“At what hour would you have us arrive? Only twelve hours delayed; a bagatelle. In Portugal, that is a trifle.”
“Was there an accident?” the servant asked with solicitude, following them upstairs.
“The national accident!” answered Reynaldo, striking his foot nervously against the matting of the corridor. “The cars got off the track! We are here by a miracle. A vile country!”
He vented his anger on the servant as he had done before on the stones of the street, so intense was his disgust.
“For more than a year,” he said, “my sole prayer has been, ‘O my God, send another earthquake!’ I read the telegraphic news every day to see if the earthquake has taken place. Nothing. A minister has fallen, a new baron has been created, but of the earthquake, nothing.” And he smiled, vaguely grateful to a country whose defects provided him with so many subjects of complaint.
When the servant told him, trembling, that there were only a parlor and a double-bedded room on the third story, the rage of Reynaldo knew no bounds.
“Do you expect us to sleep in the same room?” he cried! “The hotel is full? And whom the devil does it occur to, to come to Portugal? Foreigners? Just so; that is the worst part of it.” And he added, shrugging his shoulders, “It is the climate, the national bait, that attracts them! A pestiferous climate! There is no greater disadvantage to a country than to possess a fine climate!” He did not cease to utter his invectives against the country, while the waiter, with a servile smile, placed on a table, plates, cold meats, and a bottle of Burgundy.
Reynaldo had come to Lisbon to dispose of the last remaining portion of his estate, and Bazilio had accompanied him in order to finish the troublesome affair of “that madwoman.”
Reynaldo did not cease to murmur inside his fur pelisse,—
“Here we are again in this pig-pen!”