“Ah!” he said, in the tone of one who has conquered, and is proud of his victory. And rubbing his hands together, he declaimed gayly, “‘The husband whom the heart accepts is always the best counsellor and the truest friend.’ To supper!” he ended joyously.
CHAPTER II.
A PORTUGUESE “TEA.”
ON Sunday evenings a number of intimate friends—a sort of conversazione—gathered in Jorge’s parlor around the antique lamp of rose-colored porcelain. They drank tea and chatted together in a somewhat bourgeois fashion. Luiza crocheted; Jorge smoked his pipe.
The first to arrive on the present occasion was Julião Zuzarte, a distant relative of Jorge, who had been his school-fellow in the old days of the Polytechnic. He was a thin and nervous-looking man, with blue spectacles, and long hair falling over the collar of his coat. He had studied medicine at the School. He was very intelligent, and an indefatigable worker; but, as he himself said, he worked without any definite purpose. At thirty years of age, poor, in debt, without patients, he began to be discontented with his fourth floor in an unfashionable neighborhood, his two-shilling dinners, and his overcoat bound with braid. While he was restricted to this narrow way of living, he saw others of far less ability succeed in all they undertook and obtain the object of their ambition. He was in the habit of saying that he was unlucky. He might have had the position of titular doctor in one of the provinces, with his own house and garden; but his pride rebelled against this, and as he had confidence in his ability and his knowledge, he did not wish to bury them in an insignificant and gloomy village, with its three streets overrun by pigs. Everything that smacked of provincialism inspired him with horror. He beheld himself in imagination leading this obscure existence, playing manilha at evening parties, and dying of tedium; therefore he made no effort to change his way of living. He still hoped, with the audacity of the ambitious plebeian, for a large practice, a chair in the School of Medicine, a carriage in which to visit his patients, and a handsome wife with a good dowry. He believed firmly in his right to all these good things, and as they delayed in coming to him, his temper became soured. He hated this existence in which he had no pleasures. The periods of long and bitter meditation, during which he gnawed his nails in silence, grew every day more frequent; or if he opened his lips at all it was only to give harsh answers and utter unjust complaints in accents that had the steely sharpness of a sword.
Luiza could see nothing attractive in him; on the contrary, she thought him extremely tiresome. She detested his magisterial tone, the glitter of his blue spectacles, and the cut of his trousers, which he wore so short as to allow the worn elastics of his boots to be seen below them. But she concealed her antipathy, and always treated him with amiability because Jorge admired him, and thought him, as he said, a man of genius, a great man.
As Julião arrived early, he went to the dining-room to take his after-dinner cup of coffee with Jorge and Luiza. He glanced askance and with bitterness at the silver on the table and at the fresh toilet of Luiza. All these evidences of prosperity irritated him. Jorge was, in his opinion, a man of mediocre abilities, who did not deserve his good fortune; and the thought of this relative of his who lived comfortably, who was happily married, good-looking, well thought of in the Department, and who, in addition to all this, possessed some hundreds of dollars in bonds, imbittered his mind, like an injustice of fate, and weighed upon him like a humiliation. But he professed affection for him, and never failed to visit him on Sunday evenings. On these occasions he endeavored to hide his envy, chatting gayly, and passing his hand from time to time over his dry and disordered hair.
Towards nine o’clock Donna Felicidade de Noronha made her appearance. She entered the room with open arms and a smiling countenance. She was a lady of about fifty years of age, and was very stout. As she suffered from a flatulent dyspepsia, she was unable to lace herself, and her figure, as a consequence, was devoid of symmetry or shape. A few silver threads glittered here and there in her wavy hair; but her face, round and full, had all the soft and delicate fairness of a nun’s. The dark and humid pupils of her prominent and restless eyes shone beneath their wrinkled lids; her mobile nostrils were somewhat wide; the corners of her mouth were shaded by a slight down that resembled a circumflex accent lightly traced by a fine pen. She had been the intimate friend of Luiza’s mother, and she had kept up the habit of going to see the little one every Sunday. She was, according to her own account, of a noble family,—the Noronhas of Redondella. For the rest, she was highly esteemed in Lisbon. She was somewhat of a devotee, and was a constant attendant at the Chapel of the Encarnação. The moment she entered she gave Luiza a noisy kiss, and asked her in a low and anxious voice,—
“Is he coming?”
“The counsellor?” said Luiza. “Yes, he is coming.”
She spoke with knowledge, for he, the Counsellor Accacio, never came to take a cup of tea with Donna Luiza, as he called her, without going the evening before to the Department of Public Works to see Jorge, and say to him with a solemn inclination of his tall figure,—