than a few pounds off.  As for the pay he gave, the city was proud of its millionaire.  Not even the Bank of Spain enjoyed the respect and confidence his firm had won.  No clerks and cashiers!  No mahogany furniture!  Everything above board!  Ask for a hundred thousand; and if don Matias said “yes,” he just went in to his bedroom and, God knows from where, he would draw out a roll of bank-notes the size of your body!

And this lucky rustic, this upstart lout, rich without deserving it for any competence he had, was giving himself the airs of an intelligent dealer, presuming to approach Rafael, “his deputy,” with a proposal for a freight-rate bill to promote the shipping of oranges into the interior of Spain!  As if a little thing like a bill in Congress would make any difference to his way of getting money!

Of his wretched past don Matias preserved but a single trait:  his respect for the house of Brull.  The rest of the city he treated with a certain uppishness; but he could not conceal the awe which dona Bernarda inspired in him—­a feeling that was strengthened by gratitude for her kindness in singling him out (after he had become rich), and for the interest she showed in his “little girl.”  He cherished a vivid memory of Rafael’s father, the “greatest man” he had known in all his life.  It seemed as though he could still see don Ramon stopping on his big horse in front of his humble farmhouse and, with the air of a grand lord, leaving orders for what don Matias was to do in the coming elections.  He knew the bad state in which the great man had left his affairs upon his death; and more than once he had given money to dona Bernarda outright, proud that she should do him the honor of appealing to him in her straits.  But in his eyes, the House of Brull, poor or rich, was always the House of Brull, the cradle of a dynasty whose authority no power could shake.  He had money.  But those others, the Brulls—­ah!—­they had, up there in Madrid, friends, influence!  If they wanted to they could get the ear of the Throne itself.  They were people with a “pull,” and if anyone suggested in his presence that Rafael’s mother was thinking of Remedios as a daughter-in-law, don Matias would redden with satisfaction and modestly reply: 

“I don’t know; I imagine it’s all talk.  My Remedios is only a town girl, you see.  The senor deputy is probably thinking of someone from the ‘upper crust’ in Madrid.”

Rafael had for some time been aware of his mother’s plans.  But he had no use for “that crowd.”  The old man, despite his boresome habit of suggesting “new bills,” he could stand on account of his touching loyalty to the Brull family.  But the girl was an utterly insignificant creature, pretty, to be sure, but only as any ordinary young girl is pretty.  And underneath that servile gentleness of hers lay an intelligence even more obtuse than her father’s, a mind filled with nothing but piety and the religious phrases in which she had been educated.