One member of the company maintained a look of cold distrust towards me, the very opposite of all this cordiality. This was Don Lopez, who did not need this air of dislike to appear to my eyes the ugliest mortal I had ever beheld. He was exceedingly short of stature, but of an immense breadth; and yet, even with this, his head was far too big for his body. A huge spherical mass, party-colored with habits of debauch, looked like a terrestrial globe, of which the mouth represented the equator. His attempts at embellishment had even made him more horrible; for he wore a great wig, with long curls flowing upon his shoulders, and his immense moustachios were curled into a series of circles, like a ram's horn. His nose had been divided across the middle by what seemed the slash of a cutlass, the cicatrix remaining of an angry red color, amid the florid hue of the countenance.
The expression of these benign features did not disgrace their symmetry. It was a cross between a scowl and a sneer; the eyes and brow performed the former, the mouth assuming the latter function.
Blushing with shame and trembling with emotion, Maria led me towards him, and, in accents I can never forget, told how I had rescued her in the passage of the Crocodile River. The wretch scowled more darkly than before, as he listened, and when she ended, he muttered something between his bloated lips that sounded marvellously like “Picaro!”
“Your godfather scarcely seems so grateful as one might expect, Señhora,” said I.
“Muerte de Dios!” he burst out, “I am her husband.”
Whether it was the simple fact so palpably brought forward, the manner of its announcement, or the terrible curse that involuntarily fell from my lips, I know not, but Donna Maria fell down in a swoon. Fainting, among foreigners, I have often found, is regarded next door to actually dying; and so it was here. A scene of terror and dismay burst forth that soon converted the festivity into an uproar of wild confusion. Every one screamed for aid, and dashed water in his neighbor's face. The few who retained any presence of mind filled out large bumpers of wine, and drank them off. Meanwhile, Donna Maria was sufficiently recovered to be conducted into the house, whither she was followed by her “marido,” Don Lopez, whose last look as he passed me was one of insulting defiance.
The cause of order having triumphed, as the newspapers say, I was led to one side by Don Estaban, who in a few words told me that Don Lopez was a special envoy from the Court of Madrid, come out to arrange some disputed question of a debt between the two countries; that he was a Grandee d'Espana, a Golden Fleece, and I don't know what besides; his title of Donna Maria's husband being more than enough to swallow up every other consideration with me. The ceremony had been performed that very morning. It was the wedding breakfast I had thrown into such confusion and dismay.
Don Estaban, in his triumphal narrative of his daughter's great elevation in rank, of the proud place she would occupy in the proud court of the Escurial, her wealth, her splendor, and her dignity, could not repress the fatherly sorrow he felt at such a disproportioned union; nor could he say anything of his son-in-law but what concerned his immense fortune. “Had it been you, Señhor Condé,” cried he, throwing himself into my arms,—“you, young, handsome, and well-born as you are, I had been happy.”
“Is it too late, Don Estaban?” said I, passionately. “I have wealth that does not yield to Don Lopez, and Maria is not—at least, she was not—indifferent regarding me.”