-Iii- · II

At length, by dint of patience and resolution, Julián triumphed in his battle with those impertinent vermin, and on the shelves, now cleared, the documents were ranged in line, occupying, by a miraculous effect of good order, half the space they took before, and fitting where they had never fitted. Three or four patents of nobility, all with their pendant lead seals, were set apart, wrapped in clean cloths. Everything was now in order, except one section of the shelving where Julián descried the dark, gold-tooled backs of a few old books. It was the library of an Ulloa—an Ulloa of the beginning of the century: Julián stretched out his hand, took a volume at random, opened it, and read the title-page... ‘The Henriade, a French poem, rendered into Spanish verse: its author, Monsieur de Voltaire...’. He returned the volume to its place with tight-set lips and downcast eyes, as always when something wounded or scandalized him: he was not exceedingly intolerant, but as for Voltaire, he would willingly have done to him what he did to the cockroaches; nevertheless, he confined himself to condemning the library, refusing to pass so much as a duster over the backs of the books: so that moths, worms, and spiders, harried everywhere else, found shelter under the shadow of the smiling Arouet and his enemy, the sentimental Jean-Jacques, who also slept there peacefully since the year 1816.

The material cleaning of the archives was no child’s play; nevertheless, the real labor of Hercules was the classification. ‘Catch me if you can!’ the old papers seemed to say as soon as Julián attempted to distinguish them. A tangle, a skein without an end, a labyrinth without a guiding thread. No beacon existed to guide him over that unfathomable ocean: neither registers, nor statements of accounts, nor anything. The only records he found were two greasy notebooks reeking of tobacco, wherein his predecessor, the Abbot of Ulloa, had jotted down the names of the payers and tenants of the estate, and in the margin, with a mark intelligible to himself alone or with words still more enigmatic, the balance of their payments. Some had a cross, others a scribble, those further on a reference mark, and the fewest, the phrases does not pay, will pay, is paying, has paid. What then did the scribble and the cross signify? An unfathomable mystery. On one and the same page receipts and expenditures were mingled: here So-and-so appeared as an insolvent debtor, and two lines below as a creditor for day-wages. Julián derived from the abbot’s book a tremendous sick headache. He blessed the memory of Fray Venancio, who, more radical, had left neither a trace of accounts nor the slightest voucher of his long administration.

Julián had set his hand to the work with the greatest zeal, believing it would not be impossible for him to find his bearings in such a chaos of papers. He strained his eyes to decipher the ancient handwriting and the intricate flourishes of the deeds; he wished at least to separate what pertained to each of the three or four principal rent-rolls possessed by the house; and he was astonished that to collect so little money, such paltry quantities of rye and wheat, so great a farrago of proceedings and so much indigestible documentation should be required. He lost himself in a maze of ground-rents and sub-rents, apportionments, quit-rents, annuities, entails, dower agreements, tithes, thirds, petty lawsuits over arrears, and monstrous suits over partitions. At every step all that mislaid paperwork became more confused in his head; if the works of repair, such as putting covers of strong white paper on deeds falling to pieces from sheer age, were now easy to him, not so the scientific understanding of the wretched documents, indecipherable to anyone lacking training and practice. Quite disheartened, he confessed as much to the Marquis.

“Sir, I cannot see my way through.... A lawyer is needed here, an expert person.”

“Yes, yes, I have been thinking so myself for a long time past.... It is indispensable to take matters in hand, for the documentation must be in a terrible state.... How have you found it? In a pitiful condition? I warrant you have.”

The Marquis said this with that vehement and dark tone he adopted when speaking of his own affairs, however insignificant they might be; and while talking, his hands were busy fastening her collar of bells upon Chula, with whom he was about to go out to shoot a few quails.

“Yes, sir...” murmured Julián. “It is not at all well, no.... But a person accustomed to these things unravels them in a trice.... And whoever it is must come soon, for papers do not improve like this.”

The truth was that the archives had produced upon Julián’s soul the same impression as the entire house: that of a ruin, a vast and threatening ruin, which represented something great in the past, but at present was crumbling with all speed. This was in Julián an unreasoned apprehension, which would have turned into conviction had he been well acquainted with certain family antecedents of the Marquis.

