(If you wish your grief to be changed to joy, you will not pass by, O sinner, without first praising the Virgin Mary.)
Near the altar was an open gate, and through it, Quentin passed into the Patio de los Naranjos.
Above the archway of the entrance, the cathedral tower, broad, strong, and resplendent in the sun, raised itself toward heaven, standing out in clear and sharp silhouette in the pure and diaphanous morning air.
Now and then a woman crossed the patio. A prebendary, with cap and crimson mozetta, was walking slowly up and down in the sun, smoking, with his hands clasped behind his back. In the shelter of the Puerta del Perdón, two men were piling oranges. As Quentin neared the fountain, a little old man asked him solicitously:
“Do you wish to see the Mosque?”
“No, sir,” replied Quentin pleasantly.
“The Alcázar?”
“No.”
“The Tower?”
“No.”
“Very well, Señorito, pardon me if I have molested you.”
“Not at all.”
When Quentin left the Patio de los Naranjos, he met the French couple of the train near the Triunfo column. M. Matignon hastened to greet him.
“Oh, what a town! What a town!” he cried. “Oh, my friend, what an extraordinary affair!”
“Why, what has happened to you?”
“A thousand things.”
“Good or bad?”
“Both. Just fancy: last night as I was coming out of a house, and was about to enter my hotel, a man with a lantern in his hand, and a short pike, commenced to pursue me. I went into the hotel and locked myself in my room; but the man came into the hotel; I’m sure of it, I’m sure of it.”
Quentin laughed, realizing that the man with the lantern and the short pike was a night watchman.
“Pay no attention to the man with the pike,” said he. “If he sees you again and starts to follow you, look him straight in the eye, and say to him firmly: ‘I have the key.’ It is the magic word. As soon as he hears it, he will go away.”
“Why?”
“Ah! That is a secret.”
“How strange! One says to him, ‘I have the key,’ and he goes?”
“Yes.”
“It is marvellous. Something else happened to me.”
“What?”
“Last night we went to a café, and I left my stick upon a chair. When I went back after it, it was no longer there.”
“Naturally! Some one carried it off.”
“But that is not moral!” declared M. Matignon indignantly.
“No. We Spaniards have no morals,” replied Quentin somewhat dejectedly.
“One cannot live without morality!”
“But we do live without it. With us, stealing a stick, or stabbing a friend are things of small importance.”
“You cannot have order in that way.”
“Of course not.”
“Nor discipline.”
“True.”
“Nor society.”
“Assuredly not: but here we live without those things.”
M. Matignon shook his head sadly.
“Are you going to continue your walk?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“We shall go with you if we won’t be in your way.”
“Come by all means.”
Together the trio began to wander through that puzzling entanglement of alleys. The barrio, or district into which they penetrated (the vicinity of El Potro), was beginning to come to life. A few old women with sour-looking faces, some with mantles of Antequera baize, others with black mantillas, were on their way to mass, carrying folding chairs under their arms.
“Dueñas, eh?” said the Frenchman, pointing his finger at the old women. “But their ladies, where are they now?”
“Probably snoring at their ease,” replied Quentin.
“But, do they snore?”
“Some of them, yes.”
“Snore? What is that?” Madame Matignon inquired of her husband in French.
“Ronfler, my dear,” said Matignon, “ronfler.”
His wife made a disdainful little grimace.
When the gossips in the streets caught sight of the trio, they exchanged a jest or two from door to door. Servant girls were scrubbing the floors of the patios with mops, and singing gipsy songs; balcony windows flew open with a bang, as women came out to shake their rugs and carpets.
Grimy-looking men passed them, pushing carts and shouting: “Fish!” Vendors of medicinal herbs languidly cried their wares; and a muleteer, mounted upon the hindmost donkey of his herd, rode along singing to the tune of the tinkling bells on his decorated asses.
Once, behind a window-grating, they caught sight of a pallid, anæmic face with large, sad, black eyes, and a white flower stuck in the ebony hair.
“Oh! Oh!” cried Matignon, and immediately ran to the window.
The maiden, offended by his curiosity, pulled down the curtain, and went on embroidering or sewing, waiting for the handsome gallant, who perhaps never came.
“They are odalisques,” declared the Frenchman rather spitefully.
In the doorways on some of the streets, they saw men working at turning lathes in the Moorish fashion, using a sort of bow, and helping themselves in their tasks with their feet.
