“Ah!” said Paula. “I thought— Excuse me, Senhor Sebastião.”
And he bowed respectfully.
“They begin to gossip already,” thought Sebastião, as he continued on his way.
He returned home ill at ease. He lived in an old-fashioned house with a garden, belonging to himself. Sebastião lived alone. He possessed a small fortune in bonds, arable land, and his villa in Almada called the Rozegal. His two servants had been with him for many years; the cook was a negress from St. Thomas who had been in the service of the family since before his mother’s death; Joanna the housekeeper had served in the house for thirty-five years, and still called Sebastião the little one. She had now all the caprices of a child, but she was treated with the respect that might be shown to a grandmother. She was from Oporto,—Poarto, as she called it, for she had not lost her native accent. The friends of Sebastião called her uma velha de comedia. She was short and stout, with a round and jovial face, a smile full of kindness, hair white as flax, gathered in a knot on the top of her head, and fastened by an antique tortoiseshell comb; and she always wore a large white kerchief, freshly ironed, around her shoulders. She went about the house from morning till night, shuffling her feet and jingling her keys, repeating proverbs and taking pinches of snuff from a round box, on the lid of which was a picture of the hanging bridge of Oporto.
There was something in the aspect of the whole house that called an involuntary smile to the lips. The immense sofa and the easy-chairs reminded one of the days of José I., and the damask covering, of a faded red, recalled the pomp of a decrepit court; on the walls of the dining-room hung engravings of Napoleon’s battles, in all of which was to be seen the white horse standing on a height, towards which a hussar of high rank galloped furiously, brandishing his sabre.
Sebastião slept seven hours of tranquil sleep every night, in an antique bed of bent-wood, in a small dark bedroom. On a bureau with brass scutcheons, a St. Sebastian, pierced with arrows, had for many years past writhed—in the light of a little lamp kept carefully burning by Joanna—within the cords that bound him to the trunk of a tree. All the clothes put away in the drawers were perfumed by lavender-flowers.
The house resembled its master. Sebastião had old-fashioned ideas; he was shy, and he loved solitude. Years ago, in the Latin class, they had called him the bear; his comrades pinned rags on his back for sport, and unblushingly robbed him of his luncheon. To the strength of an athlete Sebastião joined the patience of a martyr.
He was always rejected in the first examinations at college. He was intelligent, but a question put to him, the glitter of the spectacles of a professor, the sight of the large black table, petrified him, and deprived him of the power of speech, leaving him with his face crimson, his knees trembling, his glance wandering.
His mother, who had come to Lisbon from a little village where she had kept a baker’s shop, who was very proud of her rents, her villa, her furniture, and who was always dressed in silks and weighed down with jewelry, would say,—
“Has he not enough to provide him with food and drink? Why trouble the boy with studies? Let him alone! Let him alone!”