“Maria, thou whom I have loved, and who I love still; if my pardon can save you from remorse, if my benediction can render you happy, receive them both. I send them to you from my death-bed.
“Fritzen Stein.”
CHAPTER XXX.
IF the reader, before quitting us perhaps forever, will follow us, we will revisit Villamar, after the lapse of four years, that is to say in the summer of 1848, this pretty and tranquil village placed on the border of the sea; and we will narrate to him the grave events, public and private, which have happened during all that time.
We commence by recounting the vicissitudes of the unlucky inscription which gave so much trouble to the alcalde, and which was almost effaced by one of those showers of Andalusia, more calculated to submerge the earth than to fructify it.
The alcalde, fearing that his patriotism, like that of the inscription, might be effaced, would revive a noble sentiment, and he believed he would attain his object in giving to the street known as the Calle Real, the name of Calle de los Hijos de Padilla.
This change brought about the following émeute:
One of the inhabitants of this street, named Cristobal Padilla, had died, and his children continued to inhabit the house of their father; but the Lopez, the Perez, and the Sanchez were living in the same street, and they protested against the preference accorded to Padilla. The alcalde hastened to explain to them that the Sons of Padilla formed, in former times, an association of freemen, and that it was named in honor of them. They answered, that they were also as much freemen as the Padillas, and that, if the alcalde persisted in his idea, they would appeal for justice to the government. The alcalde sent them all to the devil. Then, after a second émeute, an émeute of women this time, led by Rosa Mistica, equally on account of the change of name, he wrote under the signature of El Patrioto Modelo, to a leading journal of the capital, an article, in which, after having praised his own civic rule and his courage, he spoke of the harvest of melons and calabashes.
To return to our narrative: The tower of the fort San Cristobal was in ruins, and with it the hopes of Don Modesto, who had always nourished the idea of one day seeing his fort placed on a scale with that of Gibraltar, Brest, Cadiz, Cherbourg, Malta, and Sebastopol.