The Grandee Part 1

The Grandee.

by Armando Palacio Valdes.

INTRODUCTION

According to the Spanish critics, the novel has flourished in Spain during only two epochs--the golden age of Cervantes and the period in which we are still living. That unbroken line of romance-writing which has existed for so long a time in France and in England, is not to be looked for in the Peninsula. The novel in Spain is a re-creation of our own days; but it has made, since the middle of the nineteenth century, two or three fresh starts. The first modern Spanish novelists were what are called the _walter-scottistas_, although they were inspired as much by George Sand as by the author of _Waverley_. These writers were of a romantic order, and Fernan Caballero, whose earliest novel dates from 1849, was at their head. The Revolution of September, 1868, marked an advance in Spanish fiction, and Valera came forward as the leader of a more national and more healthily vitalised species of imaginative work.

The pure and exquisite style of Valera is, doubtless, only to be appreciated by a Castilian. Something of its charm may be divined, however, even in the English translation of his masterpiece, _Pepita Jimenez_. The mystical and aristocratic genius of Valera appealed to a small audience; he has confided to the world that when all were praising but few were buying his books.

Far greater fecundity and a more directly successful appeal to the public, were, somewhat later, the characteristics of Perez y Galdos, whose vigorous novels, spoiled a little for a foreign reader by their didactic diffuseness, are well-known in this country. In the hands of Galdos, a further step was taken by Spanish fiction towards the rejection of romantic optimism and the adoption of a modified realism.

In Pereda, so the Spanish critics tell us, a still more valiant champion of naturalism was found, whose studies of local manners in the province of Santander recall to mind the paintings of Teniers. About 1875 was the date when the struggle commenced in good earnest between the schools of romanticism and realism. In 1881 Galdos definitely joined the ranks of the realists with his _La Desheredada_. An eminent Spanish writer, Emilio Pardo Bazan, thus described the position some six years ago: "It is true that the battle is not a noisy one, and excites no great warlike ardour. The question is not taken up amongst us with the same heat as in France, and this from several causes. In the first place, the idealists with us do not walk in the clouds so much as they do in France, nor do the realists load their palette so heavily. Neither school exaggerates in order to distinguish itself from the other. Perhaps our public is indifferent to literature, especially to printed literature, for what is represented on the stage produces more impression."

This indifference of the Spanish reading public, which has led a living novelist to declare that a person of good position in Madrid would rather spend his money on fireworks or on oranges than on a book, has at length been in a measure dissipated by a writer who is not merely admired and distinguished, but positively popular, and who, without sacrificing style, has conquered the unwilling Spanish public. This is Armando Palacio Valdes, who was born on the 4th of October 1853, in a hamlet in the mountains of Asturias, called Entralgo, where his family possessed a country-house. The family spent only the summer there; the remainder of the year they pa.s.sed in Aviles, the maritime town which Valdes describes under the name of Nieva in his novel _Marta y Maria_.

He began his education at Oviedo, the capital of Asturias. From this city he went, in 1870, up to Madrid to study the law as a profession.

But even in the lawyer's office, his dream was to become a man of letters. His ambition took the form of obtaining at some university a chair of political economy, to which science he had, or fancied himself to have, at that time a great proclivity.

Before terminating his legal studies, the young man published several articles in the _Revista Europea_ on philosophical and religious questions. These articles attracted the attention of the proprietor of that review, and Valdes presently joined the staff. In 1874 he became editor. He was at the head of the _Revista Europea_, at that time the most important periodical in Spain from a scientific point of view, for several years. During that time he published the main part of those articles of literary criticism, particularly on contemporary poets and novelists, which have since been collected in several volumes--_Los Oradores del Ateneo_, ("The Orators of the Athenaeum"); _Los Novelistas Espanoles_ ("The Spanish Novelists"); _Un Nuevo Viaje al Parnaso_ ("A New Journey to Parna.s.sus"), sketches of the living poets of Spain; and, in particular, a very bright collection of review articles published in conjunction with Leopoldo Alas, _La Literatura en_ 1881 ("Spanish Literature in 1881"). These gave Valdes a foremost rank among the critics of the day. He wrote no more criticism, or very little; he determined to place himself amongst those whose creative work demands the careful consideration of the best judges.

Soon after he took the direction of the _Revista_, Valdes wrote his first novel, _El Senorito Octavio_, which was not published until 1881.

In 1883 he brought out his _Marta y Maria_, a book which, I know not why, is called "The Marquis of Penalta" in its English version. This novel enjoyed an extraordinary success, and had more of the graphic and sprightly manner by which Valdes has since been distinguished, than the books which immediately followed it. Spanish critics, indeed, remembering the wonderful freshness of _Marta y Maria_, still often speak of it as the best of Valdes' stories. In this same year, 1883, he married, at the seaside town of Gijon, in Asturias, on the day when he completed his thirty years, a young lady of sixteen. His marriage was a honeymoon of a year and a half, of which _El Idilio de un Enfermo_ ("The Idyll of an Invalid"), a short novel of 1884, portrays the earlier portion. His wife died early in 1885, leaving him with an infant son to be, as he says, "my allusion and my fascination." His subsequent career has been laborious and systematic. He has published one novel almost every year. In 1885 it was _Jose_, a shorter tale of sea-faring life on the stormy coast of the author's native province. About the same time appeared a collection of short stories, called _Aguas Fuertes_ ("Strong Waters").

It was not until 1886, however, that Valdes began to rank among the foremost novelists of Europe. In that year he published his great story, _Riverita_, one of the characters in which, a charming child, became the heroine of his next book, _Maximina_, 1887. Of this character he writes to me: "My Maximina in these two books is but a pale reflection of that being from whom Providence parted me before she was eighteen years of age. In these novels I have painted a great part of my life." A Sevillian novice, who has helped to care for Maximina in Madrid, reigns supreme in a succeeding novel, _La Hermana San Sulpicio_ ("Sister San Sulpicio"), 1889. But between these two last there comes a ma.s.sive novel, describing the adventures of a journalist who founds a newspaper in the provincial town of Sarrio, by which Gijon seems to be intended. This book is called _El Cuarto Poder_ ("The Fourth Power"), and was published in 1888. To these, in 1891, was added _La Espuma_ ("Froth"), of which a translation has already appeared in the "International Library." In 1892 Valdes published _La Fe_ ("Faith").

In _La Espuma_, his best-known novel, Valdes reverted from those country scenes and those streets of provincial cities which he had hitherto loved best to paint, and gave us a sternly satiric picture of the frothy surface of fashionable life in Madrid. From the illusions of the poor, pathetic and often beautiful, he turned to the ugly cynicism of the wealthy. With his pa.s.sion for honesty and simplicity, his heart burned within him at the parade and hollowness which he detected in aristocratic and bureaucratic Madrid. One conceives that, like his own Raimundo, he was invited to enter it, took his fill of its pleasures, and found his mouth filled with ashes. His talent for portraiture was never better employed. If he was occasionally tempted to commit the peculiarly Spanish fault of exaggeration--scarcely a fault there, where the shadows are so black and the colours so flaring--he resisted it in his more important characters. The brutality of the Duke de Requena, the sagacity and urbanity of Father Ortega, the saintly sweetness of the d.u.c.h.ess, the navete of Raimundo, the sphinx-like charm of Clementina de Osorio, with her mysterious sweetness and duplicity, these are among the salient points of characterisation which stand out in this powerful book. _La Espuma_ was a cry from the desert to those who wear soft raiment in king's palaces. It was the ruthless tearing aside of the conventions by a Knox or a Savonarola. It was stringent satire, yet tempered with an artist's moderation, with a naturalist's self-suppression.

The latest novel which Valdes has published is that which we here present under the t.i.tle of _The Grandee_ ("El Maestrante"). Here, as it will be seen, the author is no longer engaged in the jarring notes of satire, but, with more lightness and a greater effusion of humour, he dissects the quaint elements which make up old-fashioned society in a provincial city of Spain. This is one of those books which peculiarly appeal to the foreign reader who desires to enter into a phase of life from which his own experience absolutely excludes him. We may suppose that a limited number of Englishmen can penetrate to the palaces and the club-rooms of Madrid, and see something, however superficially, of the life described in _Froth_. But the grim and ancient mansions which look down through ancient mullioned windows on the narrow streets of such a town as is brought before us in _The Grandee_--what can the most privileged Englishman possibly know of the manners and customs of their stately inhabitants?

In the second half of the book, the gaiety and grotesqueness of the pictures of life sink before the solemnity of the terrible and tragic corruption of Amalia, and the martyrdom of Josefina. The last pages of _The Grandee_ are, indeed, tinged with almost intolerable gloom, and in a society comparatively so civilised as our own, the revenge of the unnatural mother may seem almost overdrawn. The author contends, however, that in the cryptic and cloistered provincial life which he describes, where the light of censure can hardly reach a powerful criminal, such wickedness as is perpetrated upon Josefina is neither improbable nor unprecedented. Nor do the reports of Mr. Benjamin Waugh permit us to question that such horrors are daily committed at our own doors. Whether these maladies of the soul are or are not fit subjects for the art of the novelist is a question which every reader must answer for himself.

In the pages of _The Grandee_ we have a singular transcript of Spanish pride and picturesqueness, of a narrow society absolutely fortified against public opinion by its ancient prejudices, a society, nevertheless, in which the primitive pa.s.sions of humanity stir and interact with as much dangerous vivacity as in freer and more democratic conditions. I may perhaps mention, on the authority of the author, that by Lancia Valdes intends us to understand Oviedo, the capital of the province of Asturias, where he spent many years of his childhood and early youth. The story opens between thirty and forty years ago, and represents Oviedo and its social customs at an epoch a little earlier than the time when the novelist was forming his freshest and most vivid impressions of life.

Of the author of so many interesting books but little has yet been told to the public. In a private letter to myself, the eminent novelist gives a brief sketch of his mode of life, so interesting that I have secured his permission to translate and print it here:--"Since my wife died,"

Senor Valdes writes, "my life has continued to be tranquil and melancholy, dedicated to work and to my son. During the winters, I live in Asturias, and during the summers, in Madrid. I like the company of men of the world better than that of literary folks, because the former teach me more. I am given up to the study of metaphysics. I have a pa.s.sion for physical exercises, for gymnastics, for fencing, and I try to live in an evenly-balanced temper, nothing being so repugnant to me as affectation and emphasis. I find a good deal of pleasure in going to bull-fights (although I do not take my son to the Plaza dressed up like a miniature _torero_, as an American writer declares I do), and I cultivate the theatre, because to see life from the stage point of view helps me in the composition of my stories."

EDMUND GOSSE.

THE GRANDEE

CHAPTER I

THE GRANDEE'S HOUSE

It was ten o'clock at night, an hour when the number of those who frequented the streets of the n.o.ble city of Lancia was always of the scantiest, but in the depth of winter, when our story opens, with a bitter north-east wind and drenching rain, one would find it difficult to stumble upon a living soul. Not that all had surrendered themselves into the arms of Morpheus, for Lancia as capital of a province, albeit not one of the most important, had learnt to sit up late. But the people used to resort at an early hour to parties, whence they only sallied forth to supper and to bed at eleven o'clock. At that hour many noisy groups could be seen pa.s.sing along under the shelter of umbrellas, the ladies enveloped in warm woollen cloaks, holding up their petticoats, and the gentlemen all wrapped in their cloaks, or _montecristos_, with their trousers well turned up, breaking the silence of the night by the loud clack of their wooden shoes. For at the time of which we speak there were few that despised this comfortable shoe of the country, unless it were some new-fledged medical student from Valladolid, who considered himself above such old-fashioned things, or some fanciful young lady, who pretended that she could not walk in them. But these were the exceptions. There were no carriages in the town, for only three existed in the place, belonging respectively to the Quinones, the Countess of Onis, and to Estrada-Rosa; the last-mentioned being the only one that did not date from the middle of the last century. When either of these conveyances appeared in the street, it was followed by a crowd of little urchins, whose enthusiasm at the sight knew no bounds. The neighbours inside their houses could tell by the sound of the wheels, and the clink of the horseshoes to which of the above-mentioned magnates the carriage belonged. They were in fact three venerated inst.i.tutions which the natives of the city had learnt to love and respect. So umbrellas and wooden shoes were the only protections against the rain that falls more than three parts of the year. India-rubber shoes came in later, as well as hooded waterproofs, which at certain times transform Lancia into a vast community of Carthusian friars.

The wind blew stronger at the crossing of Santa Barbara than in any other part of the town. This uncovered pa.s.sage, between the bishop's palace and the walls of a courtyard of the cathedral, just by the chain which regulates the lightning conductor, leads finally under an archway, a murky corner where the blast, confined within a narrow s.p.a.ce, howls and moans on such infernal nights as this.

A man, m.u.f.fled up to the eyes, crossed with rapid steps the little square in front of the archbishop's house, and entered this recess. The force of the hurricane stopped him, and the rain penetrating between the collar of his coat and the brim of his hat, almost blinded him. He made a few seconds' stand against the violence of the whirlwind, and then, instead of uttering any exclamation of impatience, which would have been more than excusable under the circ.u.mstances, he merely gave vent to a long-drawn sigh of distress:

"Oh! my Jesus! what a night!"

He cowered up against the wall, and when the wind had somewhat abated, he resumed his course. Pa.s.sing under the archway that connects the palace with the cathedral, he entered the widest and best-lighted part of the pa.s.sage. An oil-lamp fixed in the corner served as its only light. The wretched thing, seconded by a tinfoil reflector placed at the back, made ineffectual attempts to pierce the gloom of the farthest corners.

Ten yards off n.o.body would have thought it was there, and yet to our m.u.f.fled traveller it must have seemed an Edison lamp of ten thousand candle-power, from the way he drew his coat-collar higher about his face, and from the haste in which he avoided the pavement, and crept along by the wall where the shadows were deepest. In this way he arrived at the Calle de Santa Lucia, cast a rapid glance around him, and renewed his course on the darkest side of the way. Although one of the most central streets, the Calle de Santa Lucia is solitary to an extreme. It is closed at one end by the base of the tower of the cathedral, a graceful, elegant structure like few to be found in Spain, and so it is only used as a thoroughfare by canons going to the choir, or devotees on their way to early Ma.s.s. In this short, straight, narrow street, the palace of Quinones de Leon was situated--a large, dreary, uninteresting-looking building with projecting iron balconies. It was two storeys high, and over the central balcony there was an enormous roughly carved shield, supported by two griffins in high relief, as rudely carved as the quarterings.

One side of the house looked on to a little, damp, melancholy, neglected garden, enclosed by a wall of regular elevation; and the other on to a dull, even damper, narrow street which ran between the house and the black, discoloured wall of the church of San Rafael. To pa.s.s from the palace to the church, where the Quinones had a private pew, was a little gallery, or covered way, smaller, but similar to that of the archbishop, over the pa.s.sage of Santa Barbara.

By the bright light shining from the crevice of a half-opened window on the balcony, it was evident that the people of the house had not yet retired to rest. And if the light were not sufficient proof, the fact was confirmed by the strains of a piano heard occasionally above the roar of the storm.

Our m.u.f.fled friend, with a rapid step, keeping as much in shadow as possible, arrived at the door of the palace. There he stopped again, cast a furtive glance down both sides of the street, and entered the portico. It was large, and paved with stones like the street; the bare, discoloured, whitewashed walls were dimly illumined by an oil-lamp hung from the centre. The man quickly crossed it, and before pulling the bell-cord, placed his ear to the door, and listened long and attentively. Convinced that n.o.body was descending the staircase, he gave one more look down the street. At last he decided to undo his cloak, and drew from under its folds a bundle, which he placed with a trembling hand near the door. It was a basket, covered with a woman's mantle, which hid the contents from view, although they could be pretty well guessed, for from the time of Moses, mysterious baskets seem destined for the consignment of infants.

The man, being now free of his burthen, pulled the bell-cord three times, and the door was immediately opened from above by means of another cord. The three pulls of the bell showed that the visitor to the aristocratic mansion of the Quinones was a n.o.bleman on a par with the Senores. This was an old-established custom of unknown origin. A menial, a servant, an inferior in any degree, only rang once, ordinary visitors rang twice, and the half dozen, or more, persons that the important Senor of Quinones considered his equals in Lancia, rang three times. If those in the town, who had never been admitted to the sacred precincts of the mansion, joked with the habitues of the place on the subject, their witticisms fell flat; but even if the shafts did go home, the feudal custom was so universally respected, that none but the privileged few dared to give the three signals pertaining to the highest rank. Paco Gomez once ventured to break the rule for a joke, but he was received so coldly when he entered the drawing-room that he never cared to repeat the experiment.

So the man of the basket entered quickly, shut the door, crossed the hall, and ascended the wide stone staircase, where holes, worn by long use, retained the damp.

When he reached the first floor, a servant approached to take his hat and cloak; so without further delay, and as if avoiding pursuit, he darted with hasty stride towards the drawing-room door, and opened it.

The light of the chandelier and candelabra dazzled him for a moment. He was a tall powerful man, between thirty and thirty-two years of age, with a pleasant expression of countenance and regular features, short hair, and a long, silky beard of reddish hue. His face was pale, and betrayed extreme anxiety. On raising his eyes, which the excessive brightness of the room at first obliged him to lower, he turned them on the lady of the house, who was seated in an armchair. She, on her side, cast an inquiring anxious look at him, and the glance caused him a shock which gave instantaneous repose to his face like the neutralisation of two equal forces.

The gentleman remained at the door waiting for five or six couples, who were pirouetting to the strains of a waltz, to pa.s.s him, whilst his pale lips wreathed into a smile as sweet as it was sad.

"What an evening! We did not think you would be here so soon," exclaimed the lady as she gave him her delicate nervous hand, which contracted three or four times with intense emotion as it came in contact with his.

She was a woman of about twenty-eight or thirty years of age, diminutive in stature, with a pale, expressive face, very black eyes and hair, small mouth, and delicate aquiline nose.

"How are you, Amalia?" said the gentleman, without replying to her remark, and trying to hide under a smile the anxiety which, in spite of himself, the trembling of his voice betrayed.

"I am better, thank you."

"Is not this noise bad for you?"

"No; I was bored to death in bed. Besides, I did not wish to deprive the young people of the one enjoyment they can get occasionally at Lancia."

"Thank you, Amalia," exclaimed a young lady who was dancing and overheard the last remark, and Amalia responded by a kind smile.

Another couple from behind then knocked against the gentleman, who was still standing.

"Always devoted, Luis!"

"To no one more than yourself, Maria," replied the young man, affecting to hide his embarra.s.sment under a laugh.

"Are you sure that I am the only one?" she asked with a mischievous glance at the partner who held her in his arms.

Maria Josefa Hevia was at least forty, and she had been almost as ugly at fifteen. As her means were not equal to her weight, no one had dared redeem her from the purgatory of solitude. Until quite lately she still entertained hopes that one of the elderly Indian bachelors, who came to pa.s.s their declining years in Lancia, would ask her hand in marriage; and these hopes were founded on the fact that these gentlemen frequently contracted alliances with the daughters of distinguished people in the place, portionless as they generally were.