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Updated: June 8, 2025
He'll get tired of that chorus girl soon enough, pretty as she is. Then you can take hold and start him right!" Doña Bernarda once again had reason to appreciate the talent of her counsellor. His predictions, made with a cynicism that always caused the pious lady to blush, had been fulfilled to the letter! She, too, was sure it was all over. Her son was not so blind as his father had been.
He could still feel the criminal shudder that rippled through him at a slight rattle of the keys, which had been left with the confidence of unlimited authority in the lock of an old chest where doña Bernarda kept her savings. With tremulous hands he had collected all the money she had put away in the small boxes there. A thief, a thief! But, after all, he was taking only what belonged to him.
All the gossip, all the echoes of Leonora's adventurous life, that had heretofore but feebly come to her ears, the old lady had never believed, regarding them as the work of envy. But now they had been repeated to her by doña Bernarda, by a lady "in good standing," a good Christian, a person incapable of falsehood.
The female Spartan said nothing however, hoarding her indignation in silence, complaining only to don Andrés of the recrudescence of a madness that was upsetting all her plans. Through his numerous henchmen the counselor kept watch upon the young man. His spies followed Rafael cautiously through the night, up to the gate of the Blue House. "What a scandal!" exclaimed doña Bernarda. "At night, too!
Rocca Bernarda, I was saying, lies 33 kilometres from its station; and even some of the largest towns in the kingdom are inconveniently and unnecessarily remote from the line. "True," he replied. "Very true! Inconveniently . . . but perhaps not unnecessarily. . . ." He nodded his head, as he often does, when revolving some deep problem in his mind. "Well, sir?"
Now after so many, many years of family sacrifice, was he going to make a fool of himself, and give his enemies a hold on him, just because of the first ballet-skirt that came along? And in her rage she did not hesitate to rend the veil of reticence behind which her conjugal fury and her conjugal unhappiness had run their parallel courses. "The same as your father!" doña Bernarda exclaimed.
He could come and go without being conscious of a pair of eyes glaring upon him and without hearing words of indignation stifled between grating teeth. Don Andrés and his friends at the Club kept asking him when the wedding would take place. In presence of "the children" doña Bernarda would speak of alterations that would have to be made in the house.
Besides, doña Bernarda invited Remedios to the Brull place frequently, and rarely indeed did Rafael come home of an afternoon without finding that timid maiden there a dull, handsomish sort of girl, dressed up in clothes that did cruel injustice to a peasant beauty rapidly transformed, by her father's good luck, into a young "society" girl. "But, mama," said Rafael, smiling.
Their Trinity was most closely cemented, however, by their fondness for Rafael, the little tot destined to bring fame to the name of Brull and realize the ambitions of both his grandfather and his father. Rafael was a quiet, morose little boy, whose gentleness of disposition seemed to irritate the hard-hearted doña Bernarda. He was always hanging on to her skirts.
Many boys his age, and even older ones, were far worse!... And the old gentleman smiled, for he was thinking of his own easy conquests with the wretched flock of dirty, unkempt peasant girls who wrapped the oranges in the shipping houses of Alcira. "You see, doña Bernarda, you suffered too much with don Ramón. You are a bit too exacting with Rafael. Let him have a good time! Let him enjoy himself!
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