Leon Roch. Benito Pérez Galdós

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      CHAPTER VI.

       PEPA.

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      Leon Roch having seen enough, left the house. A calm mild night invited him to walk along the terrace where there was not a living soul to be seen, and not a sound to be heard but the croaking of the toads. After pacing the avenue to the end and back for the second time, he thought he discovered a figure at one of the nearest ground-floor windows. It was in white, a woman beyond a doubt, whose arm rested on the sill, above which she was visible as a half-length. Leon went towards her and perceiving that she did not move, he went quite near. She might have been carved in marble but for her black hair and a slight motion of her hand among the leaves of a plant that grew near.

      “Pepa?” he said.

      “Yes, Pepa—I have turned romantic and am gazing at the stars. To be sure, there is not a star to be seen—but it is all the same.”

      “It is a very dark night; I did not recognise you,” said Leon, putting his hand on the top of the window railing. “The damp air is not good for you. Why do you not shut the window? It is of no use to wait for your father. That rascally Cimarra has got him to gamble and they are all quite happy—Go indoors.”

      “It is so hot inside!”

      The night was in fact pitch dark and Leon could not see the girl’s face; but he could study the tone of her voice, for the voice is singularly treacherous. Pepa’s voice quavered. Her head, leaning on one side, rested against the window-frame. In her hand she held a flower with a long stem—Leon thought it was a rose. She kept raising it to her lips and biting off a petal which she blew off again. Leon noted the situation and understood that it was the moment to say something appropriate, but he racked his brain in vain; he could think of nothing, and so he said nothing. Both were silent; Leon quiet and motionless, both his hands resting on the cold iron railing, Pepa pulling out the rose petals and blowing them away.

      “I hear strange stories of your whims and fancies, Pepa,” he said at last, thinking that he might presently say something to the point, if he began by saying something foolish. “You break your china, you tear your lace....”

      “And what a specimen she is!” cried Pepa interrupting him with a bitter laugh that made Leon shudder. “The poor lady is never to be seen except in church! You do not understand!—You seem to have lost your wits. I am speaking of your future mother-in-law, the marquesa de Tellería. When I was stopping at Ugoibea I had a fancy to see her. They told me all the nonsense she talked about me. The usual thing—that I am badly brought up, that I am wildly extravagant, that my manners are too free, and my style of dress disgusting—yes, disgusting. But the poor woman herself has been so very different ever since she began to lose her beauty—Besides, you see, she cannot live such a worldly life now that she has such a saintly son—for of course you know that Luis Gonzaga, your María’s twin brother who is at the college of the Sacred Heart at Puyóo, is said to be a perfect angel in a cassock? Why, my dear fellow, you are going to live in the very courts of Heaven! Your mother-in-law even wears a hair shirt. You do not believe me? But I know it—her lovers say so....” And Pepa blew away a rose petal which fell on Leon’s forehead.

      “Pepa,” he said with some annoyance, “I do not like to hear any friend of mine speak in that way of a respectable family....”

      “But they may talk of me! They may call me violent and crazy and I must not say a word. Of course! Everything I do is ill-manners, wild behaviour, ignorance, insolence....! Change the subject then. I am very sorry never to have seen your future Saint Mary face to face. They say she is very elegant-looking—she always was. But she goes out very little at Ugoibea; she and her fool of a mother only walk out together to get fresh air. They say they give themselves no end of airs;—however, you are rich and the marquis—they say he is the only idiot known who has failed to get a place in the government.”

      “Pepa, Pepa, for pity’s sake do not talk so wildly; you really hurt me deeply with your heedless speeches.” Pepa pulled at the rose which was now much reduced.

      “But you see I am badly brought up,” she retorted bitterly. “And now people are discovering that I have no heart, that I am spiteful, rebellious, and capricious....”

      “That is not the truth; but you should not behave so that people cannot believe it.”

      “Much I care what people believe. Do I want any thing they can give me?”

      “You are too proud.”

      “And they say I shall never find a man of any sense to marry me!” she went on with the same angry laugh, which seemed almost convulsive. “As if there were such a thing as a man of sense. Well, I am not one of those girls who pretend to be very meek and goody-goody just to catch a husband; and I can tell you one thing: I will never marry a learned man—I loathe a savant. Perfect happiness for a woman consists in having heaps of money and marrying a fool.”

      “I see you are in the mood to talk at random to-night,” said Leon pleasantly. “But you do not mean what you say, and your sentiments are better than your words.”

      His eyes had by this time become accustomed to the darkness, or the night was perhaps a little clearer; Leon could, at any rate, make out Pepita Fúcar’s face against the black interior behind her like the dim blurred outline of an old picture. The whiteness of her skin, her chestnut hair, the brilliancy of her small eyes, where in each pupil burned a tiny spark, the pout of her parted lips and the savage whiteness of her teeth as she still blew away the rose-petals, above all her petulant air made her seem almost pretty, though in fact she was very far from it.

      “You might make other people fancy that you were as wild as you pretend to be,” Leon went on, “but I know you better. I have known you since we were children together, and I know you have a good heart. СКАЧАТЬ