“No!” cried Frasquita passionately. “I am not your Frasquita! Think of your deeds of tonight and remind yourself of what you have done to a heart that loved you so!” And she broke into tears. It was like the sudden crumbling and thaw of a glacier. Her Ladyship, unable to suppress her feelings, went to her and put her arms very tenderly around her shoulders. Frasquita embraced her in turn without knowing what she did, and between her sobs murmured like a child seeking comforting mother’s arms: “O my lady! My lady! I am so unhappy!”
“Ah, you imagine things are much worse than they are,” her Ladyship replied, weeping pretty freely herself by this time.
“Meanwhile it’s I who am the unhappy one,” Tio Lucas began moaning quietly, fighting hard against tears.
“What about me!” wailed Don Eugenio, finally unmanned by the contagious weeping all round him, or possibly seeing in tears a way out of his predicament. “I am a villain! A monster! An utter libertine who has only got what he deserves!” And he began a doleful bleating, hiding his face in the portly midriff of Master Juan Lopez. Certain onlookers began loudly competing with him, and the whole episode looked like ending without a single one of the several suspects having to say a word to clear his name.
33
How about Yourself?
Tio lucas was the first to surface from that flood of tears. That glimpse he had caught through the bedroom keyhole at the mill suddenly recurred to him. “Now, sirs, to business!” he suddenly exclaimed.
“Never mind business, as you call it, Tio Lucas,” said her Ladyship. “Your wife here is innocent.”
“Yes, I know – but—”
“No buts, if you please! Just let her say a word, and you’ll see how you’ve wronged her. One look at her and my heart cried out she was a saint! No matter what you have told me!”
“Very well then – let her speak.”
“I won’t speak!” Frasquita cried. “You are the one who should speak! The truth is that it was you…” She stopped short, abashed by a returning awe of her Ladyship.
But Lucas was quick to retort: “What about you?” He was deep-sunk in doubt once more.
The Corregidor too was reminded of his wrongs. “The affair does not concern that woman!” he snapped at Tio Lucas. “It concerns you and that lady there.” He gestured impatiently at his own wife. “Ah, Mercedes my dear! Who would have thought that you—”
“I? And what of you?” retorted her Ladyship, piercing him with a look. And for the next few moments the angry pair tossed backwards and forwards the same recriminatory phrases. “You mean you did!” “Indeed I mean you did!” “Pardon me but!—” “How can you say!—” And so on and so forth.
This would have gone on indefinitely had not her Ladyship finally said to the Corregidor: “Be quiet, now! Our own affair can wait till later. The urgent thing at this moment is to restore Tio Lucas’s peace of mind – not a difficult matter, in my opinion, for I see Master Juan Lopez and Tonuelo over there straining at the leash to defend Señora Frasquita.”
“I don’t need men to defend me!” stoutly maintained that lady. “I have two much more trustworthy witnesses whom nobody can say I bribed or suborned.”
“Where are they?” asked the Miller.
“Downstairs, at the main door.”
“Have them come up – with her Ladyship’s permission!”
“The poor dears aren’t able to come up.”
“Ah! Two women, eh? There’s fine evidence for you!”
“They aren’t women. They’re just two little asses.”
“Worse and worse! Two lasses! Oblige me with their names!”
“One is called Pinona and the other Liviana!”
“Our two donkeys! Frasquita, are you joking with me?”
“No, I am very serious. I can prove by the testimony of these asses that I was not at the mill when you saw the Lord Corregidor there!”
“For Heaven’s sake, explain!”
“Listen, Lucas, and die of shame for ever having doubted me! While you were coming back tonight from the village to our house I was on my way from our house to the village. And so we passed each other on the road! You were off the road – as a matter of fact, you had stopped to strike a light in a ploughed field!”
“That’s true – I did stop! Go on!”
“Just then your ass brayed…”
“It did indeed! – Oh, I feel so happy! Go on! Go on! Every word you speak gives me another year of life!”
“And that bray was answered by another animal from the road…”
“Yes! Yes! Yes! God bless you! I can hear it now!”
“It was Liviana and Pinona recognizing each other and saying ‘Hallo!’ like two old cronies – while we ourselves not only didn’t exchange greetings but didn’t know each other from Adam!”
“Say no more! Say no more!”
“Not only did we not know each other,” went on Frasquita, “but we took fright and went scurrying off in opposite directions… So you see I wasn’t at the mill! If you want to know why you found my Lord Corregidor in our bed, feel those clothes on you which are still damp, and they will tell you better than any words from me. His Lordship fell into the millstream, and Weasel undressed him and put him to bed at the mill. If you want to know why I opened the door, it was because I thought it was you drowning and crying out to me. Finally, if you want to know the whole story of the appointment – however, I’ve nothing more to say at present. When we are on our own I’ll enlighten you on this and other particulars that I must not mention to this lady’s face.”
“Everything Señora Frasquita has said is Gospel truth!” Master Juan Lopez cried, eager to ingratiate himself with the Lady Mercedes, since he judged her to wear the trousers in the Corregidor’s household.
“Yes, everything! Everything!” echoed Tonuelo.
“Everything – as far as you’ve gone!” the Corregidor assented, very relieved to find that Frasquita’s explanations had not gone very deep into things.
“So then you are innocent!” cried Tio Lucas, completely convinced by the evidence. “My Frasquita! Frasquita my beloved! Forgive me for being so unjust! Let me kiss you!”
“That’s quite another kettle of fish!” his wife retorted, drawing back. “Before there’s anything of that I must hear what you have to say for yourself!”
Here the Lady Mercedes quietly interposed: “I’ll speak for him and for myself.”
“This is what I’ve been waiting for this past hour!” snorted the Corregidor, trying to draw himself up to his full height.
“But I won’t utter a word,” her Ladyship went on, “till these gentlemen have changed back into their own clothes… and even then I’ll only speak to those who deserve to hear!”
“Here! Come and change clothes,” Lucas said to his Lordship, relieved now that he had not killed him, although feeling for him a really savage hatred. “Your Lordship’s jacket is strangling me. I’ve been most uncomfortable all the time I’ve had it on.”
“You don’t know the way of it!” growled the Corregidor. “For my part, I can’t wait to put it on again and then have you – yes, and certain others – strung up on the gallows if my wife’s defence is not to my taste!”
Her Ladyship smiled at this and gave the company a look intended to say to anyone whose fear had been renewed by the Corregidor’s threat: “Take no notice of him! I’ll see you come to no harm.”
34
The Governor’s Lady Is Inviting Too
Once the corregidor and Tio Lucas had gone from the room her Ladyship sat down on the sofa, made Señora Frasquita sit beside her, and, turning to the servants and retainers cluttering up the doorway, said with a pleasant naturalness: “Now my friends! Tell this gracious lady all the bad things you know about me.”
The whole group moved forwards as one man, and ten voices would have spoken at o
nce, had not the nurse, as the leading spirit below-stairs, imposed silence on the others and begun herself: “You must know, Señora Frasquita, that my Lady and I were busy tonight looking after the children, waiting for the master to come home and telling our rosaries three times over to while away the time. Weasel had told us that my Lord Corregidor had gone out after the most bloodthirsty criminals and there couldn’t be any question of going to bed till we’d seen him come home safe and sound. And then we heard a noise made by somebody in the very next room – the one my lord and lady sleep in! We picked up the lamp – we were scared clean out of our wits! – and went to see who it was moving about there. And – Holy Virgin! – on getting into the room we saw a man dressed just like his lordship trying to hide under the bed! But it wasn’t his lordship at all – it was your husband, Señora! At that we all came out with ‘Thief! Thief!’ In a twinkling the room was full of people – and the Alguacils made a grab at the impostor and dragged him out of his hiding-place. My Lady, who, like all the rest of us, recognized Tio Lucas and, seeing what clothes he was wearing, was afraid he had made away with the rightful owner, started weeping and wailing in a way fit to melt a stone statue. ‘Throw him in the cells – the cells!’ we all kept shouting. I tell you, ‘thief’ and ‘murderer’ were the kindest words Tio Lucas had thrown at him from start to finish. So then, there he was, looking like death, cowering against the wall with never a word to say for himself. When he realized they were dragging him off to the dungeon he ups and tells us – yes, I’ll tell you what he said, though I’m sure he’d have better held his tongue. ‘Your Ladyship,’ says he, ‘I’m not a thief nor a murderer. The real thief and murderer – at any rate, he has murdered my honour’ – those were the words he used – ‘is in my house – in bed with my wife’!”
“Poor Lucas!” sighed Señora Frasquita.
“Poor me!” murmured her Ladyship.
“That’s what we all said,” went on the nurse.
“ ‘Poor Lucas – poor Ladyship – poor Lady Mercedes!’ The fact is, Señora, we had a notion that my Lord had his eye on you… though nobody dreamt that you—”
“Now then, Nurse!” her Ladyship sharply intervened. “No more of that, if you please!”
“I’ll go on from here,” broke in one of the Alguacils, profiting by the interruption to take the centre of the stage. “Tio Lucas – after taking us all in nicely with his suit and way of walking as he entered the building – so much so that we all took him for the real Corregidor – hadn’t come with the best of intentions, and if her Ladyship hadn’t still been up… well, you can imagine what would have happened.”
“Get along with you! Hold your tongue now!” the cook interrupted. “You’re just talking a lot of nonsense! Now, Señora Frasquita! Tio Lucas, to explain what he was doing in my mistress’s room, had to own up to his real intentions. To be sure, my Lady couldn’t contain herself when she heard what they were! So she gave him a good slap on the mouth and knocked the rest of his words down his throat. I too called him all the names I could lay my tongue to and would have scratched his eyes out… for – look you, Señora Frasquita, though he is your husband, the idea of coming here on purpose to—”
“You’re a windbag!” growled the doorkeeper, thrusting himself in front of her. “You’d be delighted if it happened to you! Briefly, Señora, listen to me and we’ll come to the facts. Her Ladyship did and said everything most dignified and proper, then afterwards, when her anger was out, she felt sorry for Tio Lucas and, coming to a full sense of the Corregidor’s wickedness, she said to him at last in so many words: ‘Infamous as what you had in mind was, Tio Lucas, and though I can never pardon such an affront, it is necessary, nevertheless, that your wife and my husband should believe for the space of a few hours that they’ve been treated to a dose of their own bitter medicine, and that you, by the help of the disguise you are wearing, have given injury for injury. No better revenge can we take upon them than this little deception. We can undo it whenever it suits us.’ Once her Ladyship and Tio Lucas had agreed on this they rehearsed the lot of us in everything we should say and do when his Lordship returned, and certainly my stick has so taken it out of Master Sebastian Weasel’s backside that it’ll be a long time indeed before he forgets the eve of St Simon and St Jude!”
For some time after the doorman ended her Ladyship and Frasquita went on whispering and muttering to each other, pausing every now and again to kiss or break into merry laughter. It was a pity that their conversation could not be overheard. The reader, however, will easily imagine it for himself. Or if he cannot his good lady certainly will.
35
Imperial Decree
Just then the corregidor and tio lucas came back into the room, each now dressed in his own clothes.
“Now my turn has come!” the Corregidor announced, and, after he had thumped the ground a couple of times with his bamboo cane as though to reassure himself by the feel of it, he said to her Ladyship with amazing coolness and deliberation: “My dear Mercedes! I am still awaiting your explanations!”
Meanwhile Frasquita had got up from her chair and given Lucas a little pinch of reconciliation. It fairly made him wince, but at the same time she gave him a fond and totally forgiving look. The Corregidor could not fail to notice this little byplay but stood, stony-faced, unable to make anything of it. Then, turning once more on his wife, with acid politeness, “Madam,” he said, “everybody is coming to an understanding except ourselves. Take me out of my uncertainty!… I command you as your husband and your Corregidor!” And he gave the ground another dig with his bamboo.
“So you are leaving us?” said her Ladyship. She went up to Frasquita, completely ignoring his Lordship. “You need have no fear that this scandalous affair will have any unpleasant consequences. Rosa! Lights for Master and Madam, who want to be going… God be with you, Tio Lucas!”
