But Carmen interrupted him with a plaintive voice, broken by sighs.
"In my house!" she groaned with an expression of agony. "At the hacienda! And she slept in my bed! I knew all about it before and I kept still, I kept still! But this! Josú! This—there's not another man in all Seville would dare do as much!"
Nacional intervened kindly.
"Be calm, Señora Carmen. Why, that was of no importance! Merely the visit of a female admirer of the maestro's to the plantation, one who desired to see at close range how he lived in the country. These half foreign ladies are always capricious and queer. You ought to have seen the French women when the cuadrilla went to fight at Nîmes and Arles! The whole thing is nothing! the whole thing, liquid! Man alive! by the blue dove! I would like to see the tattler that brought such news!"
Carmen continued weeping without listening to the banderillero's indignant protestations, while Seña' Angustias, seated in an arm-chair against which her super-abundant obesity rose and fell, frowned and compressed her hairy, wrinkled lips.
"Shut up, Sebastián, and don't lie," said the old woman. "I know it all. That trip to the hacienda was an indecent carousal, a gypsy's revel. They even say you had Plumitas, the robber, with you."
Here Nacional gave a start of surprise and anxiety. He imagined he saw an ill-appearing horseman with a greasy hat entering the courtyard, treading the marble flags and, dismounting from his mare, pointing a carbine at him for being a babbler and a coward. Then he seemed to see cocked hats, many cocked hats of shining rubber, moustached mouths questioning, hands scribbling, and the whole cuadrilla, in their spangled costumes, bound elbow to elbow on the road to prison. Here truly he must make energetic denial.
"Liquid! All liquid! What say you about Plumitas? Everything was decent there. Man alive! Nothing was lacking but that a citizen like myself, who carries to the voting boxes more than a hundred votes from my ward, should be accused of being a friend of Plumitas!"
Señora Angustias, overcome by Nacional's protests, and a little uncertain about this last report, ceased insisting on it. Good; nothing about Plumitas! But the other thing! The trip to the hacienda with that—woman! And firm in the blindness of motherhood, which would put all the responsibility for her son's misdeeds upon his companions, she went on scolding Nacional.
"I shall tell thy wife what thou art. The poor thing killing herself in her shop from daybreak till nightfall, and thou going off on revels like a lad. Thou shouldst be ashamed. At thy years! With such a troop of children—"