“Ah! To be sure; your honour!” said Leon with a laugh. “Very good; we will try to find it, and when we have succeeded we can talk about it. Good-bye.”
The marquis departed. Though somewhat crestfallen at the failure of his application for money, he was very proud of himself. There was something in his mind which made him swell as he thought of it; the stairs, the doorway, were not big enough for him—even the street, the fields, the whole wide world! It was the idea which had slipped in hardly visible and expanded within him, suggesting with miraculous fertility a thousand accessory possibilities of the most flattering description, raising him in his own estimation, and lowering others. How comforting it is to have an idea! especially when it condones our own sins by showing us the sins of others, and allows us to say with satisfaction: “Ah! we are all alike, all alike!”
CHAPTER XXXII.
REASON VERSUS PASSION.
The following day Leon had visitors; two friends who gave him some information which, though certainly interesting, was far from pleasing to him, and he spent the day in agitations and the night without sleep. Early in the morning he called Facunda and told her that he was going away; then an hour later he said to himself: “No I must stay—I ought to stay.”
In the afternoon he rode out, and on his return sent a message to Pepa saying that he wished to speak with her.
Since the day when the news of Cimarra’s death had reached them, Leon had hardly seen her; a feeling of delicacy had kept him from repeating his visits to Suertebella.
Pepa received him in the evening in Monina’s nursery, where he had seen the little girl suffering and dying. This evening the saucy baby, lying half-uncovered on the bed, was rebellious to the law which sends children to sleep betimes. Kicking and tossing between the sheets she was chattering to herself, relating scraps of all the stories she knew, full of fun and impudence; beginning long speeches that ended in nothing, punishing her doll after she had fed it, sitting up in bed to bow like a gentleman, and making a peep-hole with her tiny fingers to imitate the Baron de Soligny’s eye-glass. After much ado, between laughter and a pretence of severity, Pepa succeeded in making her kneel up and repeat a pater noster with a very bad grace and a great many yawns. This she followed up with a baby hymn and, as though this innocent litany had a soporific virtue, Monina dropped upon the pillow and her eyelids closed over her unwilling eyes while she was still murmuring the last words of the verse.
They stood watching her for some time in silence, and then Leon, bending down to kiss her, said: