They all pretended to look upon it as a joke, but at the bottom they all more or less felt the same alarm on seeing that sinister figure. Fernanda, as a woman, and in her particular state of mind, was visibly affected, and after they had passed she followed the two horses with eyes of terror until they were lost in the darkness.
On retiring to bed, with her wounded heart, she wished to analyse the emotion which swayed her, and to trace it back to the cause. She felt ashamed of herself. Her pride made her cry out with rage in a loud voice:
"What have these bad goings on to do with me? What have I to do with him or her?"
But hardly had she uttered these words than she felt the scalding tears upon her cheeks, and the heiress of Estrada-Rosa quickly turned and hid her face, suffused with blushes, in the pillows.
CHAPTER VII
THE INCREASE OF THE CONTINGENT
The terrible difficulties that were to arise with the marriage of Emilita, on account of the anti-bellicose opinions of her father, were got over with more facility than could have been expected.
History will not speak (although it could with more reason than it does of many events) of that solemn day when Nuñez had to go in proper form and ask Don Cristobal for the hand of his daughter, of the memorable embrace with which the latter received him, clasping him warmly to his civil breast with that incredible fusion of two heterogeneous elements created to repel each other, and the artless graces of the sweet coy angel are taken for granted and understood. If this particular page were the subject for any historian, he could not abstain from drawing attention to the extreme importance of such concord, which until then had been considered impossible, and at the same time he would impartially show the reverse side of the picture, laying before future generations the way the maligned patrician, Don Cristobal Mateo, was the victim of a social injustice, and of the persecution of his brother citizens.
It must be said that all the world in Lancia thought themselves entitled to joke this respectable and ancient functionary on the marriage of his daughter, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, but whenever the matter was referred to, allusion was made to the antagonistic opinions he had hitherto held on the abolition of the land forces. The marriage was called the increase of the contingent, and some were impertinent enough to give it that name before his future son-in-law.
One can easily conceive what it cost him to give up a tiresome and ill-judged fad.