A FAMILY OF OFFICE-HOLDERS
Don Francisco de Bringas y Caballero had a second-class clerkship in one of the most ancient of the royal bureaus. He belonged to a family which had held just such offices for time out of mind. "Government employees were his parents and his grandparents, and it is believed that his great-grandparents, and even the ancestors of these, served in one way and another in the administration of the two worlds." His wife Doña Rosalia Pipaon was equally connected with the official class, and particularly with that which had to do with the domestic service of the royal abodes. Thus, "on producing her family tree, this was found to show not so much glorious deeds of war and statesmanship as those humbler doings belonging to a long and intimate association with the royal person. Her mother had been lady of the queen's wardrobe, her uncle a halberdier of the royal guard, her grandfather keeper of the buttery, other uncles at various removes, equerries, pages, dispatch-bearers, huntsmen, and managers of the royal farm at Aranjuez, and so forth and so on.... For this dame there existed two things wholly Divine; namely, heaven and that almost equally desirable dwelling-place for the elect which we indicate by the mere laconic word 'the Palace.' In the Palace were her family history and her ideal; her aspiration was that Bringas might obtain a superior post in the royal exchequer, and that then they should go and take up their abode in one of the apartments of the second story of the great mansion which were conceded to such tenants." The above is from 'Tormento.' In the next succeeding novel, 'La de Bringas,' this aspiration is gratified; the Bringas family are installed in the Palace, in the quarters assigned to the employees of the royal household. The efforts of two of their acquaintances to find them, in the puzzling intricacies of the place, are thus amusingly described.
ABOVE-STAIRS IN A ROYAL PALACE
From 'La de Bringas'
Well, this is about the way it was. We threw ourselves bravely into the interminable corridor, a veritable street, or alley at least, paved with red tiles, feebly lighted with gas jets, and full of doublings and twistings. Now and then it spread out into broad openings like little plazas, inundated with sunlight which entered through large openings from the main court-yard. This illumination penetrated lengthwise along the white walls of the narrow passageways, alleys, or tunnels, or whatever they may be called, growing ever feebler and more uncertain as it went, till finally it fainted away entirely at sight of the fan-shaped yellow gas flames, smoking little circlets upon their protecting metal disks. There were uncounted paneled doors with numbers on them, some newly painted and others moldering and weather-stained, but not one displaying the figure we were seeking. At this one you would see a rich silken bell cord, some happy find in the royal upholstery shop, while the next had nothing more than a poor frayed rope's-end; and these were an indication of what was likely to be found within, as to order and neatness or disarray and squalor. So, too, the mats or bits of carpet laid before the doors threw a useful light upon the character of the lodgings. We came upon vacant apartments with cobwebs spun across the openings, and the door gratings thick with dust, and through broken transoms, drew chill drafts that conveyed the breath of silence and desolation. Even whole precincts were abandoned, and the vaultings, of unequal height, returned the sound of our footsteps hollowly to our ears. We passed up one stairway, then down another, and then, as likely as not, we would ascend again.... The labyrinthine maze led us on and ever onward....
"It is useless to come here," at length said Pez, decidedly losing patience, "without charts and a mariner's compass. I suppose we are now in the south wing of the palace. The roofs down there must be those of the Hall of Columns and the outer stairway, are they not? What a huge mass of a place!" The roofs of which he spoke were great pyramidal shapes protected with lead, and they covered in the ceilings on which Bayeu's frescoed cherubs cut their lively pigeon-wings and pirouettes.
Still going on and on and onward without pause, we found ourselves shut up in a place without exit, a considerable inclosure lighted from the top, and we had to turn round and beat a retreat by the way we had entered. Any one who knows the palace and its symmetrical grandeur only from without could never divine all these irregularities that constitute a veritable small town in its upper regions. In truth, for an entire century there has been but one continual modifying of the original plan, a stopping up here and an opening there, a condemning of staircases, a widening of some rooms at the expense of others, a changing of corridors into living-rooms and of living-rooms into corridors, and a cutting through of partitions and a shutting up of windows. You fall in with stairways that begin but never arrive anywhere, and with balconies that are but the made-over roof coverings of dwelling-places below. These dove-cotes were once stately drawing-rooms, and on the other hand, these fine salons have been made out of the inclosing space of a grand staircase. Then again winding stairs are frequent; but if you should take them, Heaven knows what would become of you; and frequent, too, are glazed doors permanently closed, with naught behind them but silence, dust, and darkness....
"We are looking for the apartment of Don Francisco Bringas."
"Bringas? yes, yes," said an old woman; "you're close to it. All you have got to do is, go down the first circular stairway you come to, and then make a half-turn. Bringas? yes to be sure; he's sacristan of the chapel."
"Sacristan,—he? What is the matter with you? He is head clerk of the Administrative Department."