Just at the time when Guillen was describing to Doña Teresa the idea which he had formed of marriage accompanied by love, a very different scene was being performed in the lower portion of the castle, in the room which had been occupied, and was now occupied again, by Sancha, the peasant girl, whose father Don Suero had deprived of his sight. The reader will have suspected who the girl was that the count had carried off from Burgos; it was she who had assumed the name of Aldonza at the time of her flight with Mari-Perez.
The girl was standing at a barred window which looked out on the open country, for the Castle of Carrion consisted of a square turreted tower, without exterior fortifications. At her side stood Don Suero, addressing to her bitter reproaches, to which she was listening with apparent disdain, gazing indifferently on the fields lit up by a very bright moon.
"Ungrateful one," the count was saying, "did the love which I felt for you deserve that you should fly from my side as you did? Were you not the only woman to whom the Count of Carrion ever humbled himself? What was ever wanting to you in my castle?"
"I wanted liberty, and I fled away to seek it; I wanted a father, of whom you, cruel man, deprived me, and whom I have not succeeded in finding."
"And were not those privations easy to be borne, being compensated by the comforts and luxuries which you enjoyed in my castle, and more than all, by the love of the noble Count of Carrion?"
The girl laughed, and replied disdainfully—
"More pleasant to me than the comforts and luxuries of your castle have been the coarse apparel, the poor food, and the wretched habitation of Mari-Perez, for they reminded me of what I had in my childhood; and as to the love of the noble Count of Carrion, that of a poor squire of the grandee of Vivar was much more agreeable to me."
"May you be confounded!" exclaimed Don Suero, scarcely able to speak with rage, for that was the first time that a woman dared to scoff at him, and that jealousy tortured his perfidious heart. "With tears of blood you shall weep over your ingratitude; you shall never again see your father, nor rejoice in that liberty which you sigh for so ardently, nor enjoy any other love but mine."
The girl answered the threats of the count with another loud burst of laughter, which caused his anger to rise to its highest point. Don Suero then placed his hand on his dagger, but the girl threw herself on his neck, changing suddenly her sarcastic words and her disdainful smiles into the sweetest and most caressing smiles and words that a woman can assume, in order to disarm the anger of a man.
"Thus do I like to see you, my love," exclaimed Sancha,—"thus do I like to see you, for you appear to me the handsomest of men when anger animates your countenance."