"I should like to see it done! Presumption! presumption! a hundred times presumption! Who would dare to do it if Fray Diego de Areces were near?" cried the cleric convulsed with rage, and jumping up, whilst his eyes blazed with fury.
"Sit down, Pater, and calm yourself, and take another glass, for Fray Diego de Areces is only a common vessel."
The chaplain instantly calmed down, delicately poured out the liquor into the two glasses, and swallowed his own share with pleasure, after which his head fell on his breast, his eyelids dropped, and he was asleep. The baron, radiant with delight, looked at him sharply with cunning eyes, then, profiling by his companion's temporary obliviousness, he took another glass, saying, "The nones."
It was a peculiar feature of those delightful sessions that the gin changed the character of both. The irascible, impetuous temper of the baron was softened in a remarkable way whilst the beneficial effects of alcohol lasted. He was cheerful, communicative, conciliatory, nobody's remarks upset him, nothing seemed worth getting angry about. Fray Diego, on the contrary, who, in his normal condition, was always a jovial, jocose priest, turned into a very devil for disputing and nagging, and he betrayed a combative disposition that nobody would have suspected under his round, placid face and pious calling.
He roused himself at the end of a few minutes, looked at the baron fixedly for some moments with strange ferocity, and said stammeringly:
"Will the señor baron kindly explain to me what he means by a common vessel?"
"Come, I've done with that. Are we to go on about that? What does it signify to you what the one or the other means?"
"Because I choose to know; we must understand one another."
"We have understood each other. You have two pints of gin inside you and I another two, or perhaps more," he added, with several winks.
"It is not so, señor baron, it is not so! We must understand each other once for all, stupid!"