-Iii- · I

Julián awoke when a gentle, golden autumn sun was pouring fully into the room. While dressing, he examined the chamber with some deliberation. It was vast, without a plastered ceiling; it was lighted by three windows furnished with broad stone window-seats and sashes as lacking in panes as they were well provided with paper patches stuck on with wafers. The furniture erred neither on the side of sumptuousness nor of abundance, and in every corner remained evident traces of the habits of the previous occupant, now Abbot of Ulloa, and formerly the Marquis’s chaplain: cigar ends stuck to the floor, two pairs of unserviceable boots in a corner, on the table a packet of gunpowder, and on a window-seat various sporting implements, quail cages, traps, dog collars, and a rabbit skin ill-tanned and worse-smelling. In addition to these relics, pale cobwebs hung between the beams, and everywhere dust rested peacefully, holding sway there from time immemorial.

Julián looked upon the traces of his predecessor’s slovenliness, and without wishing to accuse him, nor to call him in his heart of hearts a filthy fellow, the fact was that so much dirt and rusticity inspired in him a great desire for neatness and cleanliness—an aspiration toward purity in life as toward purity in the soul. Julián belonged to the phalanx of the timidly scrupulous, who possess a skittish virtue, with the qualms of a nun and the bashfulness of an untouched maiden. Never having been detached from his mother’s apron strings save to attend lectures at the Seminary, he knew of life only what pious books teach. The other seminarists called him Saint Julián, adding that he lacked only the little dove in his hand. He knew not when his vocation might have come to him; perhaps his mother, housekeeper to the Señores de la Lage and a woman reputed to be very devout, had gently pushed him from his tenderest years toward the Church, and he had willingly allowed himself to be led. What is certain is that as a child he used to play at chanting Mass, and once grown up he never rested until he achieved it. Continence was easy to him, almost imperceptible, for the very reason that he kept it unsullied; for moralists hold that it is easier never to sin once than to sin only once. In his triumph Julián was aided, besides the grace of God which he sought right earnestly, by the frailness of his lymphatic-nervous temperament—purely feminine, devoid of ardors and rebellions, prone to tenderness, sweet and mild as mallow itself, yet not exempt, on occasion, from those sudden energies which are also observed in woman, that being who possesses least strength in a normal state and develops the greatest quantity of it in convulsive crises. Julián, by his decorum and habits of neatness—learned from his mother, who scented all his clothes with lavender and placed a pippin apple between every pair of socks—gained the reputation of a dapper seminarist, especially when it was discovered that he washed his hands and face frequently. Indeed it was so, and had not certain notions of devout modesty stood in the way, he would have extended his frequent ablutions to the rest of his body, which he endeavored to keep as clean as possible.

On the first day of his stay at the Pazos he had good need of a dip, considering the road dust that clung to his skin; but doubtless the present Abbot of Ulloa regarded toilet articles as luxury goods, for Julián saw nothing there save a tin basin, for which the stone window-seat served as a washstand. Neither jug, nor towel, nor soap, nor bucket. He stood motionless before the basin in his shirtsleeves, not knowing what to do, until, convinced of the impossibility of refreshing himself with water, he resolved at least to take an air bath, and opened the casement.

What met his gaze enchanted him. The valley mounted in a gentle slope, spreading before the Pazos all the luxuriance of its most fertile hillside. Vineyards, chestnut woods, fields of maize plump with grain or already harvested, and dense oak groves rose in terraces, climbing upward to a hillock whose gray skirt looked in the sunshine like a leaden white. At the very foot of the tower the orchard of the Pazos resembled a green carpet with yellowish borders, in the center of which was set the surface of a great mirror, which was nothing other than the face of the pond. The air, rich in oxygen and regenerating, penetrated Julián’s lungs, and he felt immediately dispelled a part of the vague terror inspired in him by the great ancestral mansion and what he had seen of its dwellers. As if to revive it, he caught behind him the sound of cautious footsteps, and turning round he saw Sabel, who offered him with one hand a saucer and chocolate cup, and with the other, on a pewter plate, a glass of fresh water with a thick napkin folded neatly on top. The maid came with sleeves rolled to the elbow, her hair disheveled, dry and flying, doubtless from the warmth of the bed; and in the light of day the freshness of her complexion was more noticeable, very white and as if suffused with blood. Julián hastened to slip into his frock coat, murmuring:

“Another time be so good as to knock twice at the door before entering.... As it happens I am on my feet, but it might have chanced that I was still in bed... or dressing.”

Sabel looked at him steadily, without confusion, and exclaimed:

“Pardon, sir.... I did not know.... He who does not know is like one who does not see.”

“Very well, very well.... I wished to say Mass before taking chocolate.”

“You will not be able to today, because the Abbot of Ulloa has the key to the chapel, and God only knows until what hour he will sleep, or whether there will be anyone to go down there for it.”

Julián repressed a sigh. Two days already without saying Mass! Precisely since his ordination as priest his religious fervor had redoubled, and he felt the youthful enthusiasm of a newly ordained celebrant, still shaken by the impression of the august investiture; so that he celebrated the sacrifice striving to perfect the slightest ceremony, trembling at the elevation, annihilated in spirit at the consumption, ever with unspeakable recollection. Well, if there was no help for it....

“Set the chocolate down there,” he said to Sabel.

While the girl carried out this order, Julián raised his eyes to the ceiling and lowered them to the floor, and coughed, seeking to find a formula, a discreet manner of explaining himself.

“Has it been long since the Señor Abbot slept in this room?”

“Not long.... It will be two weeks since he went down to the parish house.”

“Ah.... That accounts for it.... This is somewhat... dirty, does it not seem so to you? It would be well to sweep... and also to pass the broom between the beams.”

Sabel shrugged her shoulders.

“The Señor Abbot never ordered me to sweep his room.”

“Well, frankly, cleanliness is a thing that pleases everyone.”

“Yes, sir, of course.... Do not worry, I will put it nicely in order.”

She uttered this with so much submission that Julián in his turn wished to show her a little charitable interest.

“And the child?” he asked. “Did yesterday’s doing make him ill?”

“No, sir.... He slept like a blessed little saint and is already running about the garden. See? There he is.”

Looking through the open window, shading his eyes with his hand, Julián descried Perucho, who, bareheaded, with his head in the sun, was throwing stones into the pond.

“What does not happen in a year happens in a day, Sabel,” observed the chaplain gravely. “You must not permit them to make the boy drunk: it is a very ugly vice, even in grown men, how much more in an innocent child like that! Why do you endure Primitivo giving him so much drink? It is your duty to prevent it.”

Sabel fixed her blue pupils heavily upon Julián, it being impossible to discern in them the slightest flash of intelligence or conviction. At last she articulated slowly:

“What would you have me do...? I am not going to set myself against my father.”

Julián remained silent for a moment, astounded. So he who had made the child drunk was his own grandfather! He knew not what opportune answer to make, nor even how to utter an exclamation of censure. He raised the cup to his lips to cover his embarrassment, and Sabel, believing the dialogue ended, was withdrawing slowly, when the chaplain addressed one more question to her.

“Is the Señor Marquis already up?”

“Yes, sir.... He must be in the garden or by the sheds.”

“Be so good as to take me there,” said Julián, rising and hastily wiping his lips without unfolding the napkin.

Before coming upon the Marquis, the chaplain and his guide traversed almost the entire garden. That vast tract of ground must have been in former times cultivated with refinement and adorned with the embellishments of symmetrical and geometrical gardening whose fashion came to us from France. Of all which scarcely any vestiges remained: the coat of arms of the house, traced in myrtle upon the ground, was now an intricate thicket of box, wherein not the keenest lynx-eye could distinguish a trace of the wolves, pines, embattled towers, roundels, and other emblems that figured in the illustrious blazon of the Ulloas; and yet there persisted in the confused mass an indefinable air of something planted on purpose and with art. The stone border of the pond was half ruined, and the heavy granite balls that ornamented it lay rolling about the grass, greenish with moss, scattered here and there like gigantic projectiles on some deserted battlefield. Choked with mud, the pond looked like a slimy pool, enhancing the appearance of neglect and abandonment of the garden, where what were once bowers and rustic benches had turned into corners overgrown with brushwood, and the vegetable beds into maize patches, at whose edge, like a stubborn reminiscence of the past, grew wild, thorny, and tall a few rose bushes of choice variety, reaching up with their highest branches to kiss the crown of the plum or pear tree before them. Amid these remnants of bygone grandeur walked the last scion of the Ulloas, with his hands in his pockets, whistling absently like one who knows not how to spend his time. Julián’s presence offered him the solution to the problem. Young master and chaplain paired off, and praising the beauty of the day, finished inspecting the garden in detail, and even prolonged their walk as far as the grove and the oak woods that bounded on the north the Marquis’s extensive estate. Julián opened his eyes wide, wishing that all rustic knowledge might enter them at a bound, so as to understand well the explanations concerning the quality of the soil or the development of the trees; but accustomed to the cloistered life of the Seminary and the compostelan metropolis, nature seemed to him hard to comprehend, and almost inspired fear in him by the vital impetuosity he felt pulsing within it—in the thickness of the brakes, in the rough vigor of the trunks, in the fertility of the fruit trees, in the pungent purity of the open air. He exclaimed with the most sincere despondency:

“I confess the truth, sir.... Of these country matters I do not understand a jot.”

