SeÑora de PardiÑas was now pronounced entirely well, and the advisability of her going out for a walk was being considered, when one morning, at the hour when Rogelio had his lecture on Political Economy, an hour which was unusually early for visitors, Don Nicanor arrived, smiling, and seemingly in a very good humor. He pretended to be surprised at finding none of the accustomed visitors there, whereupon DoÑa Aurora, who was knitting a woolen stocking, answered with much show of reason that as it wanted at least two hours to the usual time of their arrival, it was not strange that none of them had yet come. But apparently Lain Calvo did not hear this answer, for he had kept his ear trumpet in his pocket, using his hand as a substitute.

“Tell me, DoÑa Aurora, have you not noticed something?” he asked, settling himself comfortably in his easy-chair, whose broad back already bore the impress of his form.

DoÑa Aurora raised her eyes with an expression that seemed to say: No—that is to say, I don’t know. Do me the favor to explain yourself.

“Did you not notice the other day, the day that Pacha and I were here——”

“Yes, yes; I know—Friday.”

“How dejected the wife of Rojas seemed?”

“Poor woman! She is never very cheerful; but she never seems discontented, either. She is an excellent woman! As good as gold!”

“Well, she tried hard to conceal her grief, but it was very evident, especially to those of us who were already aware of the circumstances.”

“Why, what has happened? Have they had any trouble?” asked SeÑora de PardiÑas in alarm, for she sincerely esteemed and liked SeÑora de Rojas.

“Joaquin—the son, the judge—they have transferred him again from one end of Spain to the others, two months after the first transfer, and just when his wife is about to be confined. That will convince him that one cannot play the Quixote here, carapuche. Fancy a young man, who is beginning his career, making his dÉbut by opposing so powerful a chief as Colmenar, who has at his back the Minister of the Department. He will soon see, he will soon see that they are not the people to be trifled with. And he will see, too, of how much consequence the law is. A judge can be transferred only at his own instance? Well, put in the royal order, ‘at his own instance,’ and that settles it. Why, there have been people who were placed on the retired list ‘at their own instance.’ And when they protested, they were told they were wanting in respect for the Minister.”

“But, SeÑor Don Nicanor, that is very creditable to the Rojases. It is evident the young man is of his father’s school. People as upright as that are seldom seen nowadays. I understand nothing about those things, but I remember the affair was discussed here, and it was said that they wanted Joaquin Rojas to be a party to a dreadful piece of dishonesty—a robbery of——”

“The idea of a jackanapes like that,” continued Lain Calvo, persisting in his deafness, “wishing to set himself up in opposition to the Minister. The Rojases are as stubborn as mules. Talis pater—a fanatic the father, a fanatic the son. That is to say, a still greater fanatic, although that might seem to be impossible. For the father at least does not get himself into a fix; he adheres to the letter of the law and that is the end of it. The code says white? White let it be, then. Does it say black? Then let it be black. Rojas is a machine for carrying out the law. If the law to flog criminals or to cut off their ears were still in force, Rojas would himself go about seeing it carried into execution. But the boy! Because he has read a few trashy German and Italian books, translated into worse gibberish, he plays the learned man and the phi-los-o-pher. A judge a phi-los-o-pher! Fancy! What pretentiousness!”

“Well, for my part,” protested DoÑa Aurora, without raising her voice, for she knew how much faith to put in the Crown Solicitor’s deafness, “I think that in every situation in life a man should behave himself with dignity and propriety. For that reason I have a great deal of sympathy for the Rojases.”

“And as a natural consequence,” continued Lain Calvo, “they are very straitened in their circumstances. They never light a fire in that house, they eat only the plainest food, they drink no coffee. The salary is not enough to meet the expenses of moving from one place to another; he has married a girl without a penny, and as soon as things come to a crisis the young gentleman will lower his tone. Necessity teaches more than all the universities put together. They will tame him yet. He will be as soft as a glove before the year is over.”

Convinced that she would gain nothing by argument, DoÑa Aurora went on narrowing the heel of her stocking, contenting herself with shaking her head in dissent from time to time, for her quick temper would not allow her to listen quietly to the spiteful remarks of the malicious Asturian.

