“Of course. I see that you are a sagacious young man. Bring them, old woman,” said the archæologist, turning to Señora Patrocinio, “bring fearlessly forth that excellent wine that you have guarded so jealously these four years in the Sabine pitchers.”
The old woman brought the bottles, Quentin filled Don Gil’s glass and then his own, they emptied them both, and Señor Sabadía went on with his story in these words:
CHAPTER IX
IN WHICH SEÑOR SABADÍA ABUSES WORDS AND WINE
YEARS ago in the Calle de Librerías, in a little corner near the Cuesta de Luján, there stood a silversmith’s shop, with an awning stretched over the doorway, a very narrow show-case in which a number of rosaries, rings, medals, and crosses were displayed, and a miserable half-obliterated sign with these words: “Salvador’s Shop.” From one end of this sign, symbolically, hung a pair of pasteboard scales.
Salvador, the proprietor of this silversmith’s shop, was a wealthy bachelor who had lived with a sister for many years before her death.
At the time of my story, Don Andrés, as the silversmith was called, was a man of some sixty years, small, clean-shaven, with white hair, rosy cheeks, clear eyes, and smiling lips. He resembled a silver medal.
With all his sweet, beatific countenance, Don Andrés was at heart, an egoist. Possessing little intelligence and less courage, life made a coward of him. He had an idea that things advanced too rapidly, and was, therefore, an enemy to all innovations. Any change whatever, even if it were beneficial, disturbed him profoundly.
“We have lived like this so far,” he would say, “and I can see no necessity for any change.”
Don Andrés Salvador was equally conservative in his business: all he had was an ability for work that required patience. Rosaries, crosses, rings, and medals left his house by the gross, but everything manufactured in his shop was always the same; unchanged, and unimproved—wrought with the same old-fashioned and decadent taste.
Besides being a conservative, Don Andrés was distrust personified; he did not want any one to see him at work. At that time, repoussé work was still something mysterious and secret, and the silversmith, to prevent any one from surprising his secrets, shut himself up in his own room when he was about to make something of importance, and there worked unseen.