“Let us go and see the house,” suggested the Lord of Ulloa. “It is the largest in the country,” he added with pride.

They changed their course, heading toward the enormous mansion, which they entered by the door opening onto the garden, and having traversed the cloister formed by ashlar arcades, crossed several drawing-rooms with dilapidated furniture, without panes in the casements, whose faded paintings were maltreated by dampness, the woodworm being no more merciful with the timber of the flooring. They halted in a relatively small room with a grated window, where the black beams of the ceiling seemed exceedingly remote, and large bookcases of unvarnished chestnut astonished the eye, having thick wire grilles instead of glass. This gloomy chamber was furnished with a writing-desk, and upon it a horn inkstand, a very old leather writing-pad, several goose quills, and an empty wafer box.

The half-opened shelves allowed bundles and legal records to peer forth in abundance; on the floor, on the two leather-backed chairs, on the table, on the very sill of the grated window, lay more papers, more bundles—yellowed, ancient, worm-eaten, wrinkled, and torn; so much stationery gave off a musty, rancid smell that tickled the throat disagreeably. The Marquis of Ulloa, pausing on the threshold with a certain solemn expression, pronounced:

“The archives of the house.”

He immediately cleared the leather chairs, and explained very heatedly that everything was in the greatest confusion—a clarification wholly unnecessary—and that such disorder was due to the neglect of a certain Fray Venancio, his father’s steward, and of the present Abbot of Ulloa, in whose sinful hands the archives had come to the pass Julián now beheld....

“Well, it cannot continue thus,” exclaimed the chaplain. “Papers of importance treated in this manner! It is even very easy for some to be lost.”

“Naturally! God knows the damage they may have caused me already, and what state everything is in, for I do not even care to look at it.... This is what you see: a disaster, an utter ruin! Look..., look what you have there at your feet! Under your boot!”

Julián lifted his foot in great alarm, and the Marquis stooped, picking up from the floor a very thin book bound in green sheepskin, from which hung a round leaden seal. Julián took it with respect, and on opening it, upon the first leaf of vellum stood forth a superb heraldic miniature, in colors vivid and fresh in spite of the years.

“Letters patent of nobility!” declared the young master gravely.

By means of his folded handkerchief Julián wiped the mold from it, touching it with delicate hands. From childhood his mother had taught him to revere noble blood, and that parchment written in red ink, illuminated and gilded, seemed to him a most venerable object, worthy of pity for having been trampled and trodden under the soles of their boots. As the young master remained serious, his elbows on the table and his hands clasped beneath his chin, other words of the Señor de la Lage came back to the chaplain’s memory: ‘Everything in my nephew’s house must be at sixes and sevens.... You would do a work of charity if you put it somewhat in order.’ The truth was that he understood little about old documents, but with good will and patience....

“Sir,” he murmured, “why should we not set about putting this in order as God commands? Between you and me, it would be strange if we did not succeed. Look you: first we separate the modern from the ancient; of what is badly damaged a copy might be taken; what is torn can be pasted carefully with strips of transparent paper....”

The project seemed capital to the young master. They agreed to set to work the following morning. Misfortune would have it that on the morrow Primitivo discovered in a neighboring maize field a whole covey of partridges engaged in eating the ripe ears. And the Marquis slung his fowling-piece over his shoulder and left his chaplain forever and ever, amen, to struggle with the documents.

-IV-

And the chaplain struggled with them hand to hand, without respite, for three or four hours every morning. First he cleaned, dusted, smoothed out using the palm of his hand, and pasted little cigarette papers to join together the torn fragments of some deed. It seemed to him that he was dusting, gluing, and setting in order the House of Ulloa itself, which was to emerge from his hands bright as silver. The task, apparently easy, was not without its annoyances for the neat priest: an atmosphere of moldy dampness stifled him; when he lifted a heap of papers that had rested on the floor from time immemorial, half the documents would sometimes fall to pieces, nibbled to bits by the small and untiring teeth of mice; moths, which seem like organized and flying dust, fluttered their wings and got into his clothes; cockroaches, hunted in their most secret retreats, came forth blind with rage or fear, obliging him, not without great disgust, to squash them with his heels, stopping his ears so as not to hear the sickening crunch produced by the crushed body of the insect; spiders, dangling their dropsical bellies on their huge stilts, were wont to be cleverer and took refuge with the utmost speed in dark corners, whither a mysterious strategic instinct guided them. Of all these repulsive vermin, perhaps the one that most disgusted Julián was a species of damp worm or slug, cold and black, which was always found motionless and coiled into a ring beneath the papers, and when touched gave the sensation of a piece of soft and clammy ice.