“Don’t come to me with stories about your deafness,” protested Señora de Pardiñas. “God deliver me from deaf people like you. You hear more than you ought to hear. Give over your nonsense with me, eh? I wasn’t born in the year of the fools.”
“And the craziest of them all,” continued Lain, pretending not to have heard, “is the worthy Don Gaspar. He is a perfect simpleton. He has gone back to his childhood. We shall have to give him a nurse, or at the least a maid to take care of him. That is what he wants, and that is what he sighs for, and he is trying to steal away from you the one you have chosen for your boy. I am speaking in earnest; as sure as my name is Nicanor he is crazy for your maid, for Esclava, or whatever her name is. No boy of twenty could be more desperately in love than he is with her. I am certain that Rogelio is not half so deeply smitten.”
On hearing Rogelio’s name, and observing the tone in which it was uttered by Candás, Señora de Pardiñas started, and let her knitting fall on her lap.
“On hearing Rogelio’s name ... Señora de Pardiñas started and let her knitting fall on her lap.”
“As for Rogelio,” continued the Asturian, with the same affectation of indulgence, “what has happened to him is so natural at his age that the wonder would be if it had not happened. It is plain. A woman of twenty-five, good-looking and affectionate; a boy of twenty, what was to happen? A glance to-day, a touch to-morrow, a caress in the hall, a romp in the reception-room—youthful follies that come to an end of themselves.”
Señora de Pardiñas jumped in her chair as if she had been moved by a spring.
“Do you know what you are saying?” she exclaimed. “Do you think it is right to say such things for no other reason than your own pleasure, without any proof or foundation whatever? Are you to let your tongue gallop away with you without caring whom you knock down? Rogelio, poor boy, is incapable of such conduct in his mother’s house.”
“Of course I can understand your attaching little importance to the matter, and turning it into ridicule, for those things are follies natural to youth; and for that reason when I caught them the other day in the reception-room billing and cooing like a pair of turtle-doves, I said to them in my own mind: ‘That’s right, children, amuse yourselves; that is the law of God.’ But when I think of that other driveler, with his eighty odd years, playing the love-sick swain, I vow I could lay him across my knee and give him a sound flogging for an arch fool.”
And Doña Aurora felt that she could with the greatest pleasure have performed the same operation on the person of the incorrigible Asturian. To say these dreadful things to her and to say them in that treacherous way, that did not even give her a chance to set him right, for with the pretense of his deafness, he might assert what he chose regardless of all that might be said either in denial or disproof of his words. It was enough to make one’s blood boil with rage. It was a stupid, shameless, insufferable jest. And was she going to let it pass? No, indeed. Señora de Pardiñas’s anger was aroused; the blood boiled in her veins. “Hypocrite! liar! fire-brand! tale-bearer! fox!” she said to the Asturian in her own mind. “Now I am going to settle accounts with you.” She rose from her chair, went up quickly to him, put her hand in the pocket of his coat with the dexterity of a professional pickpocket, and took from it the case which contained his ear-trumpet. And before the astonished Lain Calvo could make a movement to defend himself, Doña Aurora had taken the silver tube out of its case, introduced it into his ear, and screamed with all her might: