of Ildefonso Tinieblas, your brother, who used to sell crockery, and my son will be the grandson of the Tinieblas—­for obscure we were born, and we shall never emerge from our obscurity, nor own a piece of land of which we can say, ’This is mine’; nor shall I ever plunge my arms up to the elbows in a sack of wheat threshed and winnowed on our own threshing-floor—­all because of your cowardice, your folly, your soft-heartedness.”

“But—­but, niece!”

The canon’s voice rose higher every time he repeated this phrase, and, with his hands to his ears, he shook his head from side to side with a look of mingled grief and desperation.  The shrill complaint of Maria Remedios grew constantly shriller, and pierced the brain of the unhappy and now dazed priest like an arrow.  But all at once the woman’s face became transformed; her plaintive wail was changed to a hard, shrill scream; she turned pale, her lips trembled, she clenched her hands, a few locks of her disordered hair fell over her forehead, her eyes glittered, dried by the heat of the anger that glowed in her breast; she rose from her seat and, not like a woman, but like a harpy, cried: 

“I am going away from here!  I am going away from here with my son!  We will go to Madrid; I don’t want my son to fret himself to death in this miserable town!  I am tired now of seeing that my son, under the protection of the cassock, neither is nor ever will be any thing.  Do you hear, my reverend uncle?  My son and I are going away!  You will never see us again—­never!”

Don Inocencio had clasped his hands and was receiving the thunderbolts of his niece’s wrath with the consternation of a criminal whom the presence of the executioner has deprived of his last hope.

“In Heaven’s name, Remedios,” he murmured, in a pained voice; “in the name of the Holy Virgin——­”

These fits of range of his niece, who was usually so meek, were as violent as they were rare, and five or six years would sometimes pass without Don Inocencio seeing Remedios transformed into a fury.

“I am a mother!  I am a mother! and since no one else will look out for my son, I will look out for him myself!” roared the improvised lioness.

“In the name of the Virgin, niece, don’t let your passion get the best of you!  Remember that you are committing a sin.  Let us say the Lord’s Prayer and an Ave Maria, and you will see that this will pass away.”

As he said this the Penitentiary trembled, and the perspiration stood on his forehead.  Poor dove in the talons of the vulture!  The furious woman completed his discomfiture with these words: 

“You are good for nothing; you are a poltroon!  My son and I will go away from this place forever, forever!  I will get a position for my son, I will find him a good position, do you understand?  Just as I would be willing to sweep the streets with my tongue if I could gain a living for him in no other way, so I will move heaven and earth to find a position for my boy in order that he may rise in the world and be rich, and a person of consequence, and a gentleman, and a lord and great, and all that there is to be—­all, all!”