“Lucía,” he said in a somewhat embarrassed voice, “change your seat, my child; come over here; the sun falls full on you where you are, and that is very injurious.”
Lucía rose with the stiffness of an automaton, crossed to the other side of the compartment, and letting herself fall heavily into her seat, covered her face again with her delicate handkerchief, and once more gave vent in sobs to the tender emotions of her youthful breast.
The bridegroom frowned. It was not for nothing that he had spent forty odd years of existence surrounded by good-humored people of easy manners, shunning disagreeable and mournful scenes, which produced in his system an extraordinary amount of nervous disturbance, disgusting him, as the sublime horror of a tragedy disgusts persons of mediocre intelligence. The gesture by which he manifested his impatience was followed by a shrug of the shoulders which said clearly, “Let us give the squall time to blow over; these tears will exhaust themselves, and after the storm will come fine weather.” Resolved, then, to wait until the clouds should clear away, he began a minute examination of his traveling equipage, informing himself as to whether the buckles of the shawl strap worked well, and whether his cane and his umbrella were properly fastened in a bundle with Lucía’s parasol. He also convinced himself to his satisfaction that a Russian leather satchel with plated clasps, which he carried at his side, attached to a leather strap slung across his shoulders, opened and shut easily, carefully replacing the little steel key of the satchel in his waistcoat pocket afterward.
He then took his railway-guide from one of the pockets of his overcoat and proceeded to check off with his fore-finger the names of the stations at which they were to stop on their route.
CHAPTER II.
We have now to learn whose was the breath that kindled the nuptial-torch on the present occasion.
Señor Joaquin, then called plain Joaquin, had left his native place in the vigor of early manhood, strong as a bull and untiring in labor as a domesticated ox. Finding a place in Madrid as porter to a nobleman who had an ancestral estate in Leon, he became the broker, man of business, and confidential agent of all the people of repute of his native province. He looked up lodgings for them, found them a safe warehouse for their goods and was, in short, the Providence of Astorga. His undoubted honesty, his punctuality and zeal won for him so good a reputation that commissions poured in upon him in a constant and steady stream, and reals, dollars, and doubloons fell like a shower of hail into his pocket in such abundance, that fifteen years after his arrival in the capital Joaquin was able to unite himself in the indissoluble bonds of matrimony with a countrywoman of his own, a maid in the service of the nobleman’s wife, and the mistress, for a long time past, of the thoughts of the porter; and, after the marriage, to set up a grocery, over the door of which was inscribed in golden letters the legend: “The Leonese. Imported Provisions.” From a broker he then became the business manager of his compatriots in Madrid; he bought goods for them wholesale and sold them at retail, and everyone in Madrid who wished to obtain aromatic chocolate, ground by hand, or biscuits of feathery lightness, such as only the women of Astorga possess the secret of making, found themselves obliged to have recourse to him. It became the fashion to breakfast on the Carácas chocolate and the biscuits of the Leonese. The magnate, his former master, set the example, giving him his custom, and the people of rank followed, their appetites awakened by the old-fashioned present of a dainty worthy of the table of Carlos IV or of Godoy. And it was worth while to see how Señor Joaquin, the commercial horizon ever widening before him, gradually came to monopolize all the national culinary specialties—tender peas from Fuentesauco, rich sausages from Candelario, hams from Calderas, sweetmeats from Estremadura, olives from the olive-groves of Seville, honeyed dates from Almeria, and golden oranges that store up in their rind the sunshine of Valencia. In this manner and by this unremitting industry Joaquin accumulated a considerable sum of money, if not with honor, at least with honesty. But, successful as he had been in acquiring money, he was more successful still in investing it after he had acquired it, in lands and houses in Leon, for which purpose he made frequent journeys to his native city. After eight years of childless marriage he became the father of a healthy and handsome girl, an event which rejoiced him as greatly as the birth of an heiress to his crown might rejoice a king; but the vigorous Leonese mother was unable to support the crisis of her late maternity, and after clinging feebly to life for a few months after the birth of the child, let go her hold upon it altogether, much against her will. In losing his wife Señor Joaquin lost his right hand, and from that time forward ceased to be distinguished by the air of satisfaction with which he had been wont to preside at the counter, displaying his gigantic proportions as he reached to the highest shelf to take down the boxes of raisins, for which purpose he had but to raise himself slightly on the tips of his broad feet and stretch out his powerful arm. He would pass whole hours in a state of abstraction, his gaze fixed mechanically on the bunches of grapes hanging from the ceiling, or on the bags of coffee piled up in the darkest corner of the shop, on which the deceased was in the habit of seating herself at her knitting. Finally, he fell into so deep a melancholy that even his honest and lawful gains, acquired in the exercise of his business, became a matter of indifference to him, and the physicians prescribing for him the salubrious air of his native place and a change in his regimen and manner of life, he disposed of the grocery, and with magnanimity not unworthy of an ancient sage, retired to his native village, satisfied with the wealth he had already acquired and unambitious of greater gains.
He took with him the little Lucía, now the only treasure dear to his heart, who with her infantile graces had already begun to enliven the shop, carrying on a fierce and constant warfare against the figs of Fraga and the almonds of Alcoy, less white than the little teeth that bit them.
The young girl grew up like a vigorous sapling planted in fertile soil; it almost seemed as if the life she had been the cause of her mother’s losing was concentrated in the person of the child. She passed through the crises of infancy and girlhood without any of those nameless sufferings that blanch the cheeks and quench the light in the eyes of the young. There was a perfect equilibrium in her rich organism between the nerves and the blood, and the result was a temperament such as is now seldom to be met with in our degenerate society.