Quentin, who was already tired of the walk and of the observations and comments of the Frenchman, announced his intention of leaving them.
“I would like to ask you a question first,” said Matignon.
“Proceed.”
“I wish to see an undertaking establishment.” “An undairtaking estableeshment,” the good man called it.
“There are none here,” replied Quentin. “They are all far away; but if you should see a shop where they sell guitars, you may be pretty sure that that is where they make coffins, too.”
“Can it be possible?”
“Yes. It’s a Cordovese custom.”
M. Matignon’s mouth fell open in surprise.
“It is extraordinary!” he exclaimed when he had recovered from his astonishment, and he drew a memorandum book and a pencil from his pocket. “Where did this custom come from?”
“Oh! It is very ancient. The casket-makers here declared that they were loath to confine their efforts to sad things, so from the same wood out of which they make a coffin, they take a piece for a guitar.”
“Admirable! Admirable! And they do not know that in France! What a philosophy is that of the casket-maker! O, Cordova, Cordova! How little thou art known in the world!”
At that moment, a tattered, bushy-haired vendor of sacred images crossed a very small plaza which contained a very large sign-post. Upon his white, matted hair he wore a greasy and dirty hat as large as a portico. His loose-fitting, long-sleeved cloak was worn wrong side to: the back across his breast, and the sleeves, knotted and bulky at the ends, falling down his back. Under his right arm he carried the saint, and in his belt was a cash-box with a slot for pennies.
“Pst! Silence!” said Quentin. “You are about to behold a most interesting spectacle.”
“What is it?”
“Do you see that man?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll wager you cannot guess who he is?”
“No.”
“The Bishop of Cordova!”
“The Bishop!”
“Yes, sir.”
“But he hasn’t the appearance of a bishop, nor even of a cleanly person.”
“That doesn’t matter. If you follow him cautiously, you will be able to see something very strange.”
After he had said this, Quentin bowed to the couple, and walked rapidly away in the direction of his home.
ARCHÆOLOGISTS guard those curious, twice-written documents called palimpsests as carefully as though they were so much gold. They are parchments from which the first inscriptions were erased years and years ago, to be substituted by others. More recently, assiduous investigators have learned how to bring the erased characters to light, to decipher them, and to read them.
The idea of those strange documents came to Quentin’s mind as he thought about his life.
Eight years of English school had apparently completely erased the memories of his early childhood. The uniformity of his school life, the continual sports, had dulled his memory. Night after night Quentin went to bed overcome with fatigue, with nothing to preoccupy his mind save his themes and his lessons; but his removal from the scholarly atmosphere, and his return to his home, had been sufficient to reawaken memories of his childhood—vaguely at first, but daily growing stronger, more distinct, and more detailed.
The erased inscription of the palimpsest was again becoming comprehensible: memories long dormant were crowding Quentin’s mind: of these recollections, some were sad and gloomy; others, and these were very few, were gay; still others were not as yet very clear to him.
Quentin endeavoured to reconstruct his childhood. He remembered having passed it in a house on the Calle de Librerías, near the Calle de la Feria and the Cuesta de Luján, and he went to see the place. It was on a corner of the street: a rose-coloured house with a silversmith’s shop on the lower floor, two large and pretentious balconies on the main floor, and above them, two rectangular windows. On top of the roof, was a diminutive azotea surrounded by a rubble-stone wall.
“That is where I was as a child,” said Quentin to himself.
He remembered vaguely that hedge-mustard used to grow between the slabs of the azotea, and that he had a white cat with which he used to play.
He peeped into the shop, and there came to his mind the picture of a man with white hair whom his mother tried to get him to kiss—something she never succeeded in doing.
“I must have been a little savage in those days,” thought Quentin.
He strolled along the Calle de la Feria and recalled his escapades with the little boys of the vicinity of La Ribera and El Murallón where they used to play.
His memory did not flow smoothly. There were large gaps in it: persons, things, and places were blurred confusedly. His vivid recollections began in the Calle de la Zapatería, where his parents established their first shop. From there on, the incidents were linked together; they had an explanation, a conclusion.
Quentin was taken to school when he was very young—three or four years old—because he was in the way at the store. As a very small child he was distinguished as a dare-devil, a rowdy, and a swaggering boaster; and many times he returned from school with his trousers torn, or a black eye.
Once he had a fight with one of his schoolmates who came from a town called Cabra (Goat). For this reason, the others used to poke fun at him, calling him a “son of a goat,” and making rude derivations from the name of his home town. Quentin was one of the most insulting, and one day the tormented lad answered him:
“You’re a bigger son of a goat than I am, and your mother is living with a silversmith.”
Quentin waited for his comrade to come out of school, and then punched his nose—only to be thrashed by his victim’s older brother afterwards. This affair gave origin to a continual series of fights, and nearly every day Quentin was crippled by the beatings he received.
“Why, what’s the matter with you?” his mother once asked.
“They told me at school that my mother was living with a silversmith.”
“Who told you?”
“Everybody,” replied Quentin with a frown.
“And what did you do?”
“Fought ’em all!”
His mother said nothing more, but she withdrew Quentin from that school and took him to another, which was presided over by a dominie, and attended by a couple of dozen children.
The dominie was a secularized monk by the name of Piñuela—an old fossil full of musty prejudices. He was a strong partisan of the ancient pedagogic principle, so much beloved by our ancestors, of “La letra con la sangre entra” (Learn by the sweat of thy brow).
Dominie Piñuela was a ridiculous and eccentric individual. His nose was large, coarse, and flaming red: his under lip hung down: his great eyes, turbid, and bulging from their sockets like two eggs, were always watery: he wore a long, tight-fitting frock coat, which was once black, but now with the passage of time, covered with layers of dirt and grease and dandruff; narrow trousers, bagging loosely at the knees, and a black skull-cap.
Piñuela’s only store of knowledge consisted of Latin, rhetoric, and writing. His system of instruction was based on the division of the class into two groups, Rome and Carthage, a book of translations, and a Latin Grammar. Besides these educational mediums, the secularized monk counted upon the aid of a ferrule, a whip, a long bamboo stick, and a small leather sack filled with bird-shot.
Piñuela taught writing by the Spanish method, with the letters ending in points. To do this one had to know how to cut and trim quill pens; and few there were who had the advantage of the Dominie in this art.
Besides this, Piñuela corrected the vicious pronunciation of his pupils; and in order to do so, he exaggerated his own by doubling his z’s and s’s. One of the selections of his readings began as follows: Amanezzía; era la máss bella mañana de primafera (Dawn was breaking; it was the most beautiful day of Spring): and all the children had to say “primafera” and “fida” unless they wished their lessons to be supplemented by a blow with the ferrule.
The Dominie walked constantly to and fro with his pen behind his ear. If he saw that a child was not studying, or had not pointed his letters sufficiently in his copy-book, according to the principles of Iturzaeta, he beat him with the stick, or threw the bag of shot at his head.
“Idling, eh?—Idling?” he would murmur, “I’ll teach you to idle!”
For more serious occasions, the stupid Dominie had his whip; but nearly all of the parents warned him not to use it on their children—which for Piñuela was the plainest symptom of the decadence of the times.
At first Quentin felt the profoundest hate for the Dominie: he tormented him every time he could with unutterable joy; he broke his inkwells; he bored holes in his writing-desk; and Piñuela retaliated by boxing his ears. Between master and pupil there began to arise a certain ironical and joyous esteem by force of beatings from the one, and pranks from the other. They looked upon each other as faithful enemies; Quentin’s mischief provoked laughter from Piñuela, and the Dominie’s beatings wrested an ironical smile from Quentin.
Once the pupils saw Piñuela advancing with his pointer raised on high, and Quentin running, hiding behind tables, and throwing inkwells at the Dominie’s head.
One day two old women were gossiping in the shop at home. They were two street vendors, one of whom was called Siete Tonos, on account of the seven different tones she used in crying her wares.
“They have hard luck with the little scamp. He’s a wicked little devil,” said one of them.
“Yes; he’s not like his father,” added the other.
“But El Pende isn’t his father.”
“Ah! Isn’t he?”
“No.”
Quentin waited for them to say more, but the clerk entered the store, and the gossips fell silent.
El Pende was the nickname of the man who passed for Quentin’s father. The boy thought about the conversation of the two old gossips for a long time, and came to the conclusion that there had been something obscure about his birth. He was proud and haughty, and considered himself worthy of royal descent, so the idea of dishonour irritated him, and made him desperate.
One day his mother went to ask the Dominie how her son was behaving himself.
