when I turned to look her in the face I could perceive no answerable

sentiment. It was plain she attached no moment to the act, and I blamed

myself for my own more uneasy consciousness.

The sight and (if I may so call it) the acquaintance of the mother

confirmed the view I had already taken of the son. The family blood had

been impoverished, perhaps by long inbreeding, which I knew to be a

common error among the proud and the exclusive. No decline, indeed, was

to be traced in the body, which had been handed down unimpaired in

shapeliness and strength; and the faces of to-day were struck as sharply

from the mint, as the face of two centuries ago that smiled upon me from

the portrait. But the intelligence (that more precious heirloom) was

degenerate; the treasure of ancestral memory ran low; and it had required

the potent, plebeian crossing of a muleteer or mountain contrabandista to

raise, what approached hebetude in the mother, into the active oddity of

the son. Yet of the two, it was the mother I preferred. Of Felipe,

vengeful and placable, full of starts and shyings, inconstant as a hare,

I could even conceive as a creature possibly noxious. Of the mother I

had no thoughts but those of kindness. And indeed, as spectators are apt

ignorantly to take sides, I grew something of a partisan in the enmity

which I perceived to smoulder between them. True, it seemed mostly on

the mother's part. She would sometimes draw in her breath as he came

near, and the pupils of her vacant eyes would contract as if with horror

or fear. Her emotions, such as they were, were much upon the surface and

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