Leon Roch. Benito Pérez Galdós
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but I will tell you—I can say anything to you,” she exclaimed, looking at her son-in-law with a vehement flash. “Are you not my son—the husband of my child? It is your duty and your right to know your father’s weakness—I am told that the marquis is entangled with ... but you must know her, you must have heard of her ... some woman they call Paca or Paquilla—no matter which—she is very pretty and very charming. She ruined the Duke of Florunda of the little he had left—and would you believe that that old idiot Agustín, with one foot in the grave!—it is too pitiable to be angry about, do not you think?”
Leon did not answer.
“What are you thinking of?” she asked.
“That the cardinal virtue in married life is indeed patience,” he replied.
“Which is as much as to say endurance and fortitude ... but my whole life has been a martyrdom!—and I could bear everything if my husband’s extravagance and follies did not threaten to compromise the honour and good name of the family. But I am terribly afraid of that.... What do you think? And I feel very deeply having to tell you that I cannot pay you the sixty thousand reales that you lent me and that I was to have repaid you this month.”
“It is of no consequence,” said Leon, wishing to avoid this delicate subject; “do not let that trouble you.”
“Not only that I cannot pay you those three thousand dollars, but that I am in desperate need of three thousand more.”
“You can have them.”
“What! three thousand more? But it is outrageous—it is abusing your generosity! It shall be the last time, for I have quite made up my mind to practise the narrowest economy in the house—I will give you a lien on my house at Corrales de Arriba.”
“It is quite unnecessary—I assure you....”
“Thanks, a thousand thanks! How good you are, how dear a son! How can I ever repay you?” cried the marquesa, evidently agitated by sincere feeling. “You cannot imagine what a kindness you are doing me.... But I am always thinking of you, and not unfrequently I am able to intercept half-way some cloud that threatens your happiness. Last night I had quite a quarrel with your wife.”
“With María?”
“Yes, with María: even she has her faults, though they are only the excessive side of her virtues. You know that she is very devout—devout to excess; indeed, at times I have felt that this question of religion has given rise to some little differences between you.” Leon sighed.
“To some,” he said, “but nothing serious.”
“Well, you need not speak of your annoyance as a mere trifle,” said the marquesa, vexed that Leon should speak lightly of a matter that it suited her to treat as important. “The poor child is blindly attached to you: her love for you is the ruling motive of her life, and your reputation as an atheist is a standing misery to her. And you know that my daughter’s opinions are as independent and as indomitable as the beasts of the desert.” Leon nodded a sad assent.
“You can understand that she sees your lack of religion with very great pain; that is but natural. We have instilled a faith in which she will live and die. But she weeps with despair because you will not go to prayers every day as she does, will not confess once a month, will not spend your money on trumpery—it is really quite absurd! How I lectured her last night—in short, she vexed me, I got angry, I hammered away at her as if her stupid little head had been an anvil, and at last....”
“Well—at last?...”
“At last I convinced her that it was preposterous to expect men to carry out practices, which, in us, are all very well, but, in them, would be ridiculous, purely ridiculous. The men of the present day have something else to do than to be sitting in church. It seems to me that María and you—she spending her time in devotions, and you spending yours at your studies—may both be very happy. What is the use of discussion? You do not want to prevent her praying to her heart’s content. The men of the present day have their own ideas and it is senseless to try to combat them. No one need be more religious than I am, but I have no notion of enquiring into things that I do not understand. Women are not learned; their part is to believe, believe, believe.
“That a married couple should quarrel over that appears to me the height of folly. But do you know that her ambition is to convert you? To lead you to abhor your own views and devote yourself to hers—upon my word I can hardly help laughing when I think of it. Do you know what she says? That it would be her highest happiness to burn all those books of yours—what a sin! So beautifully bound as they are! Much I should care whether my husband were as regular at Mass as I am, so long as he loved me and cared for no one else—jealous of his books! Not I indeed, such a woman must be a perfect fool!
“You cannot think how strongly I spoke to her; I told her that you were the best man living—to that she agreed—I told her that you were far superior to her—infinitely superior; that all this talk about atheism is a mere bogey; that though we hear people speak of atheists there are no atheists—just as we talk of magicians but there are no magicians. I told her that she was not to think of such nonsense as trying to convert you, and that the best thing she could do was to keep the peace in her home and get rid of her monomania—do not you think so?—She had better change her confessor—do not you think so? She should do as I do. I am extremely religious, I perform all my devotions with the greatest exactitude, I give all I can afford to the church, but that is all; do not you think that María should do the same?”
Leon did not reply; he sat silent and gloomy. Suddenly he seemed to shake off some depressing idea, as we wave off a bee that buzzes in our ears, and looking at his mother-in-law he said:
“I will send you that money to-day.”
“Ah! is that what you were thinking about?” cried the marquesa and her face shone with satisfaction till it seemed positively phosphorescent. “Very good; do so, and I will give you a receipt.... But here I have stayed chattering, and in your delightful society I forget that I have business to attend to—heaps of business! Eleven o’clock! I shall be too late for Mass!”
She bustled up and held out her hand to her son-in-law. “And Padre Paoletti is to preach.—Good-bye, I must fly. What shall I say to your wife? I will tell her to make haste home and that you are very dull without her.”
CHAPTER X.
THE MARQUIS.
He was a little man, with delicate and effeminate features, on which he wore a look of assumed gravity, at first carefully cultivated, but now as much a matter of habit as though it had been a cosmetic applied daily out of a gallipot in his old dandy’s dressing-case. His eyes, nose and mouth were, like his daughter’s, perfectly well shaped, but what in her was charming, in him was ridiculous, and what was beautiful in her, in him was purely comical; for there is nothing more preposterous than the face of a pretty woman hung on, like a mask, to the figure and manners of a pottering old man.
His fashionable dress, his easy demeanour, his refined and frigid courtesy, which masked a total absence of kindliness or intelligence, decorated his exterior as a gorgeous binding covers a book that is destitute of rational contents. He was not a vicious man; he was equally incapable of wilful evil or intentional good; he was a vacuous compound of weakness and dissipation, corrupt rather from “evil communications” than from inherent wickedness; one of so many! a creature so hard to be distinguished from the rest of his species, since absence of character has reduced certain groups of the upper classes—as well as of the lower—with a few notable exceptions, to a common type which will lack a generic name till the advance of terminology allows us to speak of them as “the masses of the upper class.” Still, this empty-headed and unenlightened mortal had a great command of words in no respect deficient in meaning, and was an admired master of all the commonplace of the press and the law; he added nothing to be sure, but,