Don Pedro Moscoso de Cabreira y Pardo de la Lage was left an orphan by his father’s death while still a mere child. But for such a misfortune, he might perhaps have had a profession: the Moscosos retained, from the Frenchified, encyclopedist, and Freemason grandfather who took the liberty of reading Monsieur de Voltaire, a certain tradition of ancient culture, half extinguished already, yet still sufficient to impel a Moscoso to the benches of the university lecture hall. Among the Pardos de la Lage, on the contrary, it was an axiom that a live ass is worth more than a dead doctor. The Pardos were living then in their ancestral mansion, not far distant from that of Ulloa: on the widowhood of Don Pedro’s mother, the eldest son of the house of Lage was on the point of marrying in Santiago a young lady of distinction, moving his household to the city; and Don Gabriel, the younger son, came to the House of Ulloa to keep his sister company, as he said, and serve as her protector; in reality, so evil tongues affirmed, to enjoy at his pleasure the revenues of his deceased brother-in-law. The fact was that Don Gabriel in a short time assumed the mastery of the house: he discovered and proposed as steward that blessed unfrocked friar Fray Venancio, half doting since the suppression of the monasteries and half an idiot from birth, under whose shadow he was able to manage his nephew’s estate at his own sweet will, discharging the guardianship. One of Don Gabriel’s clever strokes was to make a partition of property with his sister, craftily securing almost the whole of her legal share—a spoliation to which the poor lady consented, being utterly inept in business matters and skilled only in saving money, which she hoarded with sordid avarice, and having the imprudent childishness to convert it into gold ounces, of the oldest and most valuable sort. Scant were the yields of Moscoso’s fortune that did not slip from between Fray Venancio’s trembling fingers into the robust palms of the guardian; but if they succeeded in passing into those of Doña Micaela, they never issued thence except in the shape of gold doubloons, on their way to a certain mysterious hiding-place, concerning which a legend was gradually forming in the countryside. While the mother hoarded, Don Gabriel educated his nephew in his own image and likeness, taking him along to fairs, hunting parties, rustic revels, and perhaps less innocent diversions, teaching him, as they said there, to hunt the white partridge; and the boy idolized that jovial, vigorous, and resolute uncle, skilled in athletic exercises, coarsely witty, like all the Lages, over his wine: a species of feudal lord respected in the district, who taught the heir of the Ulloas in a practical way contempt for humanity and the abuse of strength. One day when uncle and nephew were amusing themselves, according to their custom, four or six leagues away from the Pazos, having taken with them the man-servant and the stable-boy, at four in the afternoon, all the doors of the ancestral mansion standing open, there appeared a gang of twenty men masked or blackened with charcoal, who bound and gagged the maid, made Fray Venancio lie face downwards, and seizing Doña Micaela, demanded that she point out the hiding-place of the gold ounces; and when the lady refused, after boxing her ears, they began to prick her with the point of a clasp-knife, while several proposed that oil be heated to fry her feet. As soon as they had riddled an arm and a breast, she begged for mercy and revealed, beneath an enormous chest, the famous hiding-place—a trapdoor cleverly disguised by means of a plank identical to the rest of the flooring, but which rose and fell at will. The robbers gathered up the handsome coins, seized also all the wrought silver they found at hand, and withdrew from the Pazos at six o’clock, before it was quite dark. A peasant or day-laborer saw them depart, but what could he do? They were twenty, well armed with shotguns, pistols, and blunderbusses.

Fray Venancio, who had received only a kick or two and a contemptuous cuff, needed no further passport to depart to the other world, out of sheer fright, in a week’s time; the lady made less haste, but, as the saying is, never held up her head again, and a few months later a serous apoplexy prevented her from continuing to hoard gold ounces in a better disguised hole. The robbery was talked of for a long time in the country, and very strange rumors were set afloat: it was affirmed that the criminals were no professional bandits, but well-known and well-to-do people, one of whom held public office, and among them were counted persons long connected with the Ulloa family, who were therefore aware of the customs of the house, of the days when it was left without men, and of Doña Micaela’s insatiable constancy in collecting and preserving the most valuable gold coins. Be that as it might, justice did not discover the authors of the crime, and Don Pedro was soon left without any relative save his uncle Gabriel. The latter sought to fill Fray Venancio’s place with a rough priest, a great hunter, incapable of dying of fright before robbers. For some time past Primitivo had assisted them in their sporting expeditions—the best poacher in the countryside, the unerringest shot, and the father of the prettiest girl to be found for ten leagues round. The death of Doña Micaela allowed father and daughter to establish themselves at the Pazos, she under the title of maid, he under that of... grand huntsman, we should have said centuries ago; today there is no suitable name for the office. Don Gabriel kept them both well in check, scenting in Primitivo a serious danger to his influence; but three or four years after his sister’s death, Don Gabriel suffered attacks of gout that endangered his life, and then what had already been whispered about his secret marriage with the daughter of the Cebre jailer became public property. The gentleman removed to live, or rather to fume with rage, in the little town; he executed a will bequeathing his goods and estate to three children he had, without leaving his nephew Don Pedro so much as his watch as a keepsake; and the gout having mounted to his heart, he surrendered his soul to God most unwillingly, whereupon the last of the Moscosos found himself completely master of his own actions.

