“I heard it twenty days ago, and am still suffocating over it.”
“Ah, Luis, you do not know the man yet! I heard Fray Ignatius say that.”
“We know him well; and also what he is capable of”; and Luis plucked his mustache fiercely, as he bowed a silent farewell to the ladies.
“Holy Maria! How brave he is!” said Isabel, with a flash of pride that conquered her desire to weep. “How brave he is! Certainly, if he meets Santa Anna, he will kill him.”
They went very quietly up-stairs. The Senora was anticipating the interview she expected with Rachela, and, perhaps wisely, she isolated herself in an atmosphere of sullen and haughty silence. She would accept nothing from her, not even sympathy or flattery; and, in a curt dismission, managed to make her feel the immeasurable distance between a high-born lady of the house of Flores, and a poor manola that she had taken from the streets of Madrid. Rachela knew the Senora was thinking of this circumstance; the thought was in her voice, and it cowed and snubbed the woman, her nature being essentially as low as her birth.
As for the Senora, the experience did her a world of good. She waited upon herself as a princess might condescend to minister to her own wants—loftily, with a smile at her own complaisance. The very knowledge that her husband was near at hand inspired her with courage. She went to sleep assuring herself “that not even Fray Ignatius should again speak evil of her beloved, who never thought of her except with a loyal affection.” For in married life, the wife can sin against love as well as fidelity; and she thought with a sob of the cowardice which had permitted Fray Ignatius to call her dear one “rebel and heretic.”
“Santa Dios!” she said in a passionate whisper; “it is not a mortal sin to think differently from Santa Anna”—and then more tenderly—“those who love each other are of the same faith.”
And if Fray Ignatius had seen at that moment the savage whiteness of her small teeth behind the petulant pout of her parted lips, he might have understood that this woman of small intelligence had also the unreasoning partisanship and the implacable sense of anger which generally accompanies small intelligence, and which indicates a nature governed by feeling, and utterly irresponsive to reasoning which feeling does not endorse.