“Oaf!” retorted the Corregidor. “I had to put on something! Don’t you know they robbed me of my own clothes? Don’t you know that a band of thieves sent here by Tio Lucas—”
“That’s a lie!” cried Frasquita.
“You listen to me, Señora Frasquita,” said the Alguacil, beckoning her aside. “By the leave of the Lord Corregidor and all present!… If you don’t come to some arrangement we’ll be hanged every one beginning with Tio Lucas!”
“Why, what’s the matter?” asked Frasquita.
“Tio Lucas is traipsing through the city right now dressed up as the Corregidor… and – Heaven only knows! – in that disguise he may be in her Ladyship’s room at this very moment.” And the Alguacil told her in brief what the reader knows already.
“Jesu!” exclaimed Frasquita. “Then my husband believes me dishonoured! He’s gone to the city to avenge me! Let’s be off at once! Away to the city and clear my name in my husband’s eyes!”
“Off to the city! And stop that man speaking to my wife – telling her all the nonsense that occurs to his fertile fancy!” The Corregidor pressed up to one of the asses. “Take my foot and help me mount, Master Alcalde.”
“To the city! Yes!”
“To the city – by all means!” Weasel said, “and Heaven grant, my Lord Corregidor, that Tio Lucas has been satisfied with just speaking to her Ladyship!”
“What’s that you say, you rogue?” thundered Don Eugenio. “Do you think that boor capable?…”
“Of anything!” answered Frasquita.
28
Ave Maria Purissima! Half-past Twelve and All Clear!
The night-watchmen were raising this cry through the streets of the city when the Miller’s wife and the Corregidor, each on one of the Miller’s asses, with Master Juan Lopez on his mule and the two Alguacils on foot, arrived at the main door of the Town Hall.
The door was closed.
For both governors and governed, it seemed to declare, business was over for the day.
“This is bad!” muttered Weasel to himself. And he banged the great knocker two or three times.
A long time passed; no one opened or in any way answered the summons. Mistress Frasquita had turned paler than wax. The Corregidor gnawed the fingernails of each hand nervously.
Nobody spoke a word.
Bang! Bang! Bang! Blow upon blow thundered on the door of the Town Hall, applied alternately by the two Alguacils and Master Juan Lopez. They might have spared themselves – there was no response. No one came to the door. Not a creature stirred.
All that could be heard was the light sound of the spouting of a fountain that stood in the patio of the building. And in this way passed entire minutes, long as eternities. At last – it was about one o’clock – a little window on the third floor opened, and a woman’s voice said, “Who is it?”
“It’s the nurse,” whispered Weasel.
“It is I!” answered Don Eugenio. “Open the door!”
There was a moment of silence.
“Who did you say it was?” at last the nurse said.
“Why don’t you listen? I am your master!… the Corregidor!…”
There was another pause.
“God be with you!” came again the good woman’s voice. “But my master came home an hour ago and went to bed directly. You folk had better do the same and sleep off the wine inside you!” And the window closed with a thud.
Frasquita covered her face with her hands.
“Wench!” thundered the Corregidor, beside himself. “Don’t you hear me telling you to open the door? Do you not hear that it’s I? Do you want me to hang you as well?”
The window went up again. “Now what’s all this? Who is shouting like that?”
“I am the Corregidor!”
“Tell me another! Haven’t I said that my Lord Corregidor came in before twelve? And that with my own eyes I saw him let himself in to her Ladyship’s suite? Are you trying to make a fool of me? Just you wait and see what happens to you!”
As she spoke the door suddenly opened and a swarm of servants and retainers, each armed with a cudgel, rushed upon those outside, shouting furiously, “Here we are now. Where is the fellow who says he is the Corregidor? Where is the clown? – the drunkard?”
And with this began the devil’s own mêlée in the pitch darkness, in which the Corregidor, Weasel, Master Juan Lopez, and Tonuelo each took two or three blows apiece. It was the second rough-handling which that night’s adventure had cost Don Eugenio – not counting the drenching he was given in the millstream.
Frasquita, separated some distance from the whirling tangle of men, was in tears for the first time in her life…
“Lucas! Lucas!” she was sobbing. “How could you doubt me? How could you put your arms round another woman? Ah! Nothing can end our unhappiness!”
29
The Moon Shines through the Clouds
“What’s all this uproar about?” A voice said at last, a voice calm, majestic and melodious, that sounded high above the fracas. They all looked up and saw a woman in a black dress looking down from the second-storey window. “Her Ladyship!” the Town Hall servants hissed, and the thudding sound of falling cudgels instantly ceased.
“My wife!” stammered the Corregidor.
“Let in those country folk,” said her Ladyship, and added as an afterthought, “My Lord Corregidor gives them leave.”
The servants stood aside, and the Corregidor and his party passed through the doorway and made their way upstairs. Never did a condemned criminal mount the scaffold with such faltering steps and hangdog looks as the Corregidor climbed the stairway in his own house. And yet so proud and egoistic was he by nature that the thought of his dishonour was already beginning to loom larger than all the misfortunes that had come upon him and all the other ridiculous features of the situation in which he found himself.
“Before everything,” he said to himself as he trod the stairs, “before everything I am a Zuniga and a Ponce de Leon! Let them look to themselves if they’ve forgotten that! Let my Lady beware if she has besmirched my name!”
30
A Lady of Quality
Her ladyship received her husband and his retinue of country folk in the principal reception room of the Town Hall. She stood alone, her eyes fastened on the doorway.
She was, without doubt, a supremely noble lady, still quite young, and beautiful in a quiet, rather austere fashion, a fitter model for a Christian than a pagan painter, and her dress had all the sober dignity favoured by the taste of the time. The gown she wore, the narrow, rather short skirt and the high, full sleeves were of fine black alpaca wool. A creamy white lace shawl draped her superb shoulders, and the longest of black tulle gloves covered arms like alabaster. She stood fanning herself regally with an enormous fan, which had come from the Philippine Islands, and held in her other hand a lace handkerchief, and the precise way its four corners fitted over each other somehow gave a crowning touch to the lady’s immaculateness.
This handsome woman had about her something of a queen, but something more of an abbess, and inspired reverence and awe in all who saw her. For the rest, the grandness of her costume – considering the lateness of the hour – her proud and serious bearing, and the multitude of lights in the salon proved that her Ladyship had done everything to give the scene a touch of drama and pomp and thus show up all the gross vulgarity in her husband’s escapade.
This lady, be it known, moreover, was by name and title the Lady Mercedes Carrillo de Albornoz y Espinosa de los Monteros, and was daughter, niece, great-niece, great grandniece, as well as niece twenty times removed, to that famous city, being a direct descendant of its illustrious Conquistadors. For purely material reasons her family had induced her to marry the rich and ageing Corregidor, and her Ladyship, who would otherwise have been a nun – her natural bent having always been fo
r the cloister – had consented to the painful sacrifice. At this time she had two children by her rakish husband, and it was a common rumour in the town that a third was on the way.
31
An Eye for an Eye
“Mercedes!” cried the Corregidor, confronting his wife. “I demand to know at once!—”
“Hello, Tio Lucas! Are you here?” said her Ladyship, interrupting him. “Is everything all right at the mill?”
“Madam! I’m not here to jest!” The Corregidor’s voice was thick with anger. “Before I start any explaining on my side I insist on knowing whether my honour has been—”
“That’s nothing to do with me! Did you by chance leave it in my charge?”
“Yes, my lady, I did!” replied Don Eugenio. “Wives are always the repositories of their husbands’ honours.”
“Very well then, Tio Lucas, ask your wife. She is listening to us at this very moment.”
Frasquita, who had all this time been standing on the threshold, gave a sort of cry.
“Come in, Madam, and sit down,” said her Ladyship, turning in her queenliest manner to address Frasquita. At the same time she walked to the sofa. The large-hearted Frasquita divined at once all the noble forbearance under the calm of that wronged – perhaps doubly wronged – wife. And so, rising to a similar level herself, she mastered her natural impulse and kept gravely silent. Naturally enough, in the sure knowledge of her own innocence and strength, she was in no hurry to justify herself. She was eager indeed to lay charges – grave charges – but certainly not against her Ladyship. The one she wished to settle scores with was Tio Lucas – but he was not there.
“Señora Frasquita,” the noble lady repeated, seeing that the Miller’s wife stayed where she was, “I have asked you to come in and sit down.” This second invitation was spoken in a friendlier, more sympathetic tone than the first. No doubt her Ladyship’s instinct told her, on the first full glance at Frasquita, that here was no common peasant woman, here was someone perhaps as sorely tried as herself, and that, like her own, this woman’s trials sprang from the Corregidor.
So the two women exchanged the most friendly and forgiving glances, even though they regarded each other as rivals twice over. Almost in spite of themselves, each felt her heart go out to the other as to a sister found again after a long separation. In just such a manner might the pure white snowy peaks of two distant Alps flash a salute to each other in the sunlight.
Conscious of this new feeling, Frasquita drew herself up, stepped proudly into the salon, and seated herself on the edge of a chair. During her passage through the mill, knowing that she would have to appear before people of quality, she had touched herself up a little, and put on a black flannel mantilla with velvet bobbles that became her greatly. She had quite an air about her, had Frasquita.
All through this scene the Corregidor stayed quite silent. Frasquita’s cry and entry upon the stage had fairly taken the wind out of his sails. That woman instilled more terror in him than his own wife!
“Come now, my dear Tio Lucas,” her Ladyship went on, turning towards her Lord. “Here is Señora Frasquita for you. Now’s the time to ask your question! Now’s the time to ask about your honour!”
“For the love of Heaven, Mercedes!” almost shrieked the Corregidor. “Take care! You do not know to what lengths I can go! Once again I beseech you – stop this nonsense and tell me what has happened while I’ve been away. Where is that man?”
“Who? My husband? My husband is just getting out of bed – and should be here very soon.”
“Getting out of bed?” Don Eugenio’s voice rose again.
“Does that surprise you? Where now would you have a respectable man at this hour but in his bed and sleeping with his lawful wife, as God wills?”
“Mercedes, my love! Take care what you say! Remember, people are listening! Remember I am the Corregidor!
Her Ladyship rose to her feet. “Don’t raise your voice at me, Tio Lucas! or I’ll have the Alguacils throw you in the cells!”
“Throw me in the cells! Me! The Corregidor of this city!”
“The Corregidor of this city, the representative of the Law, the deputy of the King,” her Ladyship declaimed in a voice high enough to override her Lord’s sibilant one, “came home at the due time to repose from the high duties of his office, and then in the morning resume the protection of citizens’ honour and lives, the preserving of the sanctity of their property and the modesty of their womenfolk. And this by making sure that no man, whether disguised as the Corregidor or otherwise, entered the room of another’s wife – that no man took womanly virtue at a disadvantage in unwary slumber, that no man abused her chaste sleep…”
“Mercedes, my love! Whatever are you talking about?” the Corregidor hissed through nearly clenched teeth. “If such things have really come to pass in my house I say you are a slut, a faithless wretch, a wanton!”
“To whom is he talking – this fellow?” In a voice full of disdain her Ladyship enquired of the bystanders. “Who is this madman – this drunken sot? I can’t think it’s a respectable miller like Tio Lucas, even though he is wearing his country habit. Master Juan Lopez, believe me,” she went on, appealing to the village Alcalde who could hardly look at her for awe, “my husband, the Corregidor of the city, came home two hours ago with his three-cornered hat, his scarlet cape, his cavalier’s rapier, and his staff of authority. The servants and Alguacils you see around us all rose to their feet and bowed to him as they watched him pass through the door, up the stairs, and through the vestibule. At once all the doors were closed, and from that time not a soul has come in until you people arrived. Is that the truth?” She appealed to the servants. “Tell him, will you?”
“It’s Gospel truth! It surely is!” the nurse, the servants, and the Alguacils replied in chorus, for all of them, in a group near the salon door, were spectators at the scene.
“Be off, the whole pack of you!” screamed the Corregidor, foaming with rage. “Weasel! Weasel! Come and arrest these rascals that show no respect for me! Put them under lock and key! String them up, I say!” No Weasel, however, came forwards.
The Lady Mercedes continued. “What is more, sir” – she had changed her tone now, condescended to look at her husband and to treat him as such, feeling perhaps a misgiving that the jest could be carried to irreparable extremes – “say that you are my husband… Suppose you are Don Eugenio de Zuniga y Ponce de Leon…”
“I am!”
“Suppose, what is more, that some blame does attach to me for having taken for you the man who came into my room dressed as the Corregidor—”
“Shameless creature!” croaked the old man, thrusting a hand to his sword-hilt but encountering only the Miller’s sash in its place.
Frasquita hid her face in one side of her mantilla to hide the burning anger and jealousy that showed there.
“Suppose anything you like,” went on the Lady Mercedes with a baffling imperturbability. “Tell me, my fine sir, would you have the right to complain? Could you play the prosecutor and accuse me? Could you be judge and condemn me? Do you come here from church, by any chance? Do you come straight from the confessional? or from hearing Mass? Where do you come from, dressed as you are? And in the company of that lady? Where have you spent half the night?”
“By your leave,” broke in Frasquita, almost bounding to her feet and putting herself boldly between her Ladyship and her husband. The latter, who was about to say something, stopped open-mouthed on seeing that Frasquita was about to open fire. Nevertheless, it was the Lady Mercedes who spoke first. “Madame, please do not tire yourself with giving me explanations. I don’t ask you to – far from it! But here comes one who has the right to ask. Make things right with him!”
At the same time the door of a side room opened and in the doorway appeared Tio Lucas, still dressed from head to foot in the Corregidor’s clothes, with ca
ne, gloves, and rapier, just as though he were making a formal appearance in the Council Chamber.
32
Faith Moves Mountains
“A very good evening to you all!” the newcomer announced, sweeping off his three-cornered hat and speaking with lips indrawn just like Don Eugenio. Then he immediately advanced into the middle of the room swaying from side to side, and went and kissed her Ladyship’s hand.
The bystanders were stupefied. Tio Lucas’s resemblance to the real Corregidor was miraculous. The crowd of servants, and even Master Juan Lopez himself, couldn’t help laughing aloud. This new affront nettled Don Eugenio and he flung himself venomously towards Tio Lucas. But Frasquita, intervening, sent the Corregidor reeling back with, so to speak, no more than a push from her little finger. To avoid falling with him and thereby adding to the ludicrousness of the spectacle, her Ladyship stepped back and let him fall to the ground without a word. The fair Miller’s wife was clearly more than a match for the Corregidor.
Tio Lucas turned deathly pale on seeing his wife so near, but quickly mastered himself. He gave a smile – more like a grimace of pain – and, clutching at his heart as if to stop it from breaking, said in his mock Corregidor voice: “God keep you, Frasquita! Have you sent the letter of appointment to your nephew?”
The effect upon Frasquita was electrifying. She flung back her mantilla, raised her head with the proud gesture of a lioness and fixed eyes like daggers on Lucas. “I despise you, Lucas!” She seemed to spit the words at him. Onlookers thought that she had in very truth spat at him, so vehement was her gesture, her bearing, the tone of her voice.
The Miller’s face changed completely at this outburst from his wife. An exultation, akin to that which accompanies religious faith, surged up in his soul and submerged him in a flood of enlightenment and joy. He forgot in an instant all he had seen, real or imaginary, at the mill, and cried out, tears in his eyes, with intensest feeling, “So you really are my Frasquita! My Frasquita!”
The Three-Cornered Hat Page 8