Thanks to all these vicissitudes, extortions, and nibblings, the House of Ulloa, despite possessing two or three respectable nuclei of revenue, was entangled and drained of resources; it was what Julián suspected: a ruin. Given the complexity of the network and the atomistic subdivision that characterizes Galician landholding, a little neglect or bad management is enough to undermine the foundations of the most important landed estate. The necessity of paying certain arrears of quit-rents and their interest had caused the estate to be burdened with a mortgage of no great amount; but a mortgage is like cancer: it begins by attacking one point of the organism and ends by infecting the whole. In connection with the aforesaid quit-rents, the young master searched diligently for the gold ounces in his mother’s new hiding-place; time wasted: either the lady had hoarded no more since the robbery, or she had concealed it so well that the very devil could not have hit upon it.

The sight of such a mortgage saddened Julián, for the good cleric was beginning to feel that special attachment chaplains experience toward the noble houses they enter; but it filled him with still greater confusion to find among the papers the documentation relating to a petty suit over partition, maintained by Don Alberto Moscoso, Don Pedro’s father, with... the Marquis of Ulloa!

For it is now time to state that the authentic and legal Marquis of Ulloa, he whose name appears in the Court Guide, was driving peacefully in his open carriage along the Castellana during the winter of 1866 to 1867, while Julián was exterminating cockroaches in the archives of the Pazos. Little did he suspect that the title of nobility for whose patent of succession he had religiously paid his tax of lanzas y medias anatas was enjoyed gratis by a kinsman of his in a corner of Galicia. True, the legitimate Marquis of Ulloa, who was a Grandee of Spain of the first class, Duke of something, three times a marquis and twice a count at the very least, was known to no one in Madrid except by his dukedom, upon the principle that the greater card takes the lesser, even though the title of Ulloa, rooted in the illustrious house of Cabreira of Portugal, might surpass the most eminent in antiquity and esteem. On the estate of the House of Ulloa passing to a collateral branch, the marquisate went whither it belonged by strict agnation; but the villagers, who understand nothing of agnations, accustomed as they were to the House of Ulloa giving its name to the title, continued to call the owners of the great rabbit-warren marquises. The lords of the Pazos did not protest: they were marquises by prescriptive right; and when a peasant, in a sunken lane, bared his head respectfully before Don Pedro, murmuring: ‘May your lordship fare most happily, Señor Marquis,’ Don Pedro felt an agreeable tickling on the epidermis of his vanity, and answered in a ringing voice: ‘Good evening to you.’

-V-

From the famous reorganization of the archives Julián derived cold feet and a hot head: he would fain have exerted himself and applied practically the notions acquired regarding the state of the property, so as to begin exercising his functions of steward with intelligence, but he could not hit upon the way, he was unable; his inexperience in rural and legal matters betrayed itself at every turn. He endeavored to study the internal mechanism of the Pazos: he took the trouble to visit the stables and cattle-sheds, to inform himself about the crops, to inspect the granary, the oven, the corn-lofts, the threshing-floors, the cellars, the outhouses, every dependency and every corner; to inquire what this, that, and the other served for, and how much it cost and at what price it sold; a useless labor, for though scenting abuses and disorder on every hand, through his lack of malice and worldly wisdom he never succeeded in putting his finger upon them and remedying them. The young master did not accompany him on such excursions: he had enough to do with fairs, shooting, and visits to the people of Cebre or the gentry of the mountain, so that Julián’s guide was Primitivo. A pessimistic guide if ever there was one. Every reform Julián sought to introduce the huntsman pronounced impossible, with a shrug of his shoulders; every superfluity he attempted to suppress was declared indispensable to the proper service of the house. Before Julián’s zeal arose heaps of petty difficulties, hindering him from effecting any useful modification. And the most alarming thing was to observe Primitivo’s concealed but real omnipotence. Servants, tenant-farmers, day-laborers, and even the cattle in the stalls, seemed subject to him and favorable: the flattering respect with which they treated the young master, the greeting half-disdainful and half-indifferent they addressed to the chaplain, were converted into absolute submission toward Primitivo, manifested not by outward formulas, but by the instantaneous compliance with his will, indicated at times merely by the cold and direct look of his lashless eyes. And Julián felt humiliated in the presence of a man who commanded there like an unquestioned autocrat, from his ambiguous position of servant with the pretensions of a bailiff. He felt weighing upon his soul Primitivo’s searching glance, which watched his slightest actions and studied his countenance, doubtless to discover the vulnerable side of that sober, disinterested priest, who averted his eyes from the buxom peasant girls. Perhaps Primitivo’s philosophy was that there is no man without a vice, and Julián could be no exception.