“Then, my dear madam, of what use is your Christian resignation?” asked the son of Mars, with a look of innocence worthy of a cherub all head and wings. “The Lord will vouchsafe unexpected consolations. And María, is she resigned?”
“What else do you expect from that angel? My poor child! You might crucify her and she would not utter a groan. But Heaven always allows its most saintly children to go through the severest trials. She, like my adored Luis, only prays the Lord to take her to Himself; to him He sent physical suffering; to her, mental anguish.”
“We see every day,” said the general with an expression of horror that sat very funnily on his babyish face framed in white whiskers, “that scandals, infidelities and wickedness are on the increase. All laws human and divine are less and less respected every day. Where will you find a man of upright character, or a trace of chivalrous honour? Turn where you will there is nothing but effrontery and cynicism! Only picture to yourself, my dear Milagros, what the end must be of a society which, day by day and hour by hour, neglects all the principles of religion. But no! I ought not to say that, for there are still saints and martyrs. Your daughter for instance, deserted by her husband for her very virtues, is by those virtues—by those very virtues let me repeat—a shining example, a light, a standard in the battle.”
Yes, that she certainly was. Every group in the room was discussing her. Deserted! and solely for being too good! Such a deed cried to Heaven and clamoured for vengeance—a second deluge, the gulf that yawned to swallow Korah, the fires of Sodom, the flies of Egypt, the sword of Attila—of all these curses the one which seemed most likely to be realised then and there was that of the flies in Egypt, for their buzzing and their sting were not inadequately represented by the spiteful tattle, the commonplace denunciations, and amateur excommunication with which people of a certain way of thinking castigate whatever they disapprove of in their fellow men.
“If the separation had been based on any other pretext,” said a poet to a journalist, “it might pass ... for it is an obvious fact that Leon....” But their voices were lost in a chorus of comments and tittering. Two old ladies put their noses into the group to inhale the atmosphere of scandal—more fragrant to them than the scent of roses.
“I have suspected it for a long time,” said the mistress of the house to a deputy who held the archiepiscopal throne in the ultramontane coterie. “Pepa Fúcar is a hussy. But there was never more than a crumb of principle in all the Fúcar household. It does not do to be too particular in the way you make either money or love. There are some families that are fated to it.”
“I have no doubt that the connection is one of old standing,” replied the deputy, who admired the marquesa’s dinners, and who was wont to improve on her slanderous insinuations.
“From what I know now, and from certain dates,” added Pilar bowing with a reproachful glance to Gustavo who just then entered the room, “I can positively assert that they are of very old standing.” And she continued her remarks in a low tone to the worthy general, who, though fully determined never to be astonished at any wickedness could not conceal his dismay and perplexity.
“Leon’s child!” he muttered.
In another part of the room the Marquis de Telleria was enlarging on a new—a perfectly new idea—with a ready flow of hackneyed phrases. This was the theory that we are all monstrously alike; that there are no men of mark left, and that the world is dismally uniform. He—the marquis—was in fact fast losing faith in the traditional chivalry of the Spanish nation.