“Listen and you will see that it would be for my own advantage as well as for yours. There is something of selfishness in the offer, too, Don Gaspar, it is not all a kindness. As I am thinking of taking Rogelio on a visit to our native place this year——”
“A reason the more, my friend; a reason the more. You cannot dispense with the services of such a girl, traveling. The times are bad. With the Higinias that are going, who would part with an Esclavita? And an Esclavita of that stamp! Have you thought seriously over the matter, I mean seriously?”
As he spoke thus, Nuño Rasura jumped up and down in his chair, twirling his crutch between his palms. His eyes sparkled, his form straightened itself like a boy’s, and his breast rose and fell with his agitated breathing.
“Heaven help us!” thought Doña Aurora, “I shall have to lift the man up from the floor with a spoon.” And as she remained silent, affecting to be considering the good man’s arguments, the latter added quickly and energetically, like a child who pretends to be yielding to persuasion in accepting a toy:
“That is to say—of course I know from the very fact of your proposing it to me that you have thought well over it. I see that you are right in what you say; very right, very right, Aurora. Traveling, one is better alone; the boy and his mother, of course, of course. As for me, it is enough that you should propose it; I accept, I accept; do you hear, my friend? I accept.”
“It is true,” reflected Doña Aurora, “that that slippery Don Nicanor, who is stuffed full of malice and who is capable of thinking evil of his own mother, irritates one at times; but these simpletons, too, who can never understand a hint—well, there are days when they keep one’s nerves on the stretch like the strings of a guitar.”
Don Gaspar’s scruples being thus vanquished, he himself arranged a plan of action, which he laid before Doña Aurora—as soon as his daughter should go away, he would take Esclavita as his housekeeper. The octogenarian added, rubbing his hands:
“Don’t let Candás know anything about the matter. I don’t want to be made the subject of annoying jests.”
XXI.
This domestic conspiracy was kept a profound secret. Doña Aurora was silent, for women know how to keep a secret when they resolve to do so, especially if their affections are concerned, and Don Gaspar did not open his lips because he dreaded more than the cholera the jokes and insinuations of the Crown Solicitor, and no less—if we must betray the secrets of his household—the anger of his daughter Felisa. The latter, suspicious as a wife, distrusting the sociable and gallant disposition of the old man, had made it her business to provide him with the ugliest, most ignorant, and worst-tempered Maritornes to be found, for she always saw in the distance the menacing shadow of a stepmother. Until Felisa should have started on her voyage to the fifth division of the globe, the old man did not dare even to hint at his desire of taking into his service the gentle and pretty Esclavita. It was with the greatest difficulty that he was able to control his impatience and wait for this event, for his old age was a second childhood. Capricious and impatient as a child, if he yielded to his impulses, he would stamp upon the floor whenever anything interfered with the gratification of his desires. The outlet he sought for his impatience was a tête-à-tête with Doña Aurora before the arrival of the other visitors, when he would talk to her ramblingly, as old people are wont to talk, of his plans for the future, of the comfort he should enjoy with Esclavita to wait upon him, of the favors he would heap upon her, of how easy it would be to wait on an old man like him, without any family, and many other things of the same kind. And when the good man, owing to the presence of others, was unable to dilate on his favorite theme, he gave his excellent friend glances and winks of intelligence. He smiled at her without any cause, and, in short, sought to give vent to his exuberant and boyish gayety. “Heaven grant he may keep his reason,” said Señora de Pardiñas to herself. “I don’t know why we should wonder at the craziness of youth, when old men can act in this way. No boy could be more deeply smitten. I declare, if he is not wild for his daughter to take herself off, so that he may get Esclavita at once. If I did not know that he is a really excellent man and that the girl, on her part, is incapable of laying a trap for him, I should be a little uneasy, for no one can tell where these things will end, and if he should take it into his head to marry!—” The idea of Don Gaspar marrying a girl of twenty-five was so absurd that Señora de Pardiñas laughed to herself, and the monologue ended by the good lady scratching her head with her knitting-needle, and saying, as a corollary of her reflections: “It won’t be my fault if anything extraordinary should happen. To find a good situation for a good servant is not a crime. All I am sorry for is that that tiresome Felisa Febrero keeps forever putting off her departure for the Philippines.”