“How is he behaving himself?” cried Piñuela with ironic geniality. “Badly! Very badly! He’s the worst boy in the class. A veritable dishonour to my school. He knows nothing about Latin, nor grammar, nor logic, nor anything. I’m sure that he doesn’t even know how to decline musa, musae.”
“So you think he is no good at studying?”
“He is a rowdy, incapable of ever possessing the sublime language of Lacius.”
His mother told her husband what Piñuela had said, and El Pende launched a sermon at Quentin.
“So this is the way you behave after the sacrifices we have made for you!”
Quentin did not reply to the charges they made against him, but when El Pende told him that if he continued his pranks he would throw him out of the house, the thought that was in Quentin’s heart rushed to his lips.
“It makes no difference to me,” he cried, “because you are not my father.”
El Pende boxed the boy’s ears; the mother wept; and that night Quentin left the house and roamed the fields half-starved, until Palomares, the clerk, found him and brought him to his parents.
The boy began to take notice of things, and made it plain to his mother that instead of studying Latin, he preferred to learn French and go to America, as a schoolmate of his—the son of a Swiss watch-maker—had done.
Accordingly they took him to the academy of a French emigré, a violent republican, who, at the same time that he taught his pupils to conjugate the verb avoir, spoke to them enthusiastically about Danton, Robespierre, and Hoche.
Perhaps this excited Quentin’s imagination; perhaps it did not need to be excited; at any rate, one Sunday morning he decided to put into execution his great projét de voyage.
His mother was accustomed to hide the key to the cabinet where she kept her money under her pillow. While she was at mass, Quentin seized the key, opened the cabinet, stuffed the seventy dollars that he found there into his pocket, and a few minutes later was calmly increasing the distance between himself and his home.
Fifteen days after his escape he was apprehended in Cadiz just as he was about to set sail for America, and was brought back to Cordova in the custody of the guardia civil.
Then his mother took him to a monastery, but Quentin had made up his mind to run away from everything, so he attempted to escape several times. At the end of a month, the friars intimated that they did not wish to keep him any longer.
To the boys of his age, Quentin was now the prototype of wildness, impudence, and disobedience. People predicted an evil future for him.
At this point his mother said to him one day:
“We are going to a certain house. Kindly answer politely anything they may ask you there.”
Quentin said nothing, but accompanied his mother to a palace on the Calle del Sol. They climbed some marble stairs, and entered a hall where a white-haired old man was sitting in a large, deep armchair, with a blond little girl who looked like an angel to Quentin, by his side.
“So this is the little scamp?” inquired the little old man with a smile.
“Sí, Señor Marqués,” replied Quentin’s mother.
“And what do you wish to do, my boy?” the Marquis asked him.
“I!—Get out of here as soon as I possibly can,” replied Quentin in a dull voice.
“But, why?”
“Because I hate this town.”
The little girl must have looked at him in horror; at least he supposed she did.
His mother and the old man chatted a while, and at last the latter exclaimed:
“Very well, my boy. You shall go to England. Get his baggage ready,” he added, turning to the mother, “and let him go as soon as possible.”
Quentin departed, making the journey sometimes in the company of others, sometimes alone, and entered Eton School, near Windsor. In a short time he had forgotten his entire former life.
In the English school the professor was not the enemy of the scholar, but rather one of his schoolmates. Quentin met boys as daring as he, and stronger than he, and he had to look alive. That school was something like a primitive forest where the strong devoured the weak, and conquered and abused them.
The brutality of the English education acted like a tonic upon Quentin, and made him athletic and good-humoured. The thing of paramount importance that he learned there, was that one must be strong and alert and calm in life, and ready to conquer always.
In the same way that he accepted this concept on account of the way it flattered him, he rejected the moral and sentimental concepts of his fellow-pupils and masters. Those young men of bulldog determination, valiant, strengthened by football and rowing, and nourished by underdone meat, were full of ridiculous conventions and respect for social class, for the hierarchy, and for authority.
In spite of the fact that he passed for an aristocrat and a son of a marquis in order to enjoy a certain prestige in the school, Quentin manifested a profound contempt for the principles his schoolmates held in such respect. He considered that authority, wigs, and ceremonies were grotesque, and consequently was looked upon as the worst kind of a poser.
