Before proceeding to this extremity, however, I had applied to Don Benito for assistance. The pettifogging rascal in reply said, that he had every disposition in the world to befriend me, and, with that view, felt called upon to say, that the further study of a profession for which I had neither the requisite talent nor application, would be merely a waste of time and money; and to advise me to apply myself to the healthful occupation of my forefathers, for which, on the other hand, my bodily strength peculiarly fitted me. “On this condition only,” he concluded, “can I render you assistance. Give me your promise to devote your best energies to this honest calling, and I am ready at once to return the sum advanced by your father, though not called upon to do so, either by law or equity.”
I spurned his offer with the contemptuous indignation it merited, withdrew from all further intercourse with the miserly wretch, and, as I have already said, sold every thing that I could lay my hands upon.
Could I have acted otherwise? impossible! But the blow inflicted on my mother by this sudden destruction of her long-indulged hopes was too heavy for her to bear up against. Staggering already under her late loss, and now with the dread of penury and want added to her sufferings, she sank broken-hearted to the grave.
I can ill describe my feelings on the heart-rending occasion. I had loved my mother with the fondest affection; yet had it been my fate to drug the cup that agonised her last moments! With pleasure would I have laid down my own life to prolong her’s; yet had it been my unlucky destiny to inflict the blow that hurried her to the tomb! She nevertheless felt more for me than for herself, even in her last moments; and her dying breath was spent in calling down a blessing on my head. Ya està en el cielo.[177]
To meet the fresh expenses my mother’s illness and death had brought upon me, as well as to liquidate my former debts, I was now under the necessity of raising more money. I tried in vain to effect a mortgage on my property: nobody would advance a maravedi upon it! To obtain a few paltry doubloons, therefore, I had no alternative left but to sell the patrimony handed down to me by a long line of ancestors. My hacienda was accordingly put up to public auction; and—deteriorated in value as it was represented to be, by every one but the auctioneer—sold for something less than one third of its real value. The purchaser was Don Benito Quisquilla.
The proceeds of the sale, after paying the customary expenses, were barely sufficient to satisfy the various demands made upon me; and I was left a bankrupt in wealth as well as expectations; a being without a relative in the wide world to speak comfort to him; without a friend to advise him; without a home; without even the means of subsistence!
Was life any longer worth preserving? I weighed its value in the scales of experience—fleeting joys on the one side, rankling injuries on the other; and the preponderating weight of the latter had well nigh determined me to rid myself of the burthen of existence, when the sweetness of revenge, cast into the opposing balance, turned the scale, and decided me to live—to live to be revenged on mankind.
The purchaser of my property, or rather the swindler who had obtained possession of it, again outraged my wounded feelings by the repetition of his humiliating offer of assistance. Thus insulted and scorned by the specious villain whose robberies had rendered me a beggar, I swore to let fall on him the first stroke of my revenge. I kept my oath! I tore from his arms his daughter, his darling Alitéa—the solace of his widowed hearth—the prop of his declining years. She fled from the paternal roof, and became my—mistress!
Ignorant of all that had passed between her father and myself, and but too ready to lend a favouring ear to my tale, few persuasions were necessary to induce Alitéa to comply with my proposal. I assured her that I had sounded Don Benito on the subject of a marriage, and that he objected only on account of the disparity of years: she who was then entering her twenty-third year, being two years older than myself. But as this objection, trifling as it could not but be considered, was nevertheless one which would always exist, I convinced her that it could only be overcome by the step I proposed, a step which would readily be forgiven by an indulgent father. She trusted to my honour and her father’s kindness, and became my victim.