-Xxiii-

In the heart of the tender heiress of the Ulloas, the chaplain had had, for some time past, a completely triumphant and victorious rival: Perucho.

It was enough for him to appear to conquer. He had entered one day on tiptoe, and without being heard had crept up to the cradle. Nucha offered him sweets and copper coins from time to time, and the boy, as usually happens with tamed wild beasts, conceived an excessive familiarity and attachment, so that it was hard work to drive him away, and he was to be found everywhere when least expected, like a kitten spoiled with petting and company.

The baby girl attracted his attention immensely at first. Neither newly hatched chicks when they broke the shell, nor Linda’s puppies, nor the cow’s newborn calves, had ever succeeded in fixing Perucho’s astonished gaze in such a manner. He could not understand how or whence so great a novelty had come; upon this theme he was lost in thought. He hovered incessantly around the cradle, at the manifest risk of receiving a cuff from the nurse; and, if they did not turn him out, he would stand for a long time with his finger in his mouth, rapt and spellbound, more like than ever to the cherubs in gardens that say by their attitude: “Silence.” Never had he been seen still for so many consecutive hours. As soon as the child began to show signs of consciousness of external life, she gave clear proofs that if she interested Perucho, Perucho mattered no less to her. Both characters immediately recognized their mutual importance, and to this recognition there succeeded evident signs of harmony and rejoicing. Scarcely did the little girl see Perucho than her little eyes sparkled, and from her parted mouth there issued, together with the warm, crystalline dribble of teething, an affectionate cooing. She eagerly stretched out her hands, and Perucho, understanding the order, drew near his head, closing his eyelids; then the child satisfied her craving, pulling at her ease his curly hair, thrusting her fingertips into his mouth, ears, and nose, all accompanied by the same cooing and interspersed with shrieks of joy when, for instance, she hit upon the hole in his ear.

When the first two or three months of nursing were past, children’s tempers sour, and their cries and tantrums are frequent, because the premonitory symptoms of dentition begin to distress them. When this happened to her baby, Nucha was accustomed to employ with good result the talisman of Perucho’s presence. One day when the screaming would not cease, it was necessary to resort to more heroic expedients: to seat Perucho in a low chair and place the baby in his arms. He sat quiet and motionless, with eyes wide open and staring, not daring to breathe, looking so handsome that one felt like devouring him. The baby, without transition, had passed from fury to calm, and laughed, opening a span of toothless mouth; she laughed with her lips, with her eyes, with her dancing feet that dealt rapid little kicks against Perucho’s thigh. The boy dared not even turn his head, so utterly enchanted was he.

In proportion as the child grew more attentive, Perucho exerted his ingenuity in bringing her playthings of his own invention, which amused her infinitely. There was no telling what that young scamp devised to find new things at every turn—whether flowers, or live fledglings, or cane crossbows, or all kinds of rubbish, which was what delighted the little girl most. He would present himself, perhaps, with a frog tied by one leg, kicking in grotesque contortions, or arrive proudly bearing a newborn mouse, so tiny and frightened that it was a pity to see. That young imp made a specialty of live playthings. In his torn and hole-riddled cap he stored lizards, butterflies, and ladybirds; in his pockets and bosom, nests, berries, and grubs. The lady would pull his ears good-humouredly:

“If you bring such disgusting things here again... you will see, you will see! I will hang you in the chimney like sausages, to be smoked!”

Julián tolerated these intimacies until he surprised the secret of others far less innocent. Ever since rising early he had seen Sabel coming out of Don Pedro’s room, his blood curdled every time he encountered the boy and noticed the affection with which Nucha treated him at times.

One day the chaplain entered the lady’s room and came upon an unexpected sight. In the centre of the chamber steamed a colossal earthenware tub full of warm water, and tightly embracing each other in their skins, the boy holding the little girl in his arms, Perucho and the heiress of Ulloa were in the bath. Nucha, crouching down, was watching the group.

“There was no other way of getting her to bathe,” she exclaimed on noticing Julián’s surprise; “and as Don Máximo says the bath does her good...”

