She bustled up and held out her hand to her son-in-law. “And Padre Paoletti is to preach.—Good-bye, I must fly. What shall I say to your wife? I will tell her to make haste home and that you are very dull without her.”
CHAPTER X.
THE MARQUIS.
He was a little man, with delicate and effeminate features, on which he wore a look of assumed gravity, at first carefully cultivated, but now as much a matter of habit as though it had been a cosmetic applied daily out of a gallipot in his old dandy’s dressing-case. His eyes, nose and mouth were, like his daughter’s, perfectly well shaped, but what in her was charming, in him was ridiculous, and what was beautiful in her, in him was purely comical; for there is nothing more preposterous than the face of a pretty woman hung on, like a mask, to the figure and manners of a pottering old man.
His fashionable dress, his easy demeanour, his refined and frigid courtesy, which masked a total absence of kindliness or intelligence, decorated his exterior as a gorgeous binding covers a book that is destitute of rational contents. He was not a vicious man; he was equally incapable of wilful evil or intentional good; he was a vacuous compound of weakness and dissipation, corrupt rather from “evil communications” than from inherent wickedness; one of so many! a creature so hard to be distinguished from the rest of his species, since absence of character has reduced certain groups of the upper classes—as well as of the lower—with a few notable exceptions, to a common type which will lack a generic name till the advance of terminology allows us to speak of them as “the masses of the upper class.” Still, this empty-headed and unenlightened mortal had a great command of words in no respect deficient in meaning, and was an admired master of all the commonplace of the press and the law; he added nothing to be sure, but, on the other hand, he deprived them of nothing. He was, in short, always prepared with a perfect thesaurus of those ready-made phrases which to many people form the Alpha and Omega of learning and wisdom. He was constantly insisting that “administration rather than legislation was what was needed;” he was convinced that “Spain is a nation past all government;” he was for “upholding the venerable creeds of the past so that we may once more become a terror to our foes at home and abroad;” he was convinced that nothing of native origin could be good for anything; that Spain is a ruined country, notwithstanding the fertility of her soil; and at the same time he maintained with punctilious exactitude the immovable dogmas of Castilian Nobility, of the Faith abandoned by the modern populace, of the materialistic tendencies of the age and so forth; he had a sacred horror of “Utopian dreams”—and anything he did not at once grasp was to him an Utopian dream. In short, not a string was wanting to his inexhaustible fiddle.
“In here as usual, always in this blessed study of yours, which is as dark and as small as a prior’s cell and might be a prince’s boudoir for the treasures it contains!... Here as usual Leon! I never meet you anywhere. And María? She was with us last evening ... tears and lamentations as usual; her mother tried to comfort her, and they sat whispering and talking—between them I suspect, they made things pleasant for you. They have nothing to think about but their subscription to the theatres, and the festival-services at San Prudencio’s; and after Mass they lay their heads together to talk of the fashions.... But you, are you ill? You look pale, what is the matter?”
“I?” said Leon, looking at his father-in-law like a man who suddenly wakes face to face with a stranger, “what were you saying?”
“That you look ill. We were talking of you last evening at the Fúcars’. Since Pepa married Cimarra, poor Don Pedro’s life is a bitter one—Poor Pepa! I hear dreadful things of Federico ... and what a sweet child that is of Pepa’s! Have you seen it? Do you never go there?... Your cigars are first-rate.”