Dona Perfecta

When the visitors entered, the three girls were for a moment abashed: but very soon their naturally gay and frivolous dispositions became apparent. They lived in poverty, as birds live in confinement, singing behind iron bars as they would sing in the midst of the abundance of the forest. They spent the day sewing, which showed at least honorable principles; but no one in Orbajosa, of their own station in life, held any intercourse with them. They were, to a certain extent, proscribed, looked down upon, avoided, which also showed that there existed some cause for scandal. But, to be just, it must be said that the bad reputation of the Troyas consisted, more than in any thing else, in the name they had of being gossips and mischief-makers, fond of playing practical jokes, and bold and free in their manners. They wrote anonymous letters to grave personages; they gave nicknames to every living being in Orbajosa, from the bishop down to the lowest vagabond; they threw pebbles at the passers-by; they hissed behind the window bars, in order to amuse themselves with the perplexity and annoyance of the startled passer-by; they found out every thing that occurred in the neighborhood; to which end they made constant use of every window and aperture in the upper part of the house; they sang at night in the balcony; they masked themselves during the Carnival, in order to obtain entrance into the houses of the highest families; and they played many other mischievous pranks peculiar to small towns. But whatever its cause, the fact was that on the Troya triumvirate rested one of those stigmas that, once affixed on any one by a susceptible community, accompanies that person implacably even beyond the tomb.

“This is the gentleman they say has come to discover the gold-mines?” said one of the girls.

“And to do away with the cultivation of garlic in Orbajosa to plant cotton or cinnamon trees in its stead?”

Pepe could not help laughing at these absurdities.

“All he has come for is to make a collection of pretty girls to take back with him to Madrid,” said Tafetan.

“Ah! I’ll be very glad to go!” cried one.

“I will take the three of you with me,” said Pepe. “But I want to know one thing; why were you laughing at me when I was at the window of the Casino?”

These words were the signal for fresh bursts of laughter.

“These girls are silly things,” said the eldest.

“It was because we said you deserved something better than Dona Perfecta’s daughter.”

“It was because this one said that you are only losing your time, for Rosarito cares only for people connected with the Church.”

“How absurd you are! I said nothing of the kind! It was you who said that the gentleman was a Lutheran atheist, and that he enters the cathedral smoking and with his hat on.”

“Well, I didn’t invent it; that is what Suspiritos told me yesterday.”

“And who is this Suspiritos who says such absurd things about me?”

“Suspiritos is—Suspiritos.”

“Girls,” said Tafetan, with smiling countenance, “there goes the orange-vender. Call him; I want to invite you to eat oranges.”

One of the girls called the orange-vender.

The conversation started by the Troyas displeased Pepe Rey not a little, dispelling the slight feeling of contentment which he had experienced at finding himself in such gay and communicative company. He could not, however, refrain from smiling when he saw Don Juan Tafetan take down a guitar and begin to play upon it with all the grace and skill of his youthful years.

“I have been told that you sing beautifully,” said Rey to the girls.

“Let Don Juan Tafetan sing.”

“I don’t sing.”

“Nor I,” said the second of the girls, offering the engineer some pieces of the skin of the orange she had just peeled.

“Maria Juana, don’t leave your sewing,” said the eldest of the Troyas. “It is late, and the cassock must be finished to-night.”

“There is to be no work to-day. To the devil with the needles!” exclaimed Tafetan.

And he began to sing a song.

“The people are stopping in the street,” said the second of the girls, going out on the balcony. “Don Juan Tafetan’s shouts can be heard in the Plaza—Juana, Juana!”

“Well?”

“Suspiritos is walking down the street.”

“Throw a piece of orange-peel at her.”

Pepe Rey looked out also; he saw a lady walking down the street at whom the youngest of the Troyas, taking a skilful aim, threw a large piece of orange-peel, which struck her straight on the back of the head. Then they hastily closed the blinds, and the three girls tried to stifle their laughter so that it might not be heard in the street.

“There is no work to-day,” cried one, overturning the sewing-basket with the tip of her shoe.

“That is the same as saying, to-morrow there is to be no eating,” said the eldest, gathering up the sewing implements.

