The commandant, dressed in the costume of a peasant, unceremoniously entered the room with his niece, who was the apple of his eye, his arm encircling her waist as if he was going to dance a waltz with her. In the salutation he exchanged with his sister, however, DoÑa Aurora could detect a shade of coldness, not far removed from dislike, a feeling which can sometimes be dissimulated where strangers are concerned, but never where its object is a member of one’s family. After the customary salutations and compliments, SeÑora de PardiÑas, who did not belie her race so far as wiliness and obstinacy were concerned, said tentatively:

“Well, I will leave you now. After all, I did not find out what I had come to learn, and consequently—— Your sister is very reserved, SeÑor de Pardo.”

“Upon my faith, I have never thought so,” answered the artilleryman bluntly, almost rudely.

“Well, every one speaks of the fair according to the bargain he has made. With me she has shown herself extraordinarily reticent.” And without heeding the gesture or the glance of Rita, she continued undaunted: “For the last quarter of an hour I have been asking information from her in vain about a young countrywoman of ours, Esclavita Lamas, the niece of the rector of Vimieiro.”

Pardo listened like one in whose memory some vague recollection has been awakened.

“Stay—let me think—Vimieiro—Lamas—Lamas TarrÍo. He was an intimate friend of papa’s. Rita knows all about him; she has the whole story at her fingers’ ends.—What objection have you to tell it to DoÑa Aurora?”

A caricaturist desiring to represent bourgeois dignity in its most exaggerated form might have copied with exactness the features and expression of Rita as, arching her brows and pointing to her eldest daughter leaning against the commandant’s knees, she exclaimed impressively:

“The child!”

“Well, what of the child?” responded Don Gabriel, imitating his sister’s tragic tone. “Is it one of those shocking things that innocent ears must not hear—that the cat has had kittens, for instance?”

“Gabriel, you are dreadful,” groaned Rita, casting up her beautiful southern eyes. “When one is killing one’s self, trying to make your nieces what they ought to be in society, you must do your best to—there is no use in trying to struggle against people’s dispositions.”

“Well,” insisted the obstinate DoÑa Aurora, “I come back to my complaint. Rita, don’t say that it was for the child’s sake that you refused to give me the information I asked. The child was not present, and even if she had been, by sending her out of the room——”

“Which is what I am going to do now. Eugenita, child, go practice your Concone.”

The girl left the room, much against her will, casting on her uncle, as she went, a couple of affectionate farewell glances; but no scale or study was heard to tell that she had shut herself in the musical torture-chamber in which our young ladies, worthy of a better fate, are condemned to dislocate their fingers daily.

“You shall hear,” said DoÑa Aurora, emphatically, “now that we can speak freely. The question is that that girl, Esclavita Lamas, wants to enter my service; and that I, for my part, am greatly pleased with what I have seen of her. But I know nothing about her past, nor why she left her native place. There seems something odd in the whole affair. Your sister knows the story, and neither for God’s sake nor the saints’ will she tell it to me. There you have the cause of our dispute. It was beginning to grow serious when you came in.”

“The story,” said Gabriel, nervously wiping his gold-rimmed spectacles, and putting them on again carefully. “Wait a moment, SeÑora; for if my treacherous memory does not deceive me—Rita, is not that the Father Lamas who took a poor girl off the street into his house for charity? Tell the truth, or I shall write this very day to Galicia to inquire.”

“Heavens! What notions you have! You are growing more unbearable every day—Was I not going to tell you the truth? Yes, that was the Lamas, and since you insist upon opening his grave, and dragging him out to public shame, do it you, for I don’t want to have such a thing on my conscience.”

“It should weigh more heavily upon your conscience,” replied Gabriel, with vehemence, “to try to prevent the girl getting her place on account of the sins of others. Now I can tell you the whole story, DoÑa Aurora, by an end I have unwound the skein; it is the same with stories as with an old tune—if one remembers the first bar, one can sing the whole of it through without a mistake. And I can tell you that it is a novel, a real novel.”

“It may seem so to you,” said Rita, venomously, pulling the lace of her sleeves again. “As for me—there are certain things—— Well, I wash my hands of it.”

DoÑa Aurora concealed the satisfaction her victory gave her, but, a woman after all, she said to herself, casting a side glance at Rita:

“I’ve got the best of you, hypocrite!”

“You shall hear,” began the commandant. “This Father Lamas was a simple-minded man, illiterate as all the rural clergy were at that time,—now they are much more enlightened,—and not over-intelligent; but he performed all his parochial duties faithfully, and if he committed faults he succeeded in hiding them. If you cannot be chaste, be cautious, as the saying is. Well, one night there came to the door of the rectory a girl, about tea years old, an orphan, who lived upon charity; in one house they gave her a piece of corn bread, in another a bundle of corn leaves to sleep upon, here a ragged shawl, there a pair of old shoes. In this way the wretched girl managed to live. The rector took pity upon her and said to her: ‘Stay here; you can learn housework; you will have clothes to wear, a bed to sleep in, and good hot soup to nourish you.’ And so it was decided—the girl stayed.”

“The girl was Esclavita?”

“No, SeÑora, no SeÑora. Wait a while. The girl turned out bright and capable; she put away from her her melancholy, as they say in our country, and she even grew rosy and handsome. And—” here the voice of the commandant took a sarcastic tone—“when the flower of maidenhood bloomed—”

“Oh, Gabriel,” remonstrated Rita, “certain things should be spoken of in a different way. There is no need of entering into details that——”

“Bah!” said DoÑa Aurora. “We are all of us married and I am an old woman. We know all about it and are not to be so easily shocked as that comes to, my dear. Go on. What came afterward?”

