The table had been set in that wonderful gallery of the ancient palace of the Dukes of Castro Duro, which looked out over the garden. The early autumn weather was of enchanting softness and sweetness.
Cæsar and Alzugaray were very smart and elegant, with creases in their trousers: Cæsar dressed in black, with the ceremonious aspect that suits a grave man; Alzugaray in a light suit with a coloured handkerchief in his breast pocket.
“I think we are ‘gentlemen’ today,” said Cæsar.
“It seems so to me.”
They entered the house and were ushered into the drawing-room. The majority of the guests were already there; the proper introductions and bows took place. Cæsar stayed in the group of men, who remained standing, and Alzugaray went over to enter the sphere of Don Calixto’s wife and the judge’s wife.
The judge, from the first moment, treated Cæsar like a man of importance, and began to call him Don Cæsar every moment, and to find everything he said, good.
In the ladies’ group there was an old priest, a tall, big, deaf man, a great friend of the family, named Don Ramón.
The judge’s wife told Alzugaray that this Don Ramón was a simpleton.
He was the pastor of a very rich hermitage nearby, the hermitage of la Vega, and he had spent all the money he had got by an inheritance, in fixing up the church.
The poor man was childlike and sweet. He said various times that he had many cloaks for the Virgin in the sacristy of his church, and that he wished they could be given to poor parishes, because two or three were enough in his.