Pepe Rey instinctively put his hand into his pocket. He would gladly have given them an alms. The spectacle of these poor orphans, condemned by the world because of their frivolity, saddened him beyond measure. If the only sin of the Troyas, if the only pleasure which they had to compensate them for solitude, poverty, and neglect, was to throw orange-peels at the passers-by, they might well be excused for doing it. The austere customs of the town in which they lived had perhaps preserved them from vice, but the unfortunate girls lacked decorum and good-breeding, the common and most visible signs of modesty, and it might easily be supposed that they had thrown out of the window something more than orange-peels. Pepe Rey felt profound pity for them. He noted their shabby dresses, made over, mended, trimmed, and retrimmed, to make them look like new; he noted their broken shoes—and once more he put his hand in his pocket.

“Vice may reign here,” he said to himself, “but the faces, the furniture, all show that this is the wreck of a respectable family. If these poor girls were as bad as it is said they are, they would not live in such poverty and they would not work. In Orbajosa there are rich men.”

The three girls went back and forward between him and the window, keeping up a gay and sprightly conversation, which indicated, it must be said, a species of innocence in the midst of all their frivolity and unconventionality.

“Senor Don Jose, what an excellent lady Dona Perfecta is!”

“She is the only person in Orbajosa who has no nickname, the only person in Orbajosa who is not spoken ill of.”

“Every one respects her.”

“Every one adores her.”

To these utterances the young man responded by praises of his aunt, but he had no longer any inclination to take money from his pocket and say, “Maria Juana, take this for a pair of boots.” “Pepa, take this to buy a dress for yourself.” “Florentina, take this to provide yourself with a week’s provisions,” as he had been on the point of doing. At a moment when the three girls had run out to the balcony to see who was passing, Don Juan Tafetan approached Rey and whispered to him:

“How pretty they are! Are they not? Poor things! It seems impossible that they should be so gay when it may be positively affirmed that they have not dined to-day.”

“Don Juan, Don Juan!” cried Pepilla. “Here comes a friend of yours, Nicolasito Hernandez, in other words, Cirio Pascual, with this three-story hat. He is praying to himself, no doubt, for the souls of those whom he has sent to the grave with his extortion.”

“I wager that neither of you will dare to call him by his nickname.”

“It is a bet.”

“Juana, shut the blinds, wait until he passes, and when he is turning the corner, I will call out, ‘Cirio, Cirio Pascual!’”

Don Juan Tafetan ran out to the balcony.

“Come here, Don Jose, so that you may know this type,” he called.

Pepe Rey, availing himself of the moment in which the three girls and Don Juan were making merry in the balcony, calling Nicolasito Hernandez the nickname which so greatly enraged him, stepped cautiously to one of the sewing baskets in the room and placed in it a half ounce which he had left after his losses at play.

Then he hurried out to the balcony just as the two youngest cried in the midst of wild bursts of laughter, “Cirio, Cirio Pascual!”

CHAPTER XIII

A CASUS BELLI

After this prank the Troyas commenced a conversation with their visitors about the people and the affairs of the town. The engineer, fearing that his exploit might be discovered while he was present, wished to go, which displeased the Troyas greatly. One of them who had left the room now returned, saying:

“Suspiritos is now in the yard; she is hanging out the clothes.”

“Don Jose will wish to see her,” said another of the girls.

“She is a fine-looking woman. And now she arranges her hair in the Madrid fashion. Come, all of you.”

They took their visitors to the dining-room—an apartment very little used—which opened on a terrace, where there were a few flowers in pots and many broken and disused articles of furniture. The terrace overlooked the yard of an adjoining house, with a piazza full of green vines and plants in pots carefully cultivated. Every thing about it showed it to be the abode of neat and industrious people of modest means.

The Troyas, approaching the edge of the roof, looked attentively at the neighboring house, and then, imposing silence by a gesture on their cavaliers, retreated to a part of the terrace from which they could not see into the yard, and where there was no danger of their being seen from it.

“She is coming out of the kitchen now with a pan of peas,” said Maria Juana, stretching out her neck to look.

“There goes!” cried another, throwing a pebble into the yard.

The noise of the projectile striking against the glass of the piazza was heard, and then an angry voice crying:

“Now they have broken another pane of glass!”

The girls, hidden, close beside the two men, in a corner of the terrace, were suffocating with laughter.

