Leon Roch. Benito Pérez Galdós
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world, to be damned in the next. For that is what you will come to as well as I, we are all in the same boat!” And he laughed as loudly as his short breath would allow.
Then, rising from his seat, and leaning on the table with both hands, as though his body could not remain upright without support, he went on:
“Do you know, my dear fellow, that you are going to lend me four thousand reales?”
Leon opened a drawer; he smiled—why, it is hard to say, but of all the members of his wife’s family, this inoffensive creature was the one who filled him with the deepest pity, for which reason perhaps, he loosened his purse-strings for him from time to time, not merely with patience but with a vague kindliness, not to grieve so hapless and frail a being. Or perhaps Leon approved of the system of the Vicar of Wakefield who, when he wanted to rid himself of some importunate relative, would lend him some money, a coat, or a horse of no value, “and never,” said he, “did it occur that he came again to my house to return it to me.”
“Thanks, best of beaux frères!” said the young man, not attempting to hide the pleasure that every human being feels at the acquisition of cash; “I will repay you next month with the rest. Not all at once, I tell you frankly that I cannot pay it all in a lump, but in instalments. It is really frightful! If there were three Easter-tides in the year every Spaniard would be reduced to beggary. By Jove! it all goes in charity; the other night those Rosafría girls coaxed me into giving a thousand reales for the Pope. Now if the world were properly constituted the Pope would give to us.—Here, you little villain! Lady Bull, come here this minute when I call you.”
The last words were addressed to a small dog that had come into the room at the same time as its master and that had immediately settled itself into an attitude of respectful patience. It was an odious little brute, of the King Charles breed, of the colour of a rat and the shape of a porcupine, with a monkey’s muzzle between long dappled ears, and a bloated body feebly supported on four tiny paws. Towards the end of the conversation, the creature’s little bell, till then silent, began to tinkle energetically and Polito found the dog rummaging among the books that lay piled on the floor.
“Come along, this minute!” said he, taking it up in his arms.
At this instant they heard a noise of wheels and the tramp of one of those wonderful Spanish horses which seem to us as indefatigable as the bronze steed of an equestrian statue that trots perpetually without ever descending from its pedestal.
“Ah! there they are!” cried Leopoldo going to the window. “Higadillos on horseback, the Count in his break. I told them to come round this way to pick me up—I am coming, I am coming!”
From where he sat Leon could see the carriage drawn up by the gate, and the bull-fighter on horseback; a huge young fellow with his legs swathed and a voluminous scarf—a supple figure, not wanting in sculpturesque beauty, crowned with a head of vulgar Spanish type, of the hue of tobacco, under a wide sombrero. His horse snorted and pawed, and the count had his hands full with those in the break, a fiery pair of a cross-breed between the Bearnais and Andalusian. Polito was soon seated in the carriage with Lady Bull, and the jolly party set out down the street, Higadillos leading the way, and cheered by the jingle of the horses’ bells. Leon looked after them with some curiosity; it was a small but significant fragment of contemporary Spanish history.
CHAPTER XII.
GUSTAVO.
He looked at him and a friendly smile lighted up his melancholy face in token of welcome; then they both gazed out—for they were sitting by the window, at the fresh and scented verdure of the garden, over which the showers from the garden hose swept like a light broom of water, laying the dust, startling the birds, frightening the butterflies, drowning the insects and caressing the plants. Skilfully directed by the gardener, it penetrated the glistening density of the euonymus shrubs, dashing off the surface of the leaves in jets of spray sparkling with miniature rainbows. The garden was a new one, one of those parterres that are turned out complete by the nurseryman as the furniture of a house is turned out by the upholsterer; methodically planted with a tiny wood, lawns, orchards, rockeries bordered with ivy, and baskets full of sweet-william and convolvulus. Conifers grew in appropriate spots, each surrounded by a formal bed in which rows of petunias crept as if on their knees, before some lordly araucaria, or the insolent loftiness of a dragon-tree all spikes and blades. It all looked as if it had just been taken out of a band-box and was the work of human industry rather than of nature; still, it was very pretty, and fresh, and gay, and nothing could be fitter to divide the road which belonged to all, from the house which belonged to one only.
After contemplating the scene for some minutes they sat down to drink their coffee.
“Before I forget it,” said Gustavo, “I want to mention my disapproval of a virtue in you, which, when not judiciously exercised, must lead to mischief: I mean your liberality, which must in the end injure you, as well as my brother who takes advantage of it. I know that you have at times given Polito money, and it annoys me, for he is a ne’er-do-weel of the very worst type. Now and here, in the strictest confidence, I may tell you exactly what I feel, and pass impartial judgment on the various members of my family. If their conduct puts me to shame it is better to blush openly than to feel it seething in my blood.”
The speaker was a young man of a very precise and rather severe expression, a good deal like his father and his brother, less handsome than María and far from the ridiculous effeteness of Polito. His face was perhaps a little hard; at any rate it indicated a firm and self-contained nature quite exceptional in the family, settled convictions and a healthy self-respect. He spoke gravely and his manners were high-bred, free alike from arrogance and from familiarity, with an equable and chilling politeness which many persons thought supreme affectation. Thoroughly honourable and gentlemanly in all the relations of life, he was also well educated, though not brilliantly talented.
Neither tall nor short, neither fat nor thin, dressed in dark colours with a calm eye behind his spectacles, free from every vice—even smoking—simple in his tastes and pitiless to the dissipation of others, Gustavo, eldest son of the Marquis Tellería, was generally spoken of as the best of the family, as an honour to his rank, and one of the hopes of the country. It is needless to add that he was a lawyer. His brother Leopoldo was a lawyer too; almost all young Spaniards are; but while Polito hardly knew what a book looked like, Gustavo studied every day and even found employment under the protection of one of the most eminent pleaders of Madrid. He had chosen what may be called the national career, and having left the university a nobody, he was now on the high road to becoming somebody. It should be added that he had a natural gift for oratory.
“To you, my dear Leon,” he went on, “I may confess that the conduct of every member of my family causes me many hours of bitter reflection—excepting of course the angel who is your wife and that other angel, even more perfect perhaps, who now lives so far from us. Is it not terrible to see my brother corrupted by dissipation? Wallowing in the low frivolity which debases so many individuals—I will not say of our class, for the disgrace is not ours alone, but of every class? Desiring to play a part above what our fortune warrants, he has been led away into insane extravagance, for his companions are rich and he is not. It enrages me to see Leopoldo driving carriages and riding horses which cost more than his whole year’s income; besides, his ignorance distresses me, and his idleness makes me desperate. Ah! you were quite right in what you once said; there is a great deal of truth in your remark that ‘while there is an aristocracy of nature among the lowest, there is also a low class among the aristocracy.’—However, all this is beside the mark; we will not talk any longer on a subject that is so painful to my feelings. I have, I think, made it sufficiently clear that you really ought not to encourage Polito in his recklessness.”
Leon inserted some remark but Gustavo went on: “The blame, I admit, lies with my father. Our education was very desultory. It would be absurd to try to hide the fact that my mother, much as it costs me to own it, has never succeeded in weaning herself or in preserving us from the