[CHAPTER IX.]
THE BROTHERS GOLFIN.
Teodoro Golfin did not waste his time at Socartes. The first day after his arrival he spent several hours in his brother's laboratory, and during the following days he went from one part of the mines to another, examining and admiring all he saw—here the awful might of natural forces, and there the power and enterprise of human skill. At night, when all was still in the busy village, and nothing was awake but the snorting furnaces, the worthy doctor, who was an enthusiastic musician, listened with delight to his sister-in-law's piano; Señora Sofía, was Don Cárlos' wife, but their children were all dead.
The two brothers were devotedly attached to each other. Born in the humblest rank of life, they had struggled hard in early youth to rise above ignorance and poverty, often on the point of giving way to the difficulties that beset them; but the impetus of manly determination was so strong in them, that at length, gasping for breath, they reached the longed-for land, rising superior to the beating waves in which vulgar souls splash and struggle in a perpetual state of shipwreck.
Teodoro, who was the eldest, was a medical man before Cárlos was qualified as an engineer, and he helped him to the utmost so long as the younger brother needed it, and when he saw him fairly started, he took the step to which his enterprising spirit had long aspired, and set out for South America. There he practised with other celebrated physicians, gaining fame and wealth. After a short visit at home, in Spain, he returned to the New World, and even after a second voyage home he went back again; but during each of these expeditions he made a short tour in Europe to avail himself of the advances made in ophthalmic science which he particularly cultivated.
He was a man of unpolished manners, dark and with an expression at once intelligent and sensual; his lips were thick, his skin opaque and hairy, his eyes bright and keen; his frame was robust and his constitution sound, though somewhat injured by the South American climate. His large, round face, his prominent brow, his short, rebellious hair, the flash of his eyes and his thick, square hands, had led to his being spoken of as "the black lion." In truth, he was like a lion, and like the king of beasts, he never lost an opportunity of asserting the estimation in which he held himself. However, this vanity of a really distinguished man was the most pardonable of vanities, for it consisted chiefly in his persistently displaying his two great titles of fame and honor, namely: his devotion to surgery and the lowness of his origin. He spoke incorrectly, from his utter inability to elaborate phrases with ease and elegance. His rapid and broken sentences followed the course of his ideas, which were as swift as the electric spark.
"We," Teodoro would say, "although we have sprung from the grass by the way-side, which is the lowest origin conceivable, have grown into stalwart trees. Long live labor and human enterprise! I cannot but think that we Golfins, though Heaven knows where we came from, must have some English blood in our veins. Even our name seems to me to be of purely Saxon origin. I give it this etymology, Gold-find, or, as you may say, Gold-finders. Well, and my brother finds it in the bowels of the earth, while I find it in that marvellous miniature universe: the human eye."
At the period of our story he had just arrived via New York and Liverpool, and, as he declared, he now meant to remain at home; but no one believed it, for he had said so many times before and had not kept his word.
His brother Cárlos was a gentler being, placid, studious, a slave to his duties, and devoted to mineralogy and metallurgy to the point of caring far more for these two branches of learning than for his wife's society. But the couple lived, nevertheless, in perfect harmony; or, as Teodoro said, in an isomorphous state, crystallizing on the same system. As for himself, when matrimony was spoken of, he would say:
"To me, marriage would be an epigenesis, a pseudo-morphous crystallization, that is to say, a mode of crystallization which would not harmonize with my nature."
Sofía was a very good woman, who had been very handsome, but whose beauty was daily losing character and expression from her unfortunate tendency to stoutness. She had been told that an atmosphere charged with coal smoke had a tendency to reduce fat, and for this reason she had come to live at the mines, without ever leaving them the whole year through. The horrible air, charged with dust, calamine and smoke, annoyed her much however. She had no child alive, and her principal occupation consisted in playing the piano and in organizing societies of benevolent ladies for giving the poor help in their homes, and for maintaining hospitals and schools.