“Senora Suspiritos is very angry,” said Rey. “Why do they call her by that name?”

“Because, when she is talking, she sighs after every word, and although she has every thing she wants, she is always complaining.”

There was a moment’s silence in the house below. Pepita Troya looked cautiously down.

“There she comes again,” she whispered, once more imposing silence by a gesture. “Maria, give me a pebble. Give it here—bang! there it goes!”

“You didn’t hit her. It struck the ground.”

“Let me see if I can. Let us wait until she comes out of the pantry again.”

“Now, now she is coming out. Take care, Florentina.”

“One, two, three! There it goes!”

A cry of pain was heard from below, a malediction, a masculine exclamation, for it was a man who uttered it. Pepe Rey could distinguish clearly these words:

“The devil! They have put a hole in my head, the–Jacinto, Jacinto! But what an abominable neighborhood this is!”

“Good Heavens! what have I done!” exclaimed Florentina, filled with consternation. “I have struck Senor Don Inocencio on the head.”

“The Penitentiary?” said Pepe Rey.

“Yes.”

“Does he live in that house?”

“Why, where else should he live?”

“And the lady of the sighs–”

“Is his niece, his housekeeper, or whatever else she may be. We amuse ourselves with her because she is very tiresome, but we are not accustomed to play tricks on his reverence, the Penitentiary.”

While this dialogue was being rapidly carried on, Pepe Rey saw, in front of the terrace and very near him, a window belonging to the bombarded house open; he saw a smiling face appear at it—a familiar face—a face the sight of which stunned him, terrified him, made him turn pale and tremble. It was that of Jacinto, who, interrupted in his grave studies, appeared at it with his pen behind his ear. His modest, fresh, and smiling countenance, appearing in this way, had an auroral aspect.

“Good-afternoon, Senor Don Jose,” he said gayly.

“Jacinto, Jacinto, I say!”

“I am coming. I was saluting a friend.”

“Come away, come away!” cried Florentina, in alarm. “The Penitentiary is going up to Don Nominative’s room and he will give us a blessing.”

“Yes, come away; let us close the door of the dining-room.”

They rushed pell-mell from the terrace.

“You might have guessed that Jacinto would see you from his temple of learning,” said Tafetan to the Troyas.

“Don Nominative is our friend,” responded one of the girls. “From his temple of science he says a great many sweet things to us on the sly, and he blows us kisses besides.”

“Jacinto?” asked the engineer. “What the deuce is that name you gave him?”

“Don Nominative.”

The three girls burst out laughing.

“We call him that because he is very learned.”

“No, because when we were little he was little too. But, yes, now I remember. We used to play on the terrace, and we could hear him studying his lessons aloud.”

“Yes, and the whole blessed day he used to spend singling.”

“Declining, girl! That is what it was. He would go like this: ‘Nominative, rosa, Genitive, Dative, Accusative.’”

“I suppose that I have my nickname too,” said Pepe Rey.

“Let Maria Juana tell you what it is,” said Florentina, hiding herself.

“I? Tell it to him you, Pepa.”

“You haven’t any name yet, Don Jose.”

“But I shall have one. I promise you that I will come to hear what it is and to receive confirmation,” said the young man, making a movement to go.

“What, are you going?”

“Yes. You have lost time enough already. To work, girls! Throwing stones at the neighbors and the passers-by is not the most suitable occupation for girls as pretty and as clever as you are. Well, good-by.”

And without waiting for further remonstrances, or answering the civilities of the girls, he left the house hastily, leaving Don Juan Tafetan behind him.

The scene which he had just witnessed, the indignity suffered by the canon, the unexpected appearance of the little doctor of laws, added still further to the perplexities, the anxieties, and the disagreeable presentiments that already disturbed the soul of the unlucky engineer. He regretted with his whole soul having entered the house of the Troyas, and, resolving to employ his time better while his hypochondriasm lasted, he made a tour of inspection through the town.

