He could find nothing else to say; but he was paler than ever, and did not raise his eyes from the ground. Vexation and disgust had changed his features as if he were suddenly and miraculously aged. His lips were pinched between two deep wrinkles, and his moustache, all unstiffened, stuck out in every direction, as threatening as a hedgehog’s spines. His cheeks, of a dull and faded pink, were furrowed and worn, and under his eyes were deep ridges of puffy white flesh; it almost seemed as though his neck was leaner and his ears larger and more transparent, while his temples had taken the yellow hue of a mortuary taper; he seemed to have fallen into decrepitude. However, after a few moments of reflection over his hapless fate, he raised his head, and forced his lips into a grimace in which a hypocritical smile hardly concealed the foaming of rage.
“You are, I am sure, most kind and considerate,” he began. “But if we owe much to you, on your part, you have ample reason for your good offices. We cannot be expected to overlook the fact that you have made our beloved María a miserable woman.”
“That I have made her miserable,” said Leon quietly.
“Yes, most wretched! though we have kept it quiet out of consideration for you—too much consideration. At last our feelings are too much for us and we cannot sit by in silence when we see that angel’s sufferings. Do you mean to say that you do not see that the grief of her separation from you will bring her to the grave?”
There is no creature on earth however insignificant that does not try to bite or sting when it is trodden under foot. The marquis, wounded in his pride and cheated of his wild hopes, had recourse to his sting.
“This is too complicated a question to be discussed in a hurry. Do you, as her father, demand an explanation of my action? Because, if so, you have been a long time thinking of it. María and I parted more than a month ago.”
“But the fact that I have delayed it need not prevent my doing so now,” retorted Don Agustín, plucking up his courage now he thought that he had laid his hand on one of those weapons which give a coward the advantage over the most valiant foe. “I am a father, and a devoted one. There is no name for your behaviour to María, that angel of goodness! In the first place you assailed her with your atheism and almost broke her heart by your materialistic views. Do you think that the piety of a woman, brought up as she has been, in the true faith, is not even deserving of respect when she desires to practice it with all due fervour? Without beliefs and without faith, do you expect to govern the world or a family by the laws of an atheistical Utopia?”
“And what in God’s name do you know about governing the world, or even a family?” cried Leon, laughing bitterly at his father-in-law’s solemnity. “When did you ever know anything about religion? When had you any beliefs, or faith, or anything of the kind to boast of?”
“Very true; I am not learned in such matters,” replied Tellería conscious of his incompetence. “I am ignorant; but I cherish certain traditions which have been stamped on my heart from childhood, that I have never forgotten in spite of my shortcomings; and by the light of those principles I can declare that you have behaved atrociously to María, and that by forcing her to this separation you have trampled on every sound principle and all that the human conscience holds most sacred.”
This hackneyed scrap of newspaper bombast exasperated Leon more perhaps than the speaker’s pretensions merited. Pale with wrath, he turned upon him at once: