She took the pitcher and went down the steps, but at the bottom the little mimicking voice of the niece of Pimentó held her. How that small insect could sting!
"She would not marry the grandson of old Tomba. He was a poor fool, dying of hunger, but very honourable and incapable of becoming related to a family of thieves."
Roseta almost dropped her pitcher. She grew red as if the words, tearing at her heart, had made all the blood rise to her face; then she became deathly pale.
"Who is a thief? Who?" she asked with trembling voice, which made all the others at the fountain laugh.
Who? Her father. Pimentó, her uncle, knew it well, and in the tavern of Copa nothing else was discussed. Did they believe that the past could be hidden? They had fled from their own pueblo because they were known there too well: for that reason they had come here, to take possession of what was not theirs. They had even heard that Señor Batiste had been in prison for ugly crimes.
And thus the little viper went on talking, pouring forth everything that she had heard in her house and in the huerta: the lies forged by the dissolute fellows at the tavern of Copa, all invented by Pimentó, who was growing less and less disposed to attack Batiste face to face, and was trying to annoy him, to persecute and wound him with insults.
The determination of the father suddenly surged up in Roseta. Trembling, stammering with fury, and with bloodshot eyes, she dropped the pitcher, which broke into pieces drenching the nearest girls, who protested in a chorus, calling her a stupid creature. But she was in no mood to take notice of such things!
"My father ..." she cried, advancing toward the one who had insulted her. "My father a thief? Say that again and I will smash your face!"
But the dark-haired girl did not have to repeat it, for before she could open her lips, she received a blow in the mouth, and the fingers of Roseta fixed themselves in her hair. Instinctively, impelled by pain, she seized the blond hair of the mill-girl in turn, and for some time the two could be seen struggling together, bent over, pouring forth cries of pain and madness, with their foreheads almost touching the ground, dragged this way and that by the cruel tugs which each one gave to the head of the other. The hair-pins fell out, loosening the braids; the heavy heads of hair seemed like banners of war, not floating and victorious, but crumpled and torn by the hands of the opponent.
But Roseta, either stronger or more furious, succeeded in disengaging herself, and was going to drag her enemy to her, perhaps to give her a spanking, for she was trying to take off her slipper with her free hand, when there occurred an irritating, brutal, unheard-of scene.