He used to maintain, much to the stupefaction of his comrades, that he felt no enthusiasm for religion, nor for his native land; that not only would he not sacrifice himself for them, but he would not even give a farthing to save them. Moreover, he asserted that if he should ever become rich, he would prefer to owe his money to chance, rather than to constant effort on his part; and that to work, as the English did, that their wives might amuse themselves and live well, was absurd—for all their blond hair, their great beauty, and their flute-like voices.
A man with his ideas, and one, moreover, who followed women—even servant girls—in the street, and made complimentary remarks to them, could not be a gentleman, and for this reason, Quentin had no intimate friends. He was respected for his good fists, but enjoyed absolutely no esteem....
During his last years at school, his only real friend was an Italian teacher of music named Caravaglia. This man communicated to Quentin his enthusiasm for Bellini, Donizetti, Rossini, and Verdi. Caravaglia used to sit at the piano and sing. Quentin listened to him and was much softened by the music. The Alma innamoratta from Lucia, and La cavattina from Hernani, made him weep; but his greatest favourites, the songs that went straight to his heart, were the manly arias from the Italian operas like that in Rigoletto, that goes:
This song, overflowing with arrogance, merry fanfaronade, indifference, and egoism, enchanted him.
On the other hand, to his psalm-singing comrades, this merry and swaggering music seemed worthy of the greatest contempt.
In the farewell banquet which Quentin gave to his four or five companions, and to the Italian professor, there were several toasts.
“I am not a Protestant,” said Quentin at the last, somewhat befuddled with whiskey, “nor am I a Catholic. I am a Horatian. I believe in the wine of Falernus, and in Cécube and his wines of Calais. I also believe that we mortals must leave the task of calming the winds to the gods.”
After this important declaration, nothing more is known, except the fact that the diners all fell asleep.
“SEE here, Quentin,” said his mother, “you ought to go and call on the Marquis.”
“Very well,” Quentin answered, “must I go today?”
“You’d better.”
“Then I shall.”
“Do you remember where he lives?”
“Yes, I think I can find the house.”
“It’s in the Calle del Sol; any one will point out the palace to you.”
Quentin left the house, turned into the Plaza de la Corredera, and from the Calle del Poyo, by encircling a church, he came out upon the Calle de Santiago. It was a moderately warm day in January, with an overcast sky. A few drops of rain were falling.
Quentin was very much preoccupied by the visit he was about to make.
So far, he had not asked what relation he was to that man. Surely some relationship did exist; a bastard kinship; something defamatory to Quentin.
Sunk deep in these thoughts, Quentin wandered from his way, and was obliged to ask where the street was.
The palace of the Marquis of Tavera stood in a street in the lower part of town, which with different names for its different parts, stretched from the Plaza de San Pedro to the Campo de la Madre de Dios.
The Marquis’ palace was extremely large. Five bay-windows, framed in thick moulding, with ornate iron-work and brass flower-pots, opened from a façade of a yellow, porous stone. On either side of the larger centre balcony, there rose two pilasters surmounted by a timpanum, in the middle of which was the half-obliterated carving of a shield. The decayed iron-work of the balustrade was twisted into complicated designs.
On the ground floor, four large gratings clawed the walls of the palace, and in the centre was a large opening closed by a massive door studded with nails, and topped by a fan-shaped window.
Before the palace, the street widened into a small-sized plaza. Quentin entered the wide entrance, and his footsteps resounded with a hollow sound.
Some distance ahead of him, through the iron bars of the grating at the end of a dark gallery, he could see a sunny garden; and that shady zone, terminating in such a brilliant spot of light, recalled the play of light and shade in the canvases of the old masters.
Quentin pulled a chain, and a bell rang in the distance with a solemn sound.
Several minutes elapsed without any one coming to the entry, and Quentin rang again.
A moment later the vivid sunlight of the distant garden, which shone like a square patch of light at the end of the shadowy corridor, was dimmed by the silhouette of a man who came forward until he reached and opened the grating. He was small in stature, and old, and wore overalls, an undershirt, and a broad-brimmed hat.
“What did you wish?” asked the old man.
“Is the Señor Marqués at home?”
“Sí, Señor.”
“May I see him?”
“I don’t know; ask upstairs.” The old man opened the grating, and Quentin passed through.
Through a door on the right he could see a deserted patio. In the centre of it was a fountain formed by a bowl which spilled the water into a basin in six sparkling jets. On the left of the wide vestibule rose a monumental stairway made of black and white marble. The very high ceiling was covered with huge panels which were broken and decayed.
“Is this the way?” Quentin asked the old man, pointing to the stairway.
“Sí, Señor.”
He climbed the stairs to the landing, and paused before a large, panelled, double door. In the centre of each half, he discerned two large and handsomely carved escutcheons. To the left of this door there was a window through which Quentin peeped.
“Oh, how beautiful!” he murmured in astonishment.
He saw a splendid garden, full of orange trees laden with fruit. In the open, the trees were tall and erect; against the walls they took the form of vines, climbing the high walls, and covering them with their dark green foliage.
A light rain was falling, and it was a wonderful sight to see the oranges glistening like balls of red and yellow gold among the dark, rain-soaked leaves. The glistening brilliancy of the foliage, and of the golden fruit, the grey sky, and the damp air created an extraordinary effect of exuberance and life.
Silence reigned in the shady garden. From time to time, from his hiding-place in a tree, some bird poured forth his sweet song. A pale yellow sunbeam struggled to illuminate the spot, and as it was reflected upon the wet leaves, it made them flash with a metallic brilliancy....
Above the opposite wall, rose the silhouette of a blackened and moss-covered belfry, surmounted by the figure of an angel. In the distance, over the house-tops, rose the dark sierra, partially hidden by bluish mists. These mists were moved about by the wind, and as they drifted along, or dissipated into the air, they disclosed several white orchards which heretofore had been concealed by the haze.
On the mountain-top, as the white penants of mist floated among the trees, they left tenuous filaments like those silver threads woven among the thorn bushes by lemures.
Quentin was gazing tirelessly upon the scene, when he heard footsteps behind him. He turned and saw a little girl of ten or twelve years, with her hair down her back.
“Good-afternoon,” said the child with a marked Andalusian accent, as she came up to him.
Quentin removed his hat respectfully, and the child smiled.
“Have you rung?” she asked.
“No.”
She rang the bell, and a large, over-grown servant girl opened the door and asked Quentin what he wanted.
“Give the Señor Marqués my card,” he said, “and tell him that I have come to pay him my respects.”
“Come in, Señor.”
Quentin entered. He rather wished that the Marquis would not care to receive him, hoping in this way to avoid making a tiresome call, but his wish was not granted, for in a short time, the over-grown servant girl asked him to kindly follow her.
They traversed a gallery whose windows looked out upon the patio of the fountain; then, after crossing two large, dark rooms, they came to a high-ceilinged hall panelled in leather, and with a red rug, tarnished by the years, upon the floor.
“Sit down, Señor; the master will be here directly,” said the maid.
Quentin seated himself and began to examine the hall. It was large and rectangular, with three broad, and widely-separated balcony windows looking out upon the garden. The room possessed an air of complete desolation. The painted walls from which the plaster had peeled off in places, were hung with life-size portraits of men in the uniforms and habiliments of nobility: in some of the pictures the canvas was torn; in others, the frames were eaten by moths: the great, rickety, leather-covered armchairs staggered under the touch of a hand upon their backs: two ancient pieces of tapestry with figures in relief, which concealed the doors, were full of large rents: on the panels in the ceiling, spiders wove their white webs: a very complicated seventeenth century clock, with pendulum and dial of copper, had ceased to run: the only things in that antique salon that were out of harmony, were the French fire-place in which some wood was burning, and a little gilt clock upon the marble mantel, which, like a good parvenu, impertinently called attention to itself.
When he had waited a moment, a curtain was pulled aside, and an old man, bent with age, entered the salon. He was followed by a little bow-legged hunchback, crosseyed, grey-haired, and dressed in black.
“Where is the boy?” asked the old man in a cracked voice.
“Right in front of you,” replied the hunchback.
“Come closer!” exclaimed the Marquis, addressing Quentin. “I do not see very well.”
Quentin approached him, and the old man seized his hand and looked at him very closely.
“Come, sit by me. Have you enjoyed good health at school?”
“Yes, Señor Marqués.”
“Don’t call me that,” murmured the old man, patting Quentin’s hand. “Have you learned to speak English?”
“Yes, sir.”
“But, well?”
“I speak it as well as I do Spanish.”
“English is very hard,” said the hunchback, who had seated himself upon the floor. “Yes means yesca (tinder); verigüel means muy bien (very well), and as for the rest—when you can say, ‘I catch, I go, I say’—you know English.”
“Hush, Colmenares,” said the Marquis, “don’t be a fool.”
“You’re more of a fool than I am,” replied the dwarf.
The old man, paying no attention to him, said to Quentin:
“I already know, I already know that you have not been up to any more foolishness.”
The hunchback burst into noisy laughter.
“Then he doesn’t belong to your family,” he exclaimed, “because every one of your family, beginning with you, is a fool.”
“Hush, buffoon, be quiet; I’ll warm your ribs for you if you don’t.”
This threat from the lips of the sickly octogenarian, was absolutely absurd; but the hunchback appeared to take it in earnest, for he began to make faces and grin in silence.
“Oh, Colmenares,” said the old man, “kindly call Rafaela, will you?”
“Very well.”
The hunchback went out, leaving the Marquis and Quentin alone.
“Well, my boy, I have asked your mother about you very often. She told me that you were well, and that you were working hard. I am very glad to see you”—and again he pressed Quentin’s hand between his own weak and trembling ones.
Quentin regarded the old man tenderly, without knowing what to say. At this moment, the hunchback returned, followed by a young lady and a little girl. The little girl was the one Quentin had greeted upon the stairs; the young lady was the same girl he had seen several years before—probably in that very same room.
Quentin rose to greet them.
“Rafaela,” said the old man, addressing the older girl, “this boy is a relative of ours. I am not going to recall incidents that sadden me: the only thing I want is that you should know that you are related. Quentin will come here often, will you not?”
“Yes, sir,” answered he, more and more astounded at the direction the interview was taking.
At this point, the hunchback, clutching the Marquis by the sleeve, asked:
“Would you like me to play for you?”
“Yes, do.”
The hunchback brought a small, lute-shaped guitar, drew up a tabouret, and sat at the feet of the Marquis. Then he began to pluck the strings with fingers as long and delicate as spiders’ legs. He played a guitar march, and then, much to Quentin’s astonishment, the old Marquis began to sing. He sang a patriotic song in a cracked voice. It was a very old one, and ended with the following stanza:
(Ah, my country, country of mine, and also of my sweetheart; to fight for country and love, is the duty of the Spanish warrior.)
When the old man had finished the song, his grand-daughters embraced him, and he smiled most contentedly.
Quentin felt as though he had been transported to another century. The shabby house, the old Marquis, the buffoon, the beautiful girls—everything seemed unusual.
The two sisters were pretty; Rafaela, the older sister, was extremely attractive. Some twenty-three or twenty-four years of age, she had clear, blue eyes—eyes the colour of pale blue satin—blond hair, a straight nose, and an enchanting smile. Lacking the freshness of her first youth, there was a suspicion of marcidity in her face, which, perhaps, enhanced her attractiveness.
The face of Remedios, the child, was less symmetrical, but more positive: she had large, black eyes, and an expression of mixed audacity, childishness, and arrogance. Now and then she smiled silently and mischievously.
When Quentin felt that he had stayed long enough, he rose, gave his hand to the two girls, and hesitantly approached the old man, who threw his arms about his neck and tearfully embraced him.
He saluted the hunchback with a nod of his head which was scarcely answered; descended the stairs, and upon reaching the vestibule, the man who had let him in, asked:
“Excuse me, Señor, but are you the man who got back from England a little while ago?”
“Yes.”
“That’s what I thought. Are you going to stay in Cordova?”
“I believe so.”
“Then we shall see you?”
“Yes, I shall call from time to time.”
The two men shook hands, and Quentin stepped into the street.
“The old man is my grandfather,” said Quentin, “that’s just what he is. His emotion, his harrowed look—that’s just what he is.”
Perhaps the best thing to do would be to ask his mother exactly what the circumstances of his birth were; but he feared to offend her.
He soon forgot about that, and began to think about the blond-haired girl Rafaela. She was pretty. Indeed she was! Her clear, soft eyes; her pleasant smile; and above all, her opaque voice had gone straight to Quentin’s heart: but as Quentin was not a dreamer, but a Bœotian, a Horatian, as he himself had remarked, he associated with Rafaela’s soft, blue eyes, the ancestral home, the beautiful garden, and the wealth which her family must still possess.
Quentin devoted the days following this visit to cogitating upon this point.
Rafaela was an admirable prize—pretty, pleasant, and aristocratic. He must attempt the conquest. True, he was an illegitimate child. He had a desire to laugh at that thought, it seemed so operatic to him: now he could sing the aria from Il Trovatore: