close of the year at the latest, there would be a new election, and therewith, as all averred, a landslide for don Rafael Brull. The intimate friend and lieutenant of the House of Brull was the best informed. If the elections took place on the date indicated by the newspapers, Rafael would still be five or six months short of his twenty-fifth birth-day. But don Andrés had written to Madrid to consult the Party leaders. The prime minister was agreeable—"there were precedents!"—and even though Rafael should be a few weeks short of the legal age, the seat would go to him just the same. They would send no more "foundlings" from Madrid! Alcira would have no more "unknowns" foisted upon her! And the whole Tribe of Brull dependents was preparing for the contest with the enthusiasm of a prize-fighter sure of victory beforehand.
All this bustling expectation left Rafael cold. For years he had been looking forward to that election time, when the chance would come for his free life in Madrid. Now that it was at hand he was completely indifferent to the whole matter, as if he were the last person in the world concerned.
He looked impatiently at the table where don Andrés, with three other leading citizens, was having his daily hand at cards before coming to sit down at Rafael's side. That was a canny habit of don Andrés. He liked to be seen in his capacity of Regent, sheltering the heir-apparent under the wing of his prestige and experienced wisdom.
Well along in the afternoon, when the Club parlor was less crowded with members, the atmosphere freer of smoke, and the ivory balls less noisy on the green cloth, don Andrés considered his game at an end, and took a chair in his disciple's circle, where as usual Rafael was sitting with the most parasitic and adulatory of his partisans.
The boy pretended to be listening to their conversation, but all the while he was preparing mentally a question he had decided to put to don Andrés the day before.
At last he made up his mind.
"You know everybody, don Andrés. Well, yesterday, up on San Salvador, I met a fine-looking woman who seems to be a foreigner. She says she's living here. Who is she?"
The old man burst into a loud laugh, and pushed his chair back from the table, so that his big paunch would have room to shake in.
"So you've seen her, too!" he exclaimed between one guffaw and another. "Well, sir, what a city this is! That woman got in the day before yesterday, and everybody's seen her already. She's the talk of the town. You were the only one who hadn't asked me about her so far. And now you've bitten!… Ho! Ho! Ho! What a place this is!"
When he had had his laugh out—Rafael, meanwhile, did not see the joke—he continued in more measured style:
"That 'foreign woman,' as you call her, boy, comes from Alcira. In fact, she was born about two doors from you. Don't you know doña Pepa, 'the doctor's woman,' they call her—a little lady who has an orchard close by the river and lives in the Blue House, that's always under water when the Júcar floods? She once owned the place you have just beyond where you live, and she's the one who sold it to your father—the only property don Ramón ever bought, so far as I know. Don't you remember?"
Rafael thought he did. As he went back in his memory, the picture of an old wrinkled woman rose before his mind, a woman round-shouldered, bent with age, but with a kindly face smiling with simple-mindedness and good nature. He could see her now, with a rosary usually in her hand, a camp-stool under her arm, and her mantilla drawn down over her face. As she passed the Brull door on her way to church, she would greet his mother; and doña Bernarda would remark in a patronizing way: "Doña Pepa is a very fine woman; one of God's own souls.... The only decent person in her family."
"Yes; I remember; I remember doña Pepa," said Rafael.
"Well, your 'foreigner,'" don Andrés continued, "is doña Pepa's niece, daughter of her brother, the doctor. The girl has been all over the world singing grand opera. You were probably too young to remember Doctor Moreno, who was the scandal of the province in those days...."
But Rafael certainly did remember Doctor Moreno! That name was one of the freshest of his childhood recollections, the bugaboo of many nights of terror and alarm, when he would hide his trembling head under the clothes. If he cried about going to bed so early, his mother would say to him in a mysterious voice:
"If you don't keep quiet and go right to sleep I'll send for Doctor Moreno!"
A weird, a formidable personage, the Doctor! Rafael could see him as clearly as if he were sitting there in front of him; with that huge, black, curly beard; those large, burning eyes that always shone with an inner fire; and that tall, angular figure that seemed taller than ever as young Brull evoked it from the hazes of his early years. Perhaps the Doctor had been a good fellow, who knows! At any rate Rafael thought so, as his mind now reverted to that distant period of his life; but he could still remember the fright he had felt as a child, when once in a narrow street he met the terrible Doctor, who had looked at him through those glowing pupils and caressed his cheeks gently and kindly with a hand that seemed to the youngster as hot as a live coal! He had fled in terror, as almost all good boys did when the Doctor petted them.
What a horrible reputation Doctor Moreno had! The curates of the town spoke of him in terms of hair-raising horror. An infidel! A man cut off from Mother Church! Nobody knew for certain just what high authority had excommunicated him, but he was, no doubt, outside the pale of decent, Christian folks. Proof of that there was, a-plenty. His whole attic was filled with mysterious books in foreign languages, all containing horrible doctrines against God and the authority of His representatives on earth. He defended a certain fellow by the name of Darwin, who claimed than men were related to monkeys, a view that gave much amusement to the indignant doña Bernarda, who repeated all the jokes on the crazy notion her favorite preacher cracked of a Sunday in the pulpit. And such a sorcerer! Hardly a disease could resist Doctor Moreno. He worked wonders in the suburbs, among the lower scum; and those laborers adored him with as much fear as affection. He succeeded with people who had been given up by the older doctors, wiseacres in long frocks and with gold-headed canes, who trusted more in God than in science, as Rafael's mother would say in praise of them. That devil of a physician used new and unheard-of treatments he learned from atheistic reviews and suspicious books he imported from abroad. His competitors grumbled also because the Doctor had a mania for treating poor folk gratis, actually leaving money, sometimes, into the bargain; and he often refused to attend wealthy people of "sound principles" who had been obliged to get their confessor's permission before placing themselves in his hands.
"Rascal!… Heretic!… Lower scum!…" doña Bernarda would exclaim.
But she said such things in a very low voice and with a certain fear, for those days were bad ones for the House of Brull. Rafael remembered how gloomy his father had been about that time, hardly even leaving the patio. Had it not been for the respect his hairy claws and his frowning eye-brows inspired, the rabble would have eaten him alive. "Others" were in command, … "others" … everybody, in fact, except the House of Brull.
The monarchy had been treasonably overturned; the men of the Revolution of September were legislating in Madrid. The petty tradesmen of the city, ever rebellious against the tyranny of don Ramón, had taken guns in their hands and formed a little militia, ready to send a fusilade into the cacique who had formerly trodden them under foot. In the streets people were singing the Marseillaise, waving tricolored bunting, and hurrahing for the Republic. Candles were being burned before pictures of Castelar. And meantime that fanatical Doctor, a Republican, was preaching on the public squares, explaining the "rights of man" at daytime meetings in the country and at night meetings in town. Wild with enthusiasm he repeated, in different words, the orations of the portentous Tribune who in those days was traveling from one end of Spain to the other, administering to the people the sacrament of democracy to the music of his eloquence, which raised all the grandeurs of History from the tomb.
Rafael's mother, shutting all the doors and windows, would lift her angry eyes toward heaven every time the crowd, returning from a meeting, would pass through her street with banners flying and halt two doors away, in front of the Doctor's house, where they would cheer, and cheer. "How long, oh Lord, how long?" And though nobody insulted her nor asked her for so much as a pin, she talked of moving to some other country. Those people demanded a Republic—they belonged, as she said, to the "Dividing-up" gang.