“Ah, father, what if you were right after all! You wanted to put off the marriage——”
“Softly, softly, my friend, stop there; I wanted to prevent it. I speak my mind frankly.”
Señor Joaquin looked more dejected than before.
“By the Constitution!” he cried, in distressed accents, “what a trial and what a responsibility it is for a father——”
“To have daughters,” ended the Jesuit, with a vague smile, pushing out his thick lips with a gesture of indulgent disdain; “and worst of all,” he added, “is to be more obstinate than a mule, if you will pardon me for saying so, and to think that poor Father Urtazu knows nothing about anything but his stones, and his stars, and his microscope, and is an ignoramus and simpleton where real life is concerned.”
“Don’t make me feel any worse than I do already, father. It is trouble enough not to be able to see Lucía, for I don’t know how long. All that is wanting now is that the marriage should turn out badly and that she should be unhappy——”
“Well, well, give up tormenting yourself about it. What is done cannot be undone. In the matter of marriage only He who is above can tie and untie, and who knows but that all may turn out well, notwithstanding my forebodings and my foolish fears. For what am I but a poor blind creature who can see only what is right before his eyes? Bah! It is the same with this as with the microscope. You look at a drop of water with the naked eye and it looks so clear that you want to drink it up. But you place it under those innocent-looking little lenses and, presto! you find yourself face to face with all sorts of crawling things and bacteria dancing a rigadoon inside. In the same way He who dwells above the clouds up there sees things that to us dunces here below seem so simple, but which for Him have their meaning. Bah, bah! He will take care to arrange everything for us, things we could never arrange for ourselves though we should try never so hard.”
“You are right, our chief trust must be in God,” assented Señor Joaquin, drawing a heavy sigh from the depths of his capacious chest. “To-night, with all this worry, the confounded asthma will give me enough to think of. I find it hard now to draw a breath. I shall sleep, if I sleep at all, sitting up in bed.”
“Send for that rascal, Rada,—he is very clever,” said the Jesuit, looking compassionately at the old man’s flushed face and swollen eyes, lighted by the oblique rays of the autumnal sun.
While the wedding-party defiled with funereal slowness through the ill-paved streets of Leon, the train hurried on, on, leaving behind the endless rows of poplars, that looked like a staff of music, the notes of a pale green traced on the crude red of the plains. Lucía, huddled up in a corner of the compartment, wept, without bitterness, with a sense of luxury, rather, with the vehement and uncontrollable grief of girlhood. The groom was quite conscious that it was his place to say some word, to show his affection, to sympathize with this first grief, to console it; but there are certain situations in life in which simple natures display tact and judgment, but in which the man of the world, the man of experience, finds himself utterly at a loss what to do. At times a drachm of heart is worth a ton of talent. Where vain formulas are ineffectual, feeling, with its spontaneous eloquence, may be all-powerful. After racking his brains to find some opening to begin a conversation with his bride, it occurred to the bridegroom to take advantage of a trivial circumstance.