fearing that his exploit might be discovered while he was present, wished to go, which displeased the Troyas greatly. One of them who had left the room now returned, saying:
“Suspiritos is now in the yard; she is hanging out the clothes.”
“Don Jose will wish to see her,” said another of the girls.
“She is a fine-looking woman. And now she arranges her hair in the Madrid fashion. Come, all of you.”
They took their visitors to the dining-room—an apartment very little used—which opened on a terrace, where there were a few flowers in pots and many broken and disused articles of furniture. The terrace overlooked the yard of an adjoining house, with a piazza full of green vines and plants in pots carefully cultivated. Every thing about it showed it to be the abode of neat and industrious people of modest means.
The Troyas, approaching the edge of the roof, looked attentively at the neighboring house, and then, imposing silence by a gesture on their cavaliers, retreated to a part of the terrace from which they could not see into the yard, and where there was no danger of their being seen from it.
“She is coming out of the kitchen now with a pan of peas,” said Maria Juana, stretching out her neck to look.
“There goes!” cried another, throwing a pebble into the yard.
The noise of the projectile striking against the glass of the piazza was heard, and then an angry voice crying:
“Now they have broken another pane of glass!”
The girls, hidden, close beside the two men, in a corner of the terrace, were suffocating with laughter.
“Senora Suspiritos is very angry,” said Rey. “Why do they call her by that name?”
“Because, when she is talking, she sighs after every word, and although she has every thing she wants, she is always complaining.”
There was a moment’s silence in the house below. Pepita Troya looked cautiously down.
“There she comes again,” she whispered, once more imposing silence by a gesture. “Maria, give me a pebble. Give it here—bang! there it goes!”
“You didn’t hit her. It struck the ground.”
“Let me see if I can. Let us wait until she comes out of the pantry again.”
“Now, now she is coming out. Take care, Florentina.”
“One, two, three! There it goes!”
A cry of pain was heard from below, a malediction, a masculine exclamation, for it was a man who uttered it. Pepe Rey could distinguish clearly these words:
“The devil! They have put a hole in my head, the–Jacinto, Jacinto! But what an abominable neighborhood this is!”
“Good Heavens! what have I done!” exclaimed Florentina, filled with consternation. “I have struck Senor Don Inocencio on the head.”
“The Penitentiary?” said Pepe Rey.
“Yes.”
“Does he live in that house?”
“Why, where else should he live?”
“And the lady of the sighs–”
“Is his niece, his housekeeper, or whatever else she may be. We amuse ourselves with her because she is very tiresome, but we are not accustomed to play tricks on his reverence, the Penitentiary.”
While this dialogue was being rapidly carried on, Pepe Rey saw, in front of the terrace and very near him, a window belonging to the bombarded house open; he saw a smiling face appear at it—a familiar face—a face the sight of which stunned him, terrified him, made him turn pale and tremble. It was that of Jacinto, who, interrupted in his grave studies, appeared at it with his pen behind his ear. His modest, fresh, and smiling countenance, appearing in this way, had an auroral aspect.
“Good-afternoon, Senor Don Jose,” he said gayly.
“Jacinto, Jacinto, I say!”
“I am coming. I was saluting a friend.”
“Come away, come away!” cried Florentina, in alarm. “The Penitentiary is going up to Don Nominative’s room and he will give us a blessing.”
“Yes, come away; let us close the door of the dining-room.”
They rushed pell-mell from the terrace.
“You might have guessed that Jacinto would see you from his temple of learning,” said Tafetan to the Troyas.
“Don Nominative is our friend,” responded one of the girls. “From his temple of science he says a great many sweet things to us on the sly, and he blows us kisses besides.”
“Jacinto?” asked the engineer. “What the deuce is that name you gave him?”
“Don Nominative.”
The three girls burst out laughing.
“We call him that because he is very learned.”
“No, because when we were little he was little too. But, yes, now I remember. We used to play on the terrace, and we could hear him studying his lessons aloud.”
