-Xix- · I

No, that brave man was not he. A fine Mass he would say, with his head turned into a hive of humming bees! Until he could quell the mutinous thoughts that harassed him, until he could adopt a firm and valid resolve, Julián dared not even think of the holy sacrifice.

The matter was plain enough. The situation: the very same as the year before last. He had to leave that house, driven out by ugly vice, by infamous crime. It was not lawful for him to remain there a single moment longer. With all due respect, Christian marriage—in some sort his own work—had gone to the devil, and no trace of a home remained, but only a sink of corruption and sin. Away with the music elsewhere, then.

Only that... Come, there are things easier to conceive than to execute in this world. Everything seemed a mountain: finding a pretext, taking leave, packing his luggage... The first time he had thought of leaving the place it had already cost him an effort; today, the mere idea of departing produced the same effect upon him as if a cloth steeped in cold water were laid upon his soul. Why did the prospect of quitting the Pazos distress him so deeply? Strictly speaking, he was a stranger in that house.

That is to say, as for a stranger... Not a stranger, for he lived spiritually united to the family by respect, devotion, and habit. Above all, the child, the child! The recollection of the child left him dazed. He could not explain to himself the violent inward commotion caused by the thought that he would never take her in his arms again. Just think how fond he had grown of that little doll! His eyes filled with tears.

“They were right at the Seminary,” he murmured with irritation, “when they said I am very faint-hearted and very... like that... like women, who are affected by everything. A fine priest ordained for Mass! If I have such a passion for children, I ought not to have embraced the calling I chose. No, no; what I am saying now is a greater piece of folly still... If I like children and have a vocation for a tutor or nursery-man, who prevents me from caring for those who wander barefoot along the highways, begging alms? They are children of God just like this poor little one here... I did wrong, very wrong to grow so fond of her... But then, only a dog—what! not even a dog—only a wild beast could kiss a little angel and not love it dearly.”

Summing up his broodings afterwards, he added to himself:

“I am a simpleton, a weak-kneed milksop. I do not know why I came here a second time. I ought never to have returned. It was plain as day that the young master must end in this. My lack of energy is to blame. At the risk of my life I ought to have swept out that rabble, if not by fair means, then with a horsewhip. But I have no pluck, as the young master says very truly, and they are stronger and cleverer than I, beasts though they are. They have tricked me, they have hoodwinked me; I have not turned that shameless wench into the street; they have laughed at me, and hell has triumphed.”

While holding this monologue, he was taking articles of linen from a drawer of the chest, in order to pack his luggage; for, like all irresolute folk, he was prone to rush into action at first and adopt measures that helped him to deceive himself. As he stuffed the valise, he argued with himself:

“Lord, Lord, why must there be so much wickedness and so much stupidity upon earth? Why must man allow the devil to catch him with so coarse a hook and so wretched a bait? (saying this he laid pairs of socks in a row in the trunk). Possessing the pearl of women, the true counterpart of the virtuous woman, a most chaste wife (this superlative occurred to him as he carefully folded his new cassock), to go and fall precisely for a vile wench, a servant, a scullery-maid, a shameless hussy who goes gallivanting with the first peasant she meets!”

He had reached this point in his soliloquy when he was trying unsuccessfully to arrange his shovel hat so that the lid of the valise would not crush it.

The sound made by the lid as it descended, the harmonious groan of the leather, seemed to him an ironic voice replying:

“For that, for that very reason.”

“Can it be possible!” murmured the good chaplain. “Can it be possible that abjection, that unworthiness, that the very filth of sin attracts, stimulates, serves as a whet, like stinging peppers, to the vitiated palate of the slaves of vice! And that into this should fall, not persons of small account, but gentlemen of birth, of station, gentlemen who...”

He paused, and thoughtfully counted a little mound of handkerchiefs resting upon the chest of drawers.

“Four, six, seven... Yet I had a dozen, all marked... They lose linen here considerably...”

He counted again.

“Six, seven... And one in my pocket, eight... Perhaps there is another at the washerwoman’s...”