He visited the market, the Calle de la Triperia, where the principal stores were; he observed the various aspects presented by the industry and commerce of the great city of Orbajosa, and, finding only new motives of weariness, he bent his steps in the direction of the Paseo de las Descalzas; but he saw there only a few stray dogs, for, owing to the disagreeable wind which prevailed, the usual promenaders had remained at home. He went to the apothecary’s, where various species of ruminant friends of progress, who chewed again and again the cud of the same endless theme, were accustomed to meet, but there he was still more bored. Finally, as he was passing the cathedral, he heard the strains of the organ and the beautiful chanting of the choir. He entered, knelt before the high altar, remembering the warnings which his aunt had given him about behaving with decorum in church; then visited a chapel, and was about to enter another when an acolyte, warden, or beadle approached him, and with the rudest manner and in the most discourteous tone said to him:

“His lordship says that you are to get out of the church.”

The engineer felt the blood rush to his face. He obeyed without a word. Turned out everywhere, either by superior authority or by his own tedium, he had no resource but to return to his aunt’s house, where he found waiting for him:

First, Uncle Licurgo, to announce a second lawsuit to him; second, Senor Don Cayetano, to read him another passage from his discourse on the “Genealogies of Orbajosa”; third, Caballuco, on some business which he had not disclosed; fourth, Dona Perfecta and her affectionate smile, for what will appear in the following chapter.

CHAPTER XIV

THE DISCORD CONTINUES TO INCREASE

A fresh attempt to see his cousin that evening failed, and Pepe Rey shut himself up in his room to write several letters, his mind preoccupied with one thought.

“To-night or to-morrow,” he said to himself, “this will end one way or another.”

When he was called to supper Dona Perfecta, who was already in the dining-room, went up to him and said, without preface:

“Dear Pepe, don’t distress yourself, I will pacify Senor Don Inocencio. I know every thing already. Maria Remedios, who has just left the house, has told me all about it.”

Dona Perfecta’s countenance radiated such satisfaction as an artist, proud of his work, might feel.

“About what?”

“Set your mind at rest. I will make an excuse for you. You took a few glasses too much in the Casino, that was it, was it not? There you have the result of bad company. Don Juan Tafetan, the Troyas! This is horrible, frightful. Did you consider well?”

“I considered every thing,” responded Pepe, resolved not to enter into discussions with his aunt.

“I shall take good care not to write to your father what you have done.”

“You may write whatever you please to him.”

“You will exculpate yourself by denying the truth of this story, then?”

“I deny nothing.”

“You confess then that you were in the house of those–”

“I was.”

“And that you gave them a half ounce; for, according to what Maria Remedios has told me, Florentina went down to the shop of the Extramaduran this afternoon to get a half ounce changed. They could not have earned it with their sewing. You were in their house to-day; consequently—”

“Consequently I gave it to her. You are perfectly right.”

“You do not deny it?”

“Why should I deny it? I suppose I can do whatever I please with my money?”

“But you will surely deny that you threw stones at the Penitentiary.”

“I do not throw stones.”

“I mean that those girls, in your presence—”

“That is another matter.”

“And they insulted poor Maria Remedios, too.”

“I do not deny that, either.”

“And how do you excuse your conduct! Pepe in Heaven’s name, have you nothing to say? That you are sorry, that you deny—”

“Nothing, absolutely nothing, senora!”

“You don’t even give me any satisfaction.”

“I have done nothing to offend you.”

“Come, the only thing there is left for you to do now is—there, take that stick and beat me!”

“I don’t beat people.”

“What a want of respect! What, don’t you intend to eat any supper?”

“I intend to take supper.”

For more than a quarter of an hour no one spoke. Don Cayetano, Dona Perfecta, and Pepe Rey ate in silence. This was interrupted when Don Inocencio entered the dining-room.

“How sorry I was for it, my dear Don Jose! Believe me, I was truly sorry for it,” he said, pressing the young man’s hand and regarding him with a look of compassion.

The engineer was so perplexed for a moment that he did not know what to answer.

“I refer to the occurrence of this afternoon.”

“Ah, yes!”

“To your expulsion from the sacred precincts of the cathedral.”

“The bishop should consider well,” said Pepe Rey, “before he turns a Christian out of the church.”

“That is very true. I don’t know who can have put it into his lordship’s head that you are a man of very bad habits; I don’t know who has told him that you make a boast of your atheism everywhere; that you ridicule sacred things and persons, and even that you are planning to pull down the cathedral to build a large tar factory with the stones. I tried my best to dissuade him, but his lordship is a little obstinate.”

