“How?” asked Leon coldly.
“Do you not see that I am disgraced?”
“Certainly; but I do not see how I am to prevent it.”
“But could you bear to see your relations begging their bread?” said his father-in-law, employing a figure of speech that he thought must prove effective.
“I am quite willing to save my relations from beggary. But if you expect me to pay the debts you have incurred by wastefulness, dissipation and vanity, so that you may be free to begin again and get into fresh debt, and go on living in the same scandalous way, I am obliged to say very plainly: No. Not once, but several times, have I extricated you from a similar predicament. I have heard endless promises of amendment, endless schemes of reform; but they have all resulted in greater extravagance than ever. You, the marquesa, and Polito have eaten up a good quarter of my fortune; I can do no more.”
Leon’s resolute energy startled the hapless marquis, who sat stunned; the bluntness of his son-in-law’s refusal deprived him for a time of the power of speech; at last, stammering and hesitating like a man who has lost count in telling his beads, he managed to speak.
“I am not asking your charity ... that is not in my nature ... whenever I have appealed to your generosity ... you have had my bond ... and interest.”
“The bond is a mere formality, the interest purely visionary; I have accepted the hypothesis simply and solely to give a gift the semblance of a loan. What security can you give who have neither land, nor houses, not even a stick that does not belong to your creditors? What I have done for you has been anything rather than really generous, Señor; it is a crime. I have not succoured the needy but sheltered the vicious!”
“Good God!” cried the marquis quaking with astonishment; “remember—what you have done for me—for my sons and my wife was the natural outcome of your affection for us ... but Leon, for the last time ... this is the critical moment of my life. The honour of my house is at stake.”
“Your house has no such thing as honour; it has had none for a long time past.”