"Don't be offended, Cecilia. This study is only a proof of my interest in you."
"I am not offended," replied the girl, trying to smile. "I am going to speak to Rosario. Will you escort me to her?"
In the anteroom, only separated from the ballroom by a few pillars, the grave fathers were chatting and casting pleased looks to where their daughters were disporting themselves. Sometimes a masked lady detached herself from the dancing and came to rally them, and sometimes, being a contemporary, would make them laugh till they coughed, and then brought out some of their old stories.
Don Rosendo was chatting in a corner with Don Melchor de las Cuevas. He was laying before him one of his grand and magnificent projects of which the port was now the object. It is impossible to imagine how much more versed in knowledge Belinchon had become in the last few years, and, as with all great men, it was knowledge more intuitive than studied. At first, when he wrote for "The Light" on any subject of which he was ignorant, he was reticent, vacillating, and timid, but as he grew conversant with the topics of the day, and had at his command a quantity of hackneyed phrases, and, above all, when he possessed an encyclopedic dictionary in fifteen volumes, which did not cost him less than 2,000 reales, he tackled any point with tooth and nail. There was not a subject, or scientific, social, economic, and political problem, upon which Don Rosendo did not undertake to throw some light. If it was a question of the plague which was decimating the cattle, Don Rosendo sought in his dictionary for the words cattle, horse, bull, sheep, forage, live stock, etc., and as soon as he had read what was said on the subject he took up his pen, and his journalistic genius was brought to bear on the production of one or several articles pregnant with philosophy and erudition.
At the time the question of the port came up, he lost no time in looking in the dictionary for the words port, dockyard, tides, dredges, winds, etc. Seven consecutive articles were written and published to show the necessity of making a dockyard for Sarrio at a spot called Foril. He posed as a consummate seaman, used to navigating the seas and grown gray in the study of hydraulic problems. However, the Señor de las Cuevas, although less eloquent in such a vocabulary of maritime terms, some of which he did not even know, writhed at the wordy explanation given him by Don Rosendo, and ended by clapping him on the shoulder, and saying:
"You can disabuse your mind, Belinchon, about your dockyard. When the wind is in the northeast no sardines come in."
The one who enjoyed the entertainment most was an old man, the good Don Mateo, to whom it was entirely due. To him the ball represented one of the great triumphs of his life. It had cost him more trouble than enough to assemble together the cantankerous townsfolk. He never stopped all the evening, going, or rather dragging himself, from place to place, giving orders to the servants, the wardens, and the orchestra.
"Gervasio, now for the plates of sweetmeats! Take one down each side, you fellows! What do you want, Señor Anselmo? Do the boys want a polka instead of a waltz? Then let them play a polka. Tell the young men that there are ladies in the dressing-room waiting for partners. Marcelino! where has Marcelino got to? Go down to the porch, for some vagabond has thrown a stone at the lamp and broken it. But, Don Manuel, it is not more than two o'clock! You won't take away the girls yet, and the piñata [Jack Horner basket] not yet broken."
The good gentleman was rejuvenated that evening. He shared the pleasure of the young people as mystics rejoice in a general communion. His dark eyes occasionally looked over his spectacles at the wooden globe hanging in the middle of the room, and he gave a chuckle of delight. The beautiful work of art from Bordeaux was painted with blue and white stripes, and there hung from beneath it a quantity of ribbons of various colors, all of which, with one exception, were held by young ladies ready to pull them, and the one who had the ribbon that opened the piñata won the globe, which was doubtless filled with sweets, and, according to report, with very pretty knickknacks. Gonzalo, in the middle of the party, seemed also in good spirits, being sometimes with one lady, sometimes with another. He had danced a polka with his sister-in-law, and a polka and a waltz with two friends of his wife. His tall, colossal form rose like a tower above the heads of all.
"How cheerful you are, señor mayor!" said a lady of the lower middle class.