“Thanks for so much kindness.”

“And it is not because the Penitentiary has any reason to show you these considerations. A little more, and they would have left him stretched on the ground this afternoon.”

“Bah!” said the ecclesiastic, laughing. “But have you heard of that little prank already? I wager Maria Remedios came with the story. And I forbade her to do it—I forbade her positively. The thing in itself is of no consequence, am I not right, Senor de Rey?”

“Since you think so–”

“That is what I think. Young people’s pranks! Youth, let the moderns say what they will, is inclined to vice and to vicious actions. Senor de Rey, who is a person of great endowments, could not be altogether perfect—why should it be wondered at that those pretty girls should have captivated him, and, after getting his money out of him, should have made him the accomplice of their shameless and criminal insults to their neighbors? My dear friend, for the painful part that I had in this afternoon’s sport,” he added, raising his hand to the wounded spot, “I am not offended, nor will I distress you by even referring to so disagreeable an incident. I am truly sorry to hear that Maria Remedios came here to tell all about it. My niece is so fond of gossiping! I wager she told too about the half ounce, and your romping with the girls on the terrace, and your chasing one another about, and the pinches and the capers of Don Juan Tafetan. Bah! those things ought not to be told.”

Pepe Rey did not know which annoyed him most—his aunt’s severity or the hypocritical condescension of the canon.

“Why should they not be told?” said Dona Perfecta. “He does not seem ashamed of his conduct himself. I assure you all that I keep this from my dear daughter only because, in her nervous condition, a fit of anger might be dangerous to her.”

“Come, it is not so serious as all that, senora,” said the Penitentiary. “I think the matter should not be again referred to, and when the one who was stoned says that, the rest may surely be satisfied. And the blow was no joke, Senor Don Jose. I thought they had split my head open and that my brains were oozing out.”

“I am truly sorry for the occurrence!” stammered Pepe Rey. “It gives me real pain, although I had no part in it—”

“Your visit to those Senoras Troyas will be talked about all over the town,” said the canon. “We are not in Madrid, in that centre of corruption, of scandal—”

“There you can visit the vilest places without any one knowing it,” said Dona Perfecta.

“Here we are very observant of one another,” continued Don Inocencio. “We take notice of everything our neighbors do, and with such a system of vigilance public morals are maintained at a proper height. Believe me, my friend, believe me,—and I do not say this to mortify you,—you are the first gentleman of your position who, in the light of day—the first, yes, senor—Trojoe qui primus ab oris.”

And bursting into a laugh, he clapped the engineer on the back in token of amity and good-will.

“How grateful I ought to be,” said the young man, concealing his anger under the sarcastic words which he thought the most suitable to answer the covert irony of his interlocutors, “to meet with so much generosity and tolerance, when my criminal conduct would deserve—”

“What! Is a person of one’s own blood, one who bears one’s name,” said Dona Perfecta, “to be treated like a stranger? You are my nephew, you are the son of the best and the most virtuous of men, of my dear brother Juan, and that is sufficient. Yesterday afternoon the secretary of the bishop came here to tell me that his lordship is greatly displeased because I have you in my house.”

“And that too?” murmured the canon.

“And that too. I said that in spite of the respect which I owe the bishop, and the affection and reverence which I bear him, my nephew is my nephew, and I cannot turn him out of my house.”

“This is another singularity which I find in this place,” said Pepe Rey, pale with anger. “Here, apparently, the bishop governs other people’s houses.”

“He is a saint. He is so fond of me that he imagines—he imagines that you are going to contaminate us with your atheism, your disregard for public opinion, your strange ideas. I have told him repeatedly that, at bottom, you are an excellent young man.”

“Some concession must always be made to superior talent,” observed Don Inocencio.

“And this morning, when I was at the Cirujedas’—oh, you cannot imagine in what a state they had my head! Was it true that you had come to pull down the cathedral; that you were commissioned by the English Protestants to go preaching heresy throughout Spain; that you spent the whole night gambling in the Casino; that you were drunk in the streets? ‘But, senoras,’ I said to them, ‘would you have me send my nephew to the hotel?’ Besides, they are wrong about the drunkenness, and as for gambling—I have never yet heard that you gambled.”