“You have only to assert your rights. But this is no concern of mine; I plead not for law but for virtue.”
“I am coming to that point. We have here an alliance of virtue and law, and both are on my side,” Cimarra went on with increased vehemence. “I am the stronger and she the weaker party; I am the defendant, and they are the criminals. I am protected alike by religion and morality; by God and his laws, by the Church and by public opinion. Nothing, no one, can protect them. The ground on which I stand is solid earth, the best suited to my purposes, desiring as I do to be reconciled to the powers that rule the world, and to become a useful wheel in the social machine. Feeling secure in my position, and upheld both by human Justice, and by what you call divine laws, I intended to prosecute them on legal grounds, to exhaust every means, to worry them out of their lives and give them no peace nor breathing time; to cover them with dishonour, heap disgrace on them ... to attack them with the code in one hand and the anathemas of the Church in the other. These were my weapons; but, you must know, that my worthy uncles and my respected father-in-law have spent this whole day in concocting a compromise. Oh! my illustrious father-in-law is an eminently practical man, with an intense horror of exaggeration. He is as fond of me as he might be of the toothache. Unfortunately for him, this man, who is all-powerful in society, and who has a right to treat Spaniards as if they were slaves he had bought or could sell, can do nothing to hurt me. The arm of the law, if he used it to attack me, would turn and wound him too.”
“And you say that Don Justo Cimarra and Don Pedro Fúcar have been planning a compromise?” said Paoletti, who, in spite of his resolution, was yielding a little to curiosity.
“An amicable separation.—But as yet there is nothing proved, my dear sir. All must depend on our philosopher, geologist, cave-hunter.—Gustavo told me that everything was prepared for their flight, and I believe him—I must confess that I should do the same in their place!”
“So far as I am concerned I can only say that the matter does not interest me in the least,” said Paoletti, subduing his curiosity. “You are talking of law-suits, not of a case of conscience.”
“I will go on to speak of my wife. You know that I have a daughter?”
“Yes,” and again the priest felt the prick of curiosity.
“Monina is my child. Well, señor cura, the only being in the world who can rouse my soul to anything like an emotion, the only creature who, now and then, makes me think and feel unlike my habitual self, for whom a smile still lingers in that dark, unfathomed region which we call the soul—for lack of any other name, is my little daughter. I do not know what comes over me; when I was at the point of death in that horrible ship with its cargo of petroleum, everything vanished from my mind but the sense of danger, and in the midst of that danger that little golden head rose up before my eyes. I fancied that I clung to it to save myself in that wretched leaky boat which seemed every moment to be sinking. You will smile at my folly.—I used to play with her, to make her laugh that I might laugh too....”