Leon Roch. Benito Pérez Galdós
rather than out of cocoa. We live in a land of bricks,2 and we not only build our houses of them, but we eat them! Señor Pepe worked hard; at first with his own hands, then with those of others; finally with a steam engine. The result being (and the marquis pushed his hat back to the roots of his hair) that he bought land by the acre and sold it by the foot; that in ’54 he built a house in Madrid, that he got the management of the best lands belonging to the nation, and that by his command of public funds he added considerably to his fortune. In short, I should think Leon Roch must be worth eight or nine millions.”
“But you have left the choicest bit of the biography untold,” said Cimarra, seating himself by his friends. “I mean the intense vanity of the deceased worthy. In most cases these manufacturers who have enriched themselves—though they are the bane of the whole human race—are modest enough, and only care to end their days in peace, living in humble discomfort, and in the same narrow circumstances as they were used to, when they were working for their daily bread. But poor Don Pepe was quite the contrary, and his weak point was to be called marquis.”
“Indeed,” said Fúcar gravely, with the air of a man who felt it his duty to suppress such levity in the young. “I can assure you Don José Roch was a good-natured soul, kind and simple in all the relations of life; I knew him well. He made chocolate of the flower-pots in his wife’s balcony, or so said the spiteful gossips in the neighbourhood; but he was a worthy old plodder for all that, and so wrapped up in his boy that he thought of nothing else. There was in his mind but one creature in the world: his son Leon; he was insanely devoted to him. He regarded every man as his enemy who did not consider Leon the handsomest, the most learned, the first and greatest of all men on earth. All his pride and vanity were centred in being his son’s father.—We met one evening last year at Aranceles. I wanted to discuss a sale of cork with him—for he had a large property in cork-woods—but he would talk of nothing but his son. It was almost with tears in his eyes that he said to me: ‘My friend Fúcar, I want nothing for myself; six feet of earth and a stone at the top will do for me. My one desire is that Leon should have some title in this country.—It is the only thing I wish for.’
“I began to laugh: A Spanish title! Is that all you ask?—My dear Señor Don José, if you told me you longed to be handsome or to be young again—but to be a marquis! Coronets are given away now as freely as orders, and before long it will be a matter of pride not to have one. We are fast coming to a time when if a diploma of rank is sent to us we shall be ashamed to give a dollar to the porter who brings the document. Well, you shall be a marquis....”
At these words Fúcar went into one of his fits of laughing; it began with a shrill chuckle, and ended with a general contortion of his features and a sort of convulsive explosion, while he turned very red in the face. Even when this violent hilarity was over it was some time before he recovered his natural colour and his normal aspect of dignified gravity.
“Gentlemen,” said the official, hitherto silent, but not a little annoyed, perhaps, by a consciousness of his own craving for the marquisate, “however lavishly titles may have been distributed, I am not aware that any have been bestowed on chocolate makers. We are a long way....”
“Friend Onésimo,” said the marquis with cool irony, “they are bestowed on all who like to take them. And if Don Pepe never took the title of Marquis de Casa-Roch it was only because his son positively refused to be as ridiculous as the rest of the world. He is a man of principle.”
“Oh, certainly!” exclaimed Onésimo, who was always ready to support a time-honoured institution. “But in general, these learned men who are constantly manipulating principles in scientific matters lack them utterly in social questions. There are plenty of instances here; and I believe it is the same everywhere. We have seen how they govern when the country is so unfortunate as to fall into their hands, and they govern their own homes in the same way. Learned men, take my word for it, are as great a calamity in private as in public life. I do not know one who is not a fool—a perfect and utter fool.”
“You speak figuratively.”
“It is the simple truth.”
“We live in the land of Vice-versa.”
“No exaggeration, no exaggeration pray,” said the marquis, in the tone of voice he always adopted for his favourite protest. “We make a sad misuse of words nowadays and apply them too recklessly. Envy on one hand, Ignorance on the other—What is the matter?”
The question was addressed with an expression of alarm to a servant who was hurrying towards them.
“The Señorita has sent for you, Excellency. She is very unwell again.”
“I must go, my daughter is in a terrible state to-day!” said the marquis rising. “You will ask me what is the matter with her and I can only say I do not know; I have not the remotest idea. I will go and see her.”
The two friends watched him depart in silence. The marquis walked slowly, on account of his obesity, and his gait reminded one of the stately motion of some ancient ship or galleon freighted with the rich spoils of the Indies. He seemed to be carrying on board, as it were, all the weight of his immense fortune, collected during twenty years of such unfailing prosperity that the outer world could only look on and tremble and wonder.
CHAPTER IV.
MORE CONVERSATION, GIVING US SOME IDEA OF THE SPANISH CHARACTER.
In front of the grotto where the water-drinkers swallowed glass after glass, eager to counteract the oidium in their blood, there was a summer-house. It was now ten o’clock, the hour when all the visitors came out to the spring, and a party had gathered in this pleasant spot, consisting of Don Joaquín Onésimo, Leon Roch and Federico Cimarra, who was sitting astride on his chair and making it creak and groan as he seesawed.
“Do you know Leon what ails Fúcar’s daughter?”
“She left the drawing-room early last evening; she must be ill.” And having thus spoken Leon sat looking at the ground.
“But her complaint is a very strange one, as the marquis says,” added Onésimo. “Consider the symptoms. As you know, she collects china; last month, on her way back from Paris, she spent two days at Arcachon, and the Count de la Reole’s daughters gave her three pieces of Palissy-ware. They are considered handsome; to me they are no better than common crockery. Besides these she brought from Paris eight specimens of Dresden so fine and delicate you can hardly feel their weight. Well, Pepa’s whole mind seemed set on these precious works of art; she talked of nothing but her china. She took them out to look at, fifty times a day. And then—this morning she collected all this rubbish, went up to the topmost room in the hotel, opened the window and flung them into the court-yard, where they broke in a thousand pieces.”
Federico looked at Leon who merely said: “Yes, so I heard.”
“Yesterday evening,” Onésimo went on, “when we were returning from the Grotto—where, by the way, there is no more to be seen than in my bed-room—one of the large pearls dropped out of her earring. We hunted for it, and at last I found it close to a stone. I stooped to pick it up, as was natural, but she was quicker than I was; she set her foot on it and crushed it, saying: ‘Of what use is it?’—Then, they say, she tore up some costly laces. But did not you see her last night in the drawing-room? I could swear she is out of her mind.” Neither Leon nor Cimarra made any reply.
“I can tell you one thing,” continued the intelligent official, “the man who marries the damsel will have hard work with her. What bringing up! my dear fellow what training! Her father, who knows the value of money uncommonly well himself, has never taught her the difference between a bank-note and a copper piece. She is a real treasure is the Señorita de Fúcar! I had heard that she was capricious, extravagant and had the most preposterous and outrageous fancies you can imagine. Poor husband—and poor father! If she were only pretty; but she is not even that.—She will vex Don Pedro at