“Yes, and the whole blessed day he used to spend singling.”
“Declining, girl! That is what it was. He would go like this: ‘Nominative, rosa, Genitive, Dative, Accusative.’”
“I suppose that I have my nickname too,” said Pepe Rey.
“Let Maria Juana tell you what it is,” said Florentina, hiding herself.
“I? Tell it to him you, Pepa.”
“You haven’t any name yet, Don Jose.”
“But I shall have one. I promise you that I will come to hear what it is and to receive confirmation,” said the young man, making a movement to go.
“What, are you going?”
“Yes. You have lost time enough already. To work, girls! Throwing stones at the neighbors and the passers-by is not the most suitable occupation for girls as pretty and as clever as you are. Well, good-by.”
And without waiting for further remonstrances, or answering the civilities of the girls, he left the house hastily, leaving Don Juan Tafetan behind him.
The scene which he had just witnessed, the indignity suffered by the canon, the unexpected appearance of the little doctor of laws, added still further to the perplexities, the anxieties, and the disagreeable presentiments that already disturbed the soul of the unlucky engineer. He regretted with his whole soul having entered the house of the Troyas, and, resolving to employ his time better while his hypochondriasm lasted, he made a tour of inspection through the town.
He visited the market, the Calle de la Triperia, where the principal stores were; he observed the various aspects presented by the industry and commerce of the great city of Orbajosa, and, finding only new motives of weariness, he bent his steps in the direction of the Paseo de las Descalzas; but he saw there only a few stray dogs, for, owing to the disagreeable wind which prevailed, the usual promenaders had remained at home. He went to the apothecary’s, where various species of ruminant friends of progress, who chewed again and again the cud of the same endless theme, were accustomed to meet, but there he was still more bored. Finally, as he was passing the cathedral, he heard the strains of the organ and the beautiful chanting of the choir. He entered, knelt before the high altar, remembering the warnings which his aunt had given him about behaving with decorum in church; then visited a chapel, and was about to enter another when an acolyte, warden, or beadle approached him, and with the rudest manner and in the most discourteous tone said to him:
“His lordship says that you are to get out of the church.”
The engineer felt the blood rush to his face. He obeyed without a word. Turned out everywhere, either by superior authority or by his own tedium, he had no resource but to return to his aunt’s house, where he found waiting for him:
First, Uncle Licurgo, to announce a second lawsuit to him; second, Senor Don Cayetano, to read him another passage from his discourse on the “Genealogies of Orbajosa”; third, Caballuco, on some business which he had not disclosed; fourth, Dona Perfecta and her affectionate smile, for what will appear in the following chapter.
CHAPTER XIV
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 Dona 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 Senor Don Inocencio. I know every thing already. Maria Remedios, who has just left the house, has told me all about it.”
Dona 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, senora!”
“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, Dona 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 Jose! 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, Senor 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. Senor 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 Dona 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, senora,” 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, Senor Don Jose. 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 Senoras 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 Dona 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, senor—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 Dona 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, senoras,’ 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 Dona 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, Senor Don Jose,” 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, Senor 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 Dona 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 senorito’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 Dona 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 Dona 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 Dona 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 Dona 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.”
CHAPTER XV
DISCORD CONTINUES TO GROW UNTIL WAR IS DECLARED
Every one looked toward the door, at which appeared the imposing figure of the Centaur, serious-looking and frowning; embarrassed by his anxiety to salute the company politely; savagely handsome, but disfigured by the violence which he did himself in smiling civilly and treading softly and holding his herculean arms in a correct posture.
“Come in, Senor Ramos,” said Pepe Rey.
“No, no!” objected Dona Perfecta. “What he has to say to you is an absurdity.”
“Let him say it.”
“I ought not to allow such ridiculous questions to be discussed in my house.”
“What is Senor Ramos’ business with me?”
Caballuco uttered a few words.
“Enough, enough!” exclaimed Dona Perfecta. “Don’t trouble my nephew any more. Pepe, don’t mind this simpleton. Do you wish me to tell you the cause of the great Caballuco’s anger?” she said, turning to the others.
“Anger? I think I can imagine,” said the Penitentiary, leaning back in his chair and laughing with boisterous hilarity.
“I wanted to say to Senor Don Jose—” growled the formidable horseman.
“Hold your tongue, man, for Heaven’s sake! And don’t tire us any more with that nonsense.”
“Senor Caballuco,” said the canon, “it is not to be wondered at that gentlemen from the capital should cut out the rough riders of this savage country.”
“In two words, Pepe, the question is this: Caballuco is—”
She could not go on for laughing.
“Is—I don’t know just what,” said Don Inocencio, “of one of the Troya girls, of Mariquita Juana, if I am not mistaken.”
“And he is jealous! After his horse, the first thing in creation for him is Mariquilla Troya.”
“A pretty insinuation that!” exclaimed Dona Perfecta. “Poor Cristobal! Did you suppose that a person like my nephew—let us hear, what were you going to say to him? Speak.”
“Senor Don Jose and I will talk together presently,” responded the bravo of the town brusquely.
And without another word he left the room.
Shortly afterward Pepe Rey left the dining-room to retire to his own room. In the hall he found himself face to face with his Trojan antagonist, and he could not repress a smile at the sight of the fierce and gloomy countenance of the offended lover.
“A word with you,” said the latter, planting himself insolently in front of the engineer. “Do you know who I am?”
As he spoke he laid his heavy hand on the young man’s shoulder with such insolent familiarity that the latter, incensed, flung him off with violence, saying:
“It is not necessary to crush one to say that.”
The bravo, somewhat disconcerted, recovered himself in a moment, and looking at Rey with provoking boldness, repeated his refrain:
“Do you know who I am?”
“Yes; I know now that you are a brute.”
He pushed the bully roughly aside and went into his room. As traced on the excited brain of our unfortunate friend at this moment, his plan of action might be summed up briefly and definitely as follows: To break Caballuco’s head without loss of time; then to take leave of his aunt in severe but polite words which should reach her soul; to bid a cold adieu to the canon and give an embrace to the inoffensive Don Cayetano; to administer a thrashing to Uncle Licurgo, by way of winding up the entertainment, and leave Orbajosa that very night, shaking the dust from his shoes at the city gates.
But in the midst of all these mortifications and persecutions the unfortunate young man had not ceased to think of another unhappy being, whom he believed to be in a situation even more painful and distressing than his own. One of the maid-servants followed the engineer into his room.
“Did you give her my message?” he asked.
“Yes, senor, and she gave me this.”
Rey took from the girl’s hand a fragment of a newspaper, on the margin of which he read these words:
“They say you are going away. I shall die if you do.”
When he returned to the dining-room Uncle Licurgo looked in at the door and asked:
“At what hour do you want the horse?”
“At no hour,” answered Rey quickly.
“Then you are not going to-night?” said Dona Perfecta. “Well, it is better to wait until to-morrow.”
“I am not going to-morrow, either.”
“When are you going, then?”
“We will see presently,” said the young man coldly, looking at his aunt with imperturbable calmness. “For the present I do not intend to go away.”
His eyes flashed forth a fierce challenge.
Dona Perfecta turned first red, then pale. She looked at the canon, who had taken off his gold spectacles to wipe them, and then fixed her eyes successively on each of the other persons in the room, including Caballuco, who, entering shortly before, had seated himself on the edge of a chair. Dona Perfecta looked at them as a general looks at his trusty body-guard. Then she studied the thoughtful and serene countenance of her nephew—of that enemy, who, by a strategic movement, suddenly reappeared before her when she believed him to be in shameful flight.
Alas! Bloodshed, ruin, and desolation! A great battle was about to be fought.