“No!” croaked his Lordship, thrusting himself in the way. “There’ll be no going away for such as Tio Lucas! Tio Lucas shall stay under arrest till I know the whole truth! Ho, Alguacils! In the King’s name!” Not one of his retainers, however, came at his call. They were all looking at her Ladyship.
“We shall see about that. Kindly let us pass!” she said, almost stepping over her husband and bidding adieu to the company with the greatest courtesy with head on one side and skirts picked up in the tips of her fingers, bowing gracefully in the act of performing the then modish reverence known as the “pompa”.
“B-but I – but you – we – that couple—” the poor old man kept mumbling, plucking at his wife’s dress and cutting short her courteous gesture. He might have spared himself – not a bit of notice was taken of him!
When everyone had gone and the estranged pair were left to themselves, her Ladyship at last deigned to address her husband – in the tone of a Tsarina of all the Russias blasting a fallen Minister with the order of perpetual exile in Siberia.
“Though you live to be a thousand you shall never know what took place in my bedroom this night. Had you been there yourself, as you should have been, you would not need to ask. As far as I am concerned, there is absolutely no reason – there never will be – why I should satisfy your curiosity. I despise you so much that, were you not the father of my children, I should thrust you out of this window here and now – even as I now banish you for ever from my bed. And so, sir, a long good-night to you!”
With these words, which Don Eugenio listened to wide-eyed – left alone with his wife he was no bolder than a rabbit – her Ladyship strode out into her boudoir and from her boudoir passed into her bedroom, closing the door behind her. The poor man stayed behind in the centre of the salon floor, as though rooted there, and muttered between his teeth, or rather gums – for teeth he had none: “Gad, I didn’t expect to come out of it so cheaply! Weasel shall find me a berth to lie in!”
37
Conclusion, Moral and Epilogue
The dawn choru
s of birds was in full song when Tio Lucas and Señora Frasquita left the city for their mill. Both man and wife went on foot and before them ambled, ready-saddled, the two asses. “On Sunday you must go and confess,” Frasquita was saying. “You must cleanse yourself of all the evil thoughts and wicked intents of last night.”
“You are right!” agreed the Miller. “But you too, you must do something for me in return, and that is – give those mattresses and bedclothes away! Let’s have everything new! I’m not laying myself down in the place where that poisonous beast has sweated.”
“Don’t mention him, Lucas!” Frasquita broke in. “Come, let’s talk of other things. I want to ask you a second favour—”
“Do, my dear!”
“Next summer do take me away to try the waters at Solan de Cabras.”
“For what reason?”
“To find out whether we shall have children.”
“A happy thought! I’ll certainly take you there, God willing!”
Here they arrived back at the mill, just as the sun, still hidden below the horizon, was gilding the peaks of the mountains.
That evening, to the great surprise of man and wife, who were not expecting any more visits from people of quality after a scandal like the previous night’s, there flocked to the mill a greater number of the gentry than ever. The reverend Bishop, a large number of Canons, the learned Doctor of Law, two Priors, and various other gentlemen – commanded or coaxed to come by his Reverence as soon as the affair became public knowledge – were in bodily occupation of the little vine arbour.
There was only one absentee – the Corregidor.
Once the company was fairly met, my Lord Bishop made a little speech. In spite, he said, of certain recent happenings at that house, his Canons and he would continue to come there just as before, so that neither the good Miller nor his lady nor anybody else in his audience should share the general censure – which was only deserved by the one who had profaned such a chaste and honourable marriage by his disgraceful conduct. In fatherly fashion he exhorted Señora Frasquita to be less provoking in the future, a little less – so to speak – coquettish in her speech and looks, to try to wear a little more on her arms and shoulders, and to affect a higher neckline. He recommended Tio Lucas to be a little less mercenary, to have a little more restraint and less forwardness in his dealings with his betters. In conclusion, he gave the whole company his blessing and announced that, as he was not then fasting, he would eat a bunch or two of grapes with much pleasure. The company concurred in his remarks – particularly in the last one. The vine hardly stopped quivering the whole evening. That night’s entertainment cost the Miller fifty pounds of grapes, as he was never tired afterwards of telling.
The Three-Cornered Hat Page 9
