He loved his daughter.
He loved her passionately, without calculation or afterthought; yet this paternal love had something terrible about it: he loved his daughter as the jaguar or the panther loves its cubs, with fury and jealousy.
Doña Angela, though she had never tried to sound her father's impenetrable heart, had still divined the uncontrolled power she exercised over this haughty nature which crushed everything, but became suddenly weak and almost timid in her presence. The charming maid employed her power despotically, but ever with the intention of doing a good deed, as, for instance, to commute the sentence of a prisoner or succour the unfortunate; in a word, to render lighter the yoke of iron under which the general, with his feline manners, crushed his subordinates.
Thus the girl was as much adored by all those who approached her as the general was feared and hated. God had doubtlessly wished, in His ineffable goodness, to place an angel by the side of a demon, so that the wounds inflicted by the latter might be cured by the former.
Now that we have described these two persons to the best of our ability, whose characters will be more fully developed in the course of our story, we will resume our narrative at the point where we interrupted it.
[CHAPTER IX.]
THE NEXT DAY.
The sky was just beginning to be tinted with shades of opal—a few stars still shone feebly here and there in the gloomy depths of the sky. It was about half past three in the morning.
Within the locanda men and animals were sleeping that calm sleep which precedes sunrise. Not a sound, save at intervals the barking of a dog baying at the moon, broke the silence that brooded over the pueblo of San José.