“I am not surprised at her,” replied the chaplain, “but at him, who fears water more than fire.”

“For the sake of being with the baby,” retorted Nucha, “he would let himself be bathed in boiling pitch. Look at them in their glory! Do they not look like a pair of little brother and sister?”

As she uttered the phrase unintentionally, Nucha looked up from the floor toward Julián. The change in the chaplain’s face was so instantaneous, so revealing, so profound, that the lady of Moscoso, resting one hand on the floor, sprang suddenly to her feet, facing him. In that countenance wasted by long illness, beneath whose delicate skin the branching veins showed through, in those dreamy eyes with their large pupils and moist cornea encircled by dark blue rings, Julián saw kindle and blaze behind the black eyelashes a terrible light wherein burned certainty, amazement, and horror. He remained silent. He had not the heart to utter a single phrase, nor the dissimulation to compose his altered features.

The little girl, in the warm well-being of the bath, smiled; and Perucho, holding her under the armpits, talking to her in an affectionate gibberish of loving diminutives, swung her gently in the clear liquid, parted her thighs so that the cool water might reach every part, imitating with religious care what he had seen Nucha do. The scene took place in one of the smallest salons of the house, divided in two by an enormous and dilapidated eighteenth-century screen, painted fantastically with improbable landscapes: pointed trees in a row resembling lettuces, mountains shaped like San Simón cheeses, clouds in the form of loaves of bread, and red-roofed houses with two windows and a door, always facing the spectator. The screen concealed Nucha’s bed, with its gilded canopy and twisted columns, and the baby’s cradle. Motionless for a few seconds, the lady suddenly recovered the power of action. She bent over the tub and snatched her daughter violently from Perucho’s arms.

The child, surprised and terrified by the abrupt movement, interrupted in her amusement, burst into sudden and disconsolate weeping; and her mother, paying no heed to her, ran behind the screen, laid her in the cradle, half covered her, and came out again immediately. Perucho still remained in the water, considerably bewildered; the lady seized him by the shoulders, by the hair, by any part she could grasp, and pushing him cruelly, naked as he was, pursued him across the salon until she thrust him out with blows.

“Out of here!” she cried, paler than ever and with blazing eyes. “Do not let me catch you coming in!... If you return I will flog you, do you hear? I will flog you!”

She went behind the screen again, and Julián followed her, dazed, hardly knowing what was happening to him. With head bent and trembling lips, the lady of Moscoso, without concealing the agitation of her hands, was arranging the diapers of her daughter, whose crying now bore the mournful inflections of a grown person’s grief.

“Call the nurse,” ordered Nucha curtly.

Julián ran to obey. At the door of the salon something lying upon the floor barred his way; he raised his foot; it was Perucho, naked, curled into a ball. His crying was inaudible: only the gleam of heavy tears was visible, and the heaving of his distressed chest. Moved to compassion, the chaplain lifted the child. His flesh, still wet, was livid and chilled.

“Come for your clothes,” he told him. “Take them to your mother so that she may dress you. Be quiet now.”

Insensible as a Spartan to physical pain, Perucho thought only of the injustice committed against him.

“I was doing no harm...” he stammered, sobbing. “I-was-do-ing... no... harm... at... all...”

Julián returned with the nurse, but the infant took a long time to find comfort at the breast. She would take the nipple in her mouth, and suddenly turn away her face, pout, and begin a plaintive cry. Nucha, with an automatic step, emerged from the alcove formed by the screen and approached the window, making a sign to Julián to follow her. And, both pale and disturbed, they contemplated each other for some minutes in silence—she questioning with an imperious glance, he already resolved to deceive, to lie. There are problems that are only problems when posed in cold blood; in moments of urgency, instinct resolves them with wonderful certainty. Julián was determined to depart from the truth without scruple.

At length Nucha said in a hollow tone:

“Do not imagine that this is the first time it has occurred to me that that... that child is... my husband’s son. I have thought of it before; only it was like a flash of lightning, one of those things that one dismisses as soon as conceived. Now... now the case is altered. Merely from seeing your face...”

