CHAPTER XVIII.
THE ASCETIC.
Leon was not long in discovering that Luis Gonzaga was out of his element in his father’s house. The lean, angular figure, wrapped in a black gown with a cord round the slender waist,—bare-headed, feeble and drooping, with eyes always fixed on the ground, with a dull, clammy skin and weak swaying neck that could hardly support the head above it, with broad, yellow, transparent hands like little faggots of thin sticks, too weak for anything but to be folded in prayer—wandered like an ominous shadow through the drawing-rooms hung with gaudy papers or tawdry tapestry. It was a dark and dismal stain on the gilded furniture, and the oriental and Japanese decorations, in which the queer figures, like those of a grotesque dream, seemed to harmonise, though remotely, with that of the emaciated student. He was always to be seen wandering and restless, like an imprisoned bird that seeks some escape; and when he cast an eye on the objects that environed him it was to select the most uncomfortable seat in the most obscure corner, where he might pursue his meditations. Now and again the servants, when dusting or tidying a room, would come upon the black and silent form, and pause in their bustle with a mechanical gesture of reverence, while Luis would fly to seek some fresh refuge in this desert of worldly adornment, of profane pictures, of damask and chintz, of satin and rosewood. The hapless, dying anchorite, as he fled from one corner to another, hunted by his own fevered mysticism, would stumble against a piano, a Chinese screen, a stand supporting a bowl of gold-fish, a pillowy sofa covered up with brown holland, or a nude bronze Venus.—He could not understand this covering up of furniture and uncovering of statues.
The servants did not trouble themselves about him, perhaps because he never spoke to them and never asked for anything out of pure humility; he could endure hunger and thirst for an incredible length of time, and knew no vexations, for his spirit, greedy of mortification, accepted them as a boon. A little lad with a jacket all covered with buttons, a merry mischievous face and a closely-cropped head, nimble of foot and with rough warty hands, was the only person who ever did anything for him, and that against the young man’s will. But he would ask him a few questions:
“What is your name?”
“Felipe Centeno.”
“Where do you come from?”
“From Socartes.”
But not much more; the young anchorite kept his eyes down; the page left him to himself. The other servants all looked sour and disobliging, like men doing penance willy-nilly, and condemned to poverty and abstinence in the midst of luxury and splendour.