He let them drop suddenly. He had just remembered that one of those handkerchiefs he had himself tied under the baby’s chin, to prevent her dribble from chafing her neck. He sighed deeply, and opening the valise once more, observed that the silk of the shovel hat was being spoiled by the lid. “It will not go in,” he thought, and it seemed to him an enormous impediment to his journey that he could not pack the hat properly. He looked at his watch: it pointed to ten. At ten or a little after, the child took her broth, and it was the laughingstock of the world to see her with her mouth smeared with pap, determined to grasp the spoon and never quite managing it. She would be so sweet! He resolved to go downstairs; tomorrow it would be easy to pack his hat better and decide upon his departure. For twenty-four hours more or less...

This emollient medicine of delay is, for the majority of characters, an infallible specific. Its employment is not to be decried, in view of the comfort it affords: strictly speaking, life is a series of postponements, and there is only one final solution, the last. As soon as Julián conceived the luminous idea of waiting a little, he felt tranquil; more than that, happy. His disposition was not very cheerful, inclining rather to a species of dreamy and morbid melancholy, like that of anemic maidens; but at that moment he breathed with such relief at having found a solution that his hands trembled, unpacking with joyful haste the bundle of socks and linen, and restoring kindly liberty to hat and cloak. Then he hastened down the stairs toward Nucha’s room.

Nothing occurred that day to distinguish it from the rest, for there the only variation was usually the greater or lesser number of times the baby nursed, or the quantity of diapers hung out to dry. Nevertheless, within that peaceful interior the chaplain saw a mute and terrible drama unfolding. He now understood perfectly Nucha’s melancholy, her smothered sighs. And looking into her face and seeing her so wasted, with her sallow skin, her eyes larger and more dreamy, her beautiful mouth always tightly drawn except when she smiled at her daughter, he calculated that the lady must of necessity know everything, and a profound pity flooded his soul. He reproached himself for having even thought of leaving. If the lady needed a friend, a protector, in whom could she find one better than in him? And she would certainly need one.

That same night, before retiring, the chaplain witnessed a strange scene which plunged him into greater perplexity. His three-branched oil lamp having run out of oil so that he could neither pray nor read, he went down to the kitchen in quest of fuel. He found Sabel’s gathering very crowded. On the benches surrounding the hearth there was no room for another soul: girls spinning, others peeling potatoes, listening to the jokes and buffoonery of Uncle Pepe of Naya, an old fellow who was a perfect bag of mischief, and who, having come to grind a sack of wheat at the Ulloa mill where he intended to pass the night, found it no bad thing to regale himself at the Pazos with the bowl of lard broth and pork slices which the hospitable Sabel offered him. While he paid his footing by recounting funny tales, upon the great kitchen table, which since Don Pedro’s marriage the gentry no longer used, there were to be seen, not far from the murky oil light, the relics of a more succulent feast: remains of meat on greasy plates, an uncorked bottle of wine, half a tetilla cheese, all piled together in a corner, as though swept aside disdainfully by satiety; and in the clear space of the table, laid out in a row, were as many as a dozen playing cards, which, if not trimmed into an oval shape by excessive use like those Rinconete and Cortadillo handled, were not a whit behind them in greasiness and grime. Standing before them, Señora María the Sabia, extending her black, knobby finger like a dry branch of a tree, consulted them with a thoughtful air. Bent double, that hideous sibyl, illuminated by the bright fire of the hearth and the lamp light, inspired terror with her tow-like mop of hair, her look of a witch at a Sabbath, made more monstrous by the enormous goiter that disfigured her neck and mimicked a second face—a face from an infernal vision, without eyes or lips, smooth and shiny like a baked apple. Julián paused at the top of the stairs, contemplating these superstitious practices, which would certainly be interrupted if his slippers made any noise and betrayed his presence.