“Afterward came Esclavita.”

Although SeÑora PardiÑas had affirmed that she knew all about it, this piece of information, given thus suddenly, almost made her jump in her chair.

“Ah!” she exclaimed, and then looked very thoughtful. “That is why the poor girl—well, and afterward?”

“Afterward,” cried Rita impetuously, unable to keep silent any longer, “papa had the greatest difficulty to pacify SeÑor Cuesta, the Cardinal Archbishop. As the Archbishop himself was so virtuous he maintained strict discipline and permitted no misconduct. If it were not for all papa’s efforts with his eminence, to-day one entreaty and to-morrow another, Lamas TarrÍo would have been deprived of his license and would have been left to rot in the ecclesiastical prison. For it is one thing for a priest to commit a fault that no one knows anything about, and another to scandalize his parishioners, bringing up the child in his own house, outraging public opinion, petting and indulging her——”

“My father,” said Gabriel, interrupting his sister, “with one hand smoothed down the Archbishop and with the other hammered away at the sinner. By dint of exhortations he succeeded in having the siren sent away from the rectory; but Lamas continued to see her. At last papa took a firm stand and prevailed on him to allow the mother to be sent to Montevideo, on condition that he was permitted to keep the child.”

“Yes,” again interposed Rita, “a fine remedy that was, worse than the disease. The man became wilder and more reckless than he had been before. He spent night after night without closing an eye, crying and screaming. He had a rush of blood to the head—he was in our house at the time—so that they were obliged to apply more than forty leeches to him at once, and the blood that came was as black as pitch. We thought he would go mad; he would go about the corridors tearing his hair, calling on the woman’s name with maudlin expressions of endearment.”

As Rita said this her brother observed that the curtains of the adjoining room moved as if they had been stirred by a breath of hoydenish curiosity, and the outlines of an inquisitive little nose were vaguely defined against them.

“See,” he said, “now it is you who are getting beyond your depth. All that has nothing whatever to do with the case. Let us end the story at once, and let me tell it in my own way. Poor Lamas became so ill that the Archbishop himself was sorry for him, and sent for him to cheer him and inspire him with thoughts of penitence. And in effect, in process of time he grew calmer and even behaved himself very well afterward. The only fault to be found with him was that he brought up the child with extraordinary indulgence; but as the feelings of a father, even when they contravene both human and divine laws, have something sacred, people shut their eyes to this. He introduced the girl as his niece. As such children do not inherit, the priest saved up money, ounce upon ounce, which he put into Esclavita’s own hand; but the girl, who had turned out very discreet and very devout, and, in addition to that, very unselfish, when Lamas died, gave all this money, in gold as she had received it, for masses and prayers for the soul of the sinner. This act alone will give you an idea of the girl’s character. There are not many girls who would do so much even if they had been born in a better station and in a more orthodox manner.”

“As my brother is of a romantic turn he sees things in that way,” interposed Rita.

“SeÑora de PardiÑas, I give you my word as a gentleman that I neither add nor diminish. That girl, in my opinion, would be capable of going bare-footed on a pilgrimage to any part of the world in order to get the soul of the rector of Vimieiro out of purgatory.”

“And well he would need it,” said Rita, “and her mother too, who, by all accounts, does not lead the life of a saint over there in America.”

“Good Heavens! How merciless you women can be, who have never had to suffer for the want of consideration or of bread,” exclaimed Pardo, now really angry. “I do not err on the side of philanthropy, but there are certain things that I cannot understand in people who make a boast of being good Christians and who go to mass and say their prayers. Fine prayers those are! Is that what you understand by charity? Well, my dear, I declare that Esclavita is worth more than——”

Fortunately he restrained himself in time and ended:

“Than some other people. How is she to blame for her parents’ faults? Tell me that! And she is expiating them as if she had committed them. She even left her native place, it seems, so as not to be where people know and remember and discuss——”

“I would swear the same thing,” asserted DoÑa Aurora warmly. “Now I know why it was that she became so confused when she was asked certain questions. I am of the same opinion as you, Pardo, that she is good, that she has noble sentiments, and that those traits do her honor.”

“Yes, be guided by my brother, admit her into your house,” exclaimed Rita, with a spiteful and insolent laugh. “For giving advice, Gabriel has a special gift. I tremble when he and my husband get together. If Eugenio were to be led by him we should be living on charity. Take that girl on your hands, and you will see how it will end. Then you will say, ‘Rita Pardo was right after all.’”

SeÑora PardiÑas thought within herself:

“I will take her if only to spite you, hypocrite, impostor. I have taken your measure, now.”

When Gabriel was going out, he found his eldest niece waiting for him in the reception room. He caught her by the waist, and lifting her up to a level with his mouth, whispered in her ear:

“Good little girls, if they want Uncle Gabriel to love them, must not go peeping and spying and hiding themselves behind portiÈres. They must obey mamma because she is mamma, and she will not tell them to do anything wrong. Take care and don’t bite, little lizard. Good little girls—are good. Ah-h-h! my cravat!”

“Uncle Gabriel, will you take me with you?” coaxed the little madcap. “With you, yes; with you, no; with you, yes, I will go. Come, take me with you!”

“To Leganes it is that I will take you. Be good now! Study your French lesson! Comb that mane of yours! Run into the kitchen to see what the girl is about there! Papa likes his roast beef well done! See to papa’s roast beef!”

As he crossed the threshold the commandant threw a kiss to the girl, which she promptly returned.