"In my house!" she said with a dazed expression. "At the farm! And she slept in my bed!... I knew it all, too, and I held my tongue, I held my tongue! But this! Jesus! This. There is not a man in Seville who would have dared so much!"
El Nacional interposed kindly.
"Calm yourself, Señora Carmen. It certainly is of no importance. Only the visit of a lady to the farm, who is enthusiastic about the maestro and wished to see how he lived in the country. These ladies who are half foreign are very capricious and strange! But if you had only seen the French ladies, when the cuadrilla went to fight at Nîmes and Arles!... The sum total is—nothing at all. Altogether—rubbish! By the blue dove, I should like to know the babbler who brought the gossip. If I were Juaniyo, if it were anyone belonging to the farm, I should turn him out, and if it were anyone outside I would have him up before the judge and put in prison as a calumniator and an enemy."
Carmen still wept as she listened to the banderillero's indignation. But Señora Angustias seated in an arm-chair, which scarcely contained her overflowing person, frowned, and pursed up her hairy and wrinkled mouth.
"Hold your tongue, Sebastian, and don't tell lies," cried the old woman. "That journey to the farm was an indecent orgy—a fiesta of gipsies. They even say Plumitas, the brigand, was with you."
El Nacional fairly jumped with surprise and anxiety. He thought he saw, coming into the patio, trampling the marble pavement, a rider, dirty, ragged, with a greasy sombrero, who got off his horse, and pointed his rifle at him as a coward and informer. And immediately after him followed many civil guards in shining three-cornered hats, whiskered and enquiring, writing down notes, and then all the cuadrilla in their gala dresses, roped together on their way to prison. Most certainly he must deny it all energetically.
"Rubbish! All rubbish! What are you talking about, Plumitas? There was nothing but decency. God alive! They will be saying next that I, a good citizen, who can carry a hundred votes from my suburb to the urns, am a friend of Plumitas!"
Señora Angustias, who was not quite sure about this last piece of news, seemed convinced by El Nacional's asseverations. All right; she would say nothing more about El Plumitas. But as for the other thing! The journey to the farm with that ... female! And firm in her mother's blindness, which made the responsibility for all the espada's acts fall on his companions, she continued pouring blame on El Nacional.
"I shall tell your wife what you are. Poor thing, working herself to death in her shop from dawn till dark, while you go to that orgy like a reprobate. You ought to be ashamed of yourself ... at your age! and with all those brats!"
The banderillero fairly fled before the wrath of Señora Angustias, who, moved by her great indignation, developed the same nimbleness of tongue as in the days when she was at the tobacco factory. He vowed he would never again return to his master's house.