“Well,” said Lucía, raising her face, in which the rounded and evanescent contours of youth were beginning to lose themselves in the firmer outlines of early womanhood: “I will go, if you command me; but I am none the less convinced that it is a wicked action to abandon a friend in this way in her dying moments.”
She left the room. In her mind there was beginning to germinate a singular conception of marital authority; she thought her husband had a perfect, incontestable and manifest right to forbid her every species of enjoyment or happiness, but that she was free to suffer; and that to forbid her to suffer, to forbid her to devote herself, as she wished to do, to the care of the sick girl, was cruel tyranny. These strange notions are common enough with the unhappy, who often take refuge in suffering as in a sanctuary, in order to avail themselves of the immunity it confers.
The question, however, settled itself better than Lucía could have anticipated, for that very afternoon Perico took part in it, and decided it with his accustomed effrontery.
“Good-by, my dear boy,” he said, entering Miranda’s room, dressed in traveling attire, wearing cloth gaiters and a felt cap, and carrying a double-barreled fowling-piece slung across his shoulder.
And as Miranda looked at him in amazement:
“I have made up my mind,” he said. “Vichy is too stupid, and as Anatole makes a point of it——”
“You are going to Auvergne?”
“To the Castle of Ceyssat, of Ceyssat. It seems there are hares and deer there by the hundred, by the hundred—and one can have a good time at the castle; there is a large party—eighteen guests.”
Miranda put as much energy as he could summon into his voice and gestures, and said to the enthusiastic sportsman:
“But Lucía and I had decided on returning to Spain in two or three days at the latest, and as Pilar is—in delicate health—your presence here is indispensable.”