“Nonsense! Let us sing like Raoul chascun per se,” and he hummed the words to Meyerbeer’s air, the Marquis de Fúcar’s store of cigars diminishing perceptibly meanwhile.
“And, after all, what is all this that we see and touch—and smoke?” said Nules, striking a match. “What is the gorgeous and luxurious place where we now are? this magnificent room, with its fine Arabian tiles, the horses on which we were riding this afternoon, the pines in the hot-house, the pictures, flowers, carpets, vases.—What are they all? They are the juice, the savour, the very extract of our beloved native land—you understand? And as everything displaced by foul means from its natural position tends, sooner or later to return to it—just as animal organisms assimilate from nourishment the equivalent of what they lose by wear and tear, the obvious consequence....”
Here the servant came in with the ham, and his presence postponed the inference.
“And as we ourselves are the country, or an integral part of it,” said Leopoldo.
“The country is claiming its own again,” added Nules attacking the food.
This humorous youth was the originator, according to trustworthy authority, of the ribald and malicious interpretation of the pictures and texts in the chapel.
“Wealth, my dear boy,” he went on smacking his lips over the Pajarete, “works in a circle, you understand? It returns to the point it started from.—The State robs my father of half his income from Xeres in the form of taxes; Fúcar, under the happy impetus of a loan, robs the treasury of half a year’s revenue; and I drink Fúcar’s wine and smoke his cigars, thus supplying wants which my father fails to satisfy by reason of the heavy taxation. You follow me in my explanation of this circulation? But there are still a few cigars left in the case; if we leave them, the servants will smoke them.”
“Heaven forefend! Pietoso ciel!” sang Leopoldo. “That would be too much! In tal periglio estremo,” and again he hummed his Meyerbeer’s.
“Oh! what luck!” exclaimed Nules, looking out of the window. “Here are the Villa-Bojío party—mamma and two interesting daughters.” Leopoldo peeped out to see the ladies stepping out of a landau at the front door, and his heart stirred in his breast with some little excitement—like the kernel of a “withered nut rattling within its hollow shell,” as the wind sways the bough on which it hangs.
“Let us take them out for a drive,” suggested Nules.