“Yes, Señora, was she not here two days before I came?”
“Ah, you are right—but Monsieur Artegui paid for those days.”
Lucía, who, at the time, was folding some articles of clothing preparatory to packing her trunk, turned her head suddenly, like a bird at the fowler’s call. Her face was pale.
“Paid!” repeated Miranda, in whose lackluster eyes flashed a short-lived spark. “Paid! and by what right did he pay for them, Señora, I should like to know?”
“Señor, that does not concern me” (ce n’est pas mon affaire), exclaimed the landlady, having recourse, the better to explain her meaning, to her native tongue. “I receive travelers, is it not so? A lady and a gentleman arrive, is it not so? The gentleman pays me for the time the lady has been here, when he takes his departure, and I do not ask if he has the right to pay me or not. Is it not so? He pays, and that is all (voilà tout).
“Well,” said Miranda, raising his voice, “this lady’s bills are paid by me and by no one else, and you will do me the favor to send a check to—that gentleman, returning him the amount he has paid.”
“The gentleman will be so kind to excuse me,” protested the landlady, slaughtering the Spanish language, without compunction, in her confusion. “I must decline to do what the gentleman asks; I am truly desolate, but this cannot be done; this has never been done in our house. It would be an offense, a serious offense, and Monsieur de Artegui would have much reason to complain. I beg the gentleman’s pardon.”
“Go to the devil!” answered Miranda in excellent Spanish, at the same time turning his back upon his interlocutor, and forgetting, as was usual with him when he was annoyed, his artificial politeness in his mortification at the landlady’s refusal to comply with his wishes.
Lucía on this night, too, bandaged Miranda’s foot, now almost well. She did it with her accustomed lightness of touch and skill, but, as she placed her husband’s foot upon her knee, the better to arrange the compress and secure the elastic bands around the joint, she did not smile as formerly. In silence she performed her task of mercy, and on rising from the ground she breathed a light sigh, such a sigh as one breathes after completing some task fatiguing alike to mind and body.