“Brother, it is well,” he said despairingly;
“you are stronger than I am, let your will be
accomplished. Let her remain, as you wish it,
but do not let me see her!—remain, both
of you. It is I that will go.”
The sewing machine clicked from early morning till
night in the house of the Lunas. This and the
hammering of the shoemaker were the only sounds of
work that disturbed the holy silence of the upper cloister.
When Gabriel left his bed at sunrise, after a night
of painful coughing, he would find Sagrario already
in the entrance room preparing her machine for the
day’s work. From the day following that
of her return to the Cathedral she had devoted herself
to work with sullen silence as a means of returning
unnoticed to the Claverias, trusting that the people
would forgive her past. The gardener’s widow
procured her work, and so the sound of the stitching
was continually heard in the old “habitacion,”
accompanied very often by melodies from the Chapel-master’s
harmonium.
The “Wooden Staff” moved about his house
like a shadow. He remained continually in the
Cathedral or in the lower cloister, only coming up
to the “habitacion” when it was absolutely
necessary. He ate his meals with his head bent,
in order not to look at his daughter, who was seated
opposite to him at the other end of the table, ready
to burst into tears at the sight of her father before
her. A painful silence oppressed the family.
Don Luis being so absent-minded, seemed the only one
not to perceive the situation, and chatted gaily with
Gabriel about his hopes and his musical enthusiasms.
Everything seemed to him quite natural; nothing disturbed
him, and the return of Sagrario to the family hearth
had not caused him the slightest surprise.
When dinner was over Esteban fled, not to return to
the house till night-time; after supper he locked
himself into his own room, leaving his brother and
his daughter in possession of the entrance sitting-room.
The machine began to work again, and Don Luis fingered
his harmonium till nine o’clock, when Silver
Stick locked the tower staircase, rattling his bunch
of keys with a noise that equalled a curfew.
Gabriel felt indignant at his brother’s obstinacy.
“You will kill the child; what you are doing
is unworthy of a father.”
“I cannot help it, brother; it is impossible
for me to look at her. It is sufficient for me
to tolerate such things in the house. Ay! if you
could only tell how the people’s looks wound
me!”
In reality the scandal produced by the return of Sagrario
to the Claverias had been much less than he had feared.
She seemed so ill and so weary that none of the women
felt any animosity against her, and the energetic
protection of her Aunt Tomasa imposed respect.
Besides, those simple women of instinctive passions
could not now feel towards her that hostile envy that
her beauty and the cadet’s courtship had formerly
inspired. Even Mariquita, Silver Stick’s
niece, found a certain salve to her vanity in protecting
with disdainful tolerance that unhappy girl who in
former days had attracted the attention of every man
who visited the upper cloister.
