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Updated: July 15, 2025
The rich Chueta had found himself owner, on settling some accounts, of a house and valuable lands in a town in the interior of the island. On taking possession of the new property the most prudent citizens had given him good advice. He would be allowed to visit his property during the day, but as for spending the night in the house, never!
The jewelry shop of a Chueta held his attention a long while. He admired the filigree buttons with a stone in the center, the hollow gold chains made for the peasant girls, who deemed these objects the most perfect and marvelous works created by the art of man. Suppose he should go in and buy a dozen of those buttons!
He had spent the evening at the Casino, silent and ill humored under the obsession of these protests. What was there so strange and absurd about his plan that it should be rejected by that Chueta, notwithstanding that it would be an honor to his family, and by that peasant, rude and unscrupulous, who lived almost beyond the pale of the law?
His brother was crazy; he had a good head, a heart of gold, but he was mad, stark mad! With his exalted ideas, and his loud talk in the cafés, it was largely his fault that decent people felt a certain prejudice against that they spoke ill of The old man accompanied his mutilated expressions with gestures of humility, avoiding the word Chueta and refusing to name the famous street.
"Any way you look at it, you are making a mistake. You should get out of your money troubles any way you can, but not this way. We, your friends, will help you. You marry a Chueta?" He took leave of Febrer with a vigorous handclasp, as if he imagined him in danger of death. "You are making a mistake, think it over," he said with a reproachful expression. "You are making a mistake, Jaime!"
Undoubtedly after the Majorcan nobles and plebeians came hogs, dogs, asses, cats, rats, and, at the tail of all these beasts of the Lord, the despised citizen of "the street," the Chueta, the pariah of the island. It mattered nothing if he were rich, like the brother of Captain Valls, or intellectual, like others.
It had velvet sleeves of a different color decorated with a double row of filigree buttons, the work of the Chueta silversmiths. A triple shining gold chain, terminated by a cross, hung over her breast, but so enormous were the links, that, had they not been hollow, they must have borne her down by their weight.
She, the unhappy girl from "the street," the Chueta, accustomed to seeing her people cringing and trembling beneath the weight of traditional odium, would visit these cities, would figure in the procession of riches, would have opened to her doors which she had always found closed, and she would pass through them leaning on the arm of a man who had ever seemed to her the personification of all terrestrial grandeur.
What was strange about his marrying a Chueta, a woman like others in her customs, beliefs, and education, since the most famous of the Febrers in an epoch of intolerance had lived beyond the pale of the law with infidel women? Suddenly, however, family prejudices provoked in Jaime a twinge of remorse, causing him to recall a clause in the knight commander's will.
There was no record of a Chueta having slept in the pueblo. Don Benito paid no attention to this counsel and he spent a night on his property, but scarcely had he gotten into bed than the domestics fled. When the master of the house had slept long enough he sprang from his couch. Not even the faintest ray of light entered through the crevices.
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