“But that is the first thing to be done, unhappy man! Ah, how true is it that the mind, becomes dull with age. What are you waiting for?”
Velez de Rada was even yet more decided and uncompromising.
“Marry your daughter to Miranda!” he cried, raising his eyebrows with an angry and indignant gesture. “Are you mad? The finest specimen of the race that I have met with here for the past ten years. A girl who has red globules enough in her blood to supply all the anæmic mannikins that promenade the streets of Madrid! Such a figure! Such a poise! Such proportions! And to Miranda who——” (here professional discretion sealed the lips of the physician, and silence reigned in the room).
“Señor Rada,”—Señor Joaquin, who was a little hard of hearing, began timidly.
“Do you know what is the duty of a father who has a daughter like Lucía?” the physician resumed. “To look, like Diogenes, for a man who, in constitution and exuberance of vitality, is her equal, and unite them. Do you consider that, with the indifference that prevails in this matter of marriage, with the sacrilegious unions we are accustomed to see between impoverished, sickly, and tainted natures and healthy natures, it is possible that at no distant date—in three or four generations more, perhaps—the utter deterioration of the peoples of Europe will be an assured fact? Or do you think that we can with impunity transmit to our descendants poison and pus in place of blood?”
Señor Joaquin left the doctor’s office a little frightened, but more confounded, consoling himself with the thought, however, that the misfortunes predicted for his race would not happen for a century to come, at the soonest. The last disappointment that awaited him in his matrimonial consultations came from a sister of his, a very old woman who, in her youthful days, had been a laundress, but who was now supported by her brother. The poor woman, whose deceased husband had led her a dog’s life, exclaimed, in her husky voice, raising her withered hands to heaven, and shaking her trembling head:
“Miranda? Miranda? Some rascal, I suppose; some villain. May a thunderbolt strike——”
The Leonese waited to hear no more, and regarded his consultation as at an end.
The most important part of the question—Lucía’s opinion—was still wanting. Her father was racking his brains to find a diplomatic means of discovering it, when the young girl herself provided him with the desired opportunity.
“Papa,” she asked one day, with the utmost innocence, “can Señor Miranda be ill? He has not been here for several days.”