“We all begin life with the idea that we are going to reform the world,” he went on, “but very soon we take in our sails. Oh, yes, we soon take in our sails. Or if we do not, we lead a miserable existence. You will see that the storm that has caught Joaquin will reach his father also. It is brewing for him. Before the year is out they will give him a lesson he won’t forget. They cannot transfer him? They will superannuate him, then. I am no lover of the past like Don Gaspar and the others, but I must acknowledge that in my day politics had less to do with the magistracy than it has now. That is the way things come and that is how we must take them. Those gentlemen are always in the clouds, carapuche. Complete fools! The new generation understand things better. I am the only one of our circle who lives in the world. If it were not for this cursed deafness——”

“Don’t come to me with stories about your deafness,” protested SeÑora de PardiÑas. “God deliver me from deaf people like you. You hear more than you ought to hear. Give over your nonsense with me, eh? I wasn’t born in the year of the fools.”

“And the craziest of them all,” continued Lain, pretending not to have heard, “is the worthy Don Gaspar. He is a perfect simpleton. He has gone back to his childhood. We shall have to give him a nurse, or at the least a maid to take care of him. That is what he wants, and that is what he sighs for, and he is trying to steal away from you the one you have chosen for your boy. I am speaking in earnest; as sure as my name is Nicanor he is crazy for your maid, for Esclava, or whatever her name is. No boy of twenty could be more desperately in love than he is with her. I am certain that Rogelio is not half so deeply smitten.”

On hearing Rogelio’s name, and observing the tone in which it was uttered by CandÁs, SeÑora de PardiÑas started, and let her knitting fall on her lap.

“As for Rogelio,” continued the Asturian, with the same affectation of indulgence, “what has happened to him is so natural at his age that the wonder would be if it had not happened. It is plain. A woman of twenty-five, good-looking and affectionate; a boy of twenty, what was to happen? A glance to-day, a touch to-morrow, a caress in the hall, a romp in the reception-room—youthful follies that come to an end of themselves.”

SeÑora de PardiÑas jumped in her chair as if she had been moved by a spring.

“Do you know what you are saying?” she exclaimed. “Do you think it is right to say such things for no other reason than your own pleasure, without any proof or foundation whatever? Are you to let your tongue gallop away with you without caring whom you knock down? Rogelio, poor boy, is incapable of such conduct in his mother’s house.”

“Of course I can understand your attaching little importance to the matter, and turning it into ridicule, for those things are follies natural to youth; and for that reason when I caught them the other day in the reception-room billing and cooing like a pair of turtle-doves, I said to them in my own mind: ‘That’s right, children, amuse yourselves; that is the law of God.’ But when I think of that other driveler, with his eighty odd years, playing the love-sick swain, I vow I could lay him across my knee and give him a sound flogging for an arch fool.”

And DoÑa Aurora felt that she could with the greatest pleasure have performed the same operation on the person of the incorrigible Asturian. To say these dreadful things to her and to say them in that treacherous way, that did not even give her a chance to set him right, for with the pretense of his deafness, he might assert what he chose regardless of all that might be said either in denial or disproof of his words. It was enough to make one’s blood boil with rage. It was a stupid, shameless, insufferable jest. And was she going to let it pass? No, indeed. SeÑora de PardiÑas’s anger was aroused; the blood boiled in her veins. “Hypocrite! liar! fire-brand! tale-bearer! fox!” she said to the Asturian in her own mind. “Now I am going to settle accounts with you.” She rose from her chair, went up quickly to him, put her hand in the pocket of his coat with the dexterity of a professional pickpocket, and took from it the case which contained his ear-trumpet. And before the astonished Lain Calvo could make a movement to defend himself, DoÑa Aurora had taken the silver tube out of its case, introduced it into his ear, and screamed with all her might:

“Whenever you talk to me in future, either use your trumpet or else make up your mind to hear what I say in answer to you. All that about Rogelio and Esclava is the suggestion of your own vile thoughts, do you hear? My boy is not in the habit of flirting with his mother’s servants, do you hear? People are not so loose and so shameless in their conduct as you try to make them out to be, do you hear? do you hear? And decent people are not the same as villains, do you hear? And I am not so great a simpleton, listen well to what I say, that such things could take place under my very nose without my seeing them. And malicious people are not to my taste, do you hear? For I always think of the saying, ‘Ill-doers, ill-deemers,’ do you hear?”

Her philippic ended, she let herself fall on the sofa, agitated and unstrung, while the Asturian, putting both his hands up to his bald crown, exclaimed in distressed accents:

“Carapuche, Aurorina, you have broken the drum of my ear. Another such outbreak as that and you would leave me deaf.”