“Good heavens, Señorita Marcelina! What has my face to do with it?... Do not agitate yourself, I entreat you not to agitate yourself... This must surely be the devil’s work! Good heavens a thousand times!”

“No, I am not agitating myself,” she exclaimed, breathing hard and passing her open palm across her forehead.

“God bless me! Madam, you are unwell. Your colour has changed so... I can see that you are going to have a seizure. Will you have the spoonful of medicine?”

“No, no, and no; this is nothing: a little choking in the throat. I... I feel it often; it is like a ball that forms there... At the same time it seems as though they were boring into my temple... To the point, to the point. Tell me what you know. Conceal nothing.”

“Madam...” Julián resolved then, in his heart, to have recourse to what is called a Jesuitical subterfuge, which is nothing but the natural resort of all who, detesting falsehood, find themselves compelled to dread the truth. “Madam... A plague upon my face! What a notion to come into your head! I was thinking of no such thing. No, madam, no.”

The wife fixed her eyes more intently upon those of the chaplain, and put two or three concrete, decisive questions to him. Now was the moment for Jesuitism, or rather, for the truth seized where it neither pricks nor cuts.

“You may believe me; you see I would take no pleasure in saying one thing for another: I do not know whose child the boy is. Nobody knows for certain. It seems natural that he should be the child of the girl’s lover.”

“Are you certain that she has a... lover?”

“As certain as that it is broad daylight.”

“And that the lover is a country lad?”

“Yes, madam: a handsome young fellow, to be sure; the one who plays the bagpipes at the fiestas in Naya and everywhere. I have seen him come here a thousand times, last year, and... they were courting. What is more: I know for a fact that they were trying to obtain their papers to get married. Yes, madam: I know it for a fact. You see, then, that...”

Nucha breathed again, raising her right hand to her throat, which was doubtless constricted by the familiar choking sensation. Her features grew somewhat calmer, without recovering their habitual composure and charming serenity: the wrinkle remained between her brows, the wildness in her gaze.

“My child...” she murmured in a low voice, “my child in his arms! Whatever you may say and swear and protest... Julián, this must be remedied. How can I live like this? You ought to have warned me before! If the boy and the woman do not leave here, I shall go mad. I am ill; these things do me harm... great harm.”

She smiled bitterly and added:

“I have little luck... I have harmed no one, I married to please Papa, and see how matters turn out for me!”

“Madam...”

“Do not you deceive me too,” she emphasized the too. “You were brought up in my house, Julián, and to me you are like one of the family. Here I have no other friend. Advise me.”

“Madam,” exclaimed the chaplain with warmth, “I would gladly deliver you from every trouble you may have in the world, even though it should cost the blood from my veins.”

“Either that woman marries and leaves,” pronounced Nucha, “or...”

Here she broke off the sentence. There are critical moments when the mind caresses two or three violent, extreme solutions, and the tongue, more cowardly, dares not formulate them.

“Oh, Señorita Marcelina, do not distress yourself so,” pleaded Julián. “These are fancies, madam, mere fancies!”

She took his hands in hers, which were burning.

“Tell my husband to dismiss her, Julián. For the love of God and His most holy Mother!”

The touch of those feverish palms, the entreaty, disturbed the chaplain in an inexplicable manner, and without reflecting he exclaimed:

“How often have I told him so!”

“You see!” she retorted, shaking her head and clasping her hands.

Both fell silent. Across the countryside was heard the hoarse cawing of crows; behind the screen the baby whimpered, inconsolable. Nucha shuddered two or three times. At last she articulated, tapping with her knuckles upon the window-panes:

“Then it must be I...”

The chaplain murmured as though praying:

“Madam... For God’s sake... Do not trouble your mind... Think no more of that...”

The lady of Moscoso closed her eyes and rested her face against the window-panes. She was striving to control herself: the energy and serenity of her character sought to come to the surface in so furious a storm. But a tremor shook her shoulders, betraying the tyranny of the nervous system over her debilitated frame. The trembling, at last, gradually diminished and ceased... Nucha turned round, with dry eyes and her nerves subdued once more.