Had he known intimately the murky and not yet discredited science of cartomancy, how much more interesting the spectacle would have appeared to him! Then he might have seen assembled there, as in the cast of a drama, all the characters that played a part in his life and occupied his imagination. That King of Clubs, in a blue robe edged with red, his feet symmetrically set, the great green club upon his shoulder, would have appeared quite formidable to him had he known that it represented a dark, married man—Don Pedro. The Knave of the same suit would have seemed to him less ugly had he understood that it was the symbol of a dark lady—Nucha. At the Knave of Cups he would have aimed a kick for an insolent, drunken slut, seeing that it personified Sabel, a fair, unmarried wench. The gravest thing would have been to see himself—a fair young man—signified by the Knight of Cups, a blue horse to boot, although all these gaudy hues had long since been obliterated by grease.

And what would have happened if, afterwards, when the old crone shuffled the cards and, dividing them into four heaps, began to interpret their fateful meaning, he had been able to hear distinctly all the words issuing from the frightful cavern of her mouth! There were combinations of the Knave of Clubs with the Eight of Cups, which portended nothing less than long-lasting secret amours; appearances of the Eight of Clubs, which foretold quarrels between husband and wife; unions of the Knave of Swords with the Knave of Cups upside down, which contained gloomy auguries of widowerhood through the death of the wife. Fortunately, the Five of the same suit prophesied a happy union thereafter. All this, spoken by the sibyl in a low, cavernous voice, was listened to solely by the handsome scullery-maid Sabel, who, with arms folded behind her back and flushed cheeks, leaned over the oracle, which seemed to provoke her curiosity rather than her merriment. The noisy laughter with which Uncle Pepe’s jests were received at the hearth prevented anyone from paying heed to the old woman’s mumbling. Thanks to the position of the staircase, Julián commanded the table, tripod and altar of the fearful rite, and without being seen could observe and overhear something. He listened, trying to catch more clearly what he only perceived confusedly, and as in doing so he leaned upon the stair-rail, it creaked slightly, and the witch raised her hideous mask. In the twinkling of an eye she gathered up the cards, and the chaplain descended, somewhat embarrassed by his involuntary eavesdropping, but so preoccupied with what he believed he had surprised that it did not even occur to him to censure the practice of sorcery. The witch, adopting her usual humble and servile tone, hastened to explain to him that it was a mere pastime, “just to have a laugh.”

Julián returned to his room in a state of high agitation. He did not know himself what was running through his head. He had well suspected before what risks Nucha and her daughter ran living at the Pazos; now... now he saw them imminent, clear as day. A dreadful situation! The chaplain turned it over and over in his excited brain: the child would be stolen to starve her to death; Nucha would perhaps be poisoned... He tried to calm himself. Pshaw! Crimes are not so common in the world, thank God. There are judges, there are magistrates, there are executioners. That pack of scoundrels would be content with exploiting the master and the house, with making free of it, with ruling and annulling the lady in her domestic dignity and power. But... what if they were not content?

He trimmed his lamp, and resting his elbows upon the table attempted to read the works of Balmes, which the priest of Naya had lent him, and in whose perusal his spirit was wont to find pleasant solace, preferring converse with so sympathetic and persuasive an intellect to the scholastic depths of Prisco and San Severino. But at that moment he could not understand a single line of the philosopher, and heard only the dreary sounds outside, the constant lament of the mill-dam, the groaning of the wind in the trees. His overheated fancy mimicked among those plaintive murmurs another more distressing still, because it was human: a cry. What an absurd idea! He paid no heed and continued reading. But he fancied he heard that sorrowful moan once more. Could it be the dogs? He looked out of the window: the moon was sailing through a cloudy sky, and far away in the distance was heard the howling of a dog, that mournful howling which the peasants call scenting death and believe a sure sign of the approaching demise of a human being. Julián closed the window with a shudder. He was by no means distinguished for bravery, and his instinctive fears increased in the ancestral manor, which produced in him once more the painful impression of his first days. His lymphatic temperament did not possess the secret of those wholesome reactions whereby all vain fear, all phantoms of the imagination, are shaken off. He was capable, and had proved it, of facing any grave peril if he believed his duty commanded it; but not of doing so with a serene mind, with a noble contempt of danger, with that heroic good humour which belongs only to persons of rich, red blood and firm sinews. Julián’s particular courage was a trembling courage, so to speak—the brief nervous spurt of women.