Rafael thought he did.  As he went back in his memory, the picture of an old wrinkled woman rose before his mind, a woman round-shouldered, bent with age, but with a kindly face smiling with simple-mindedness and good nature.  He could see her now, with a rosary usually in her hand, a camp-stool under her arm, and her mantilla drawn down over her face.  As she passed the Brull door on her way to church, she would greet his mother; and dona Bernarda would remark in a patronizing way:  “Dona Pepa is a very fine woman; one of God’s own souls....  The only decent person in her family.”

“Yes; I remember; I remember dona Pepa,” said Rafael.

“Well, your ‘foreigner,’” don Andres continued, “is dona Pepa’s niece, daughter of her brother, the doctor.  The girl has been all over the world singing grand opera.  You were probably too young to remember Doctor Moreno, who was the scandal of the province in those days....”

But Rafael certainly did remember Doctor Moreno!  That name was one of the freshest of his childhood recollections, the bugaboo of many nights of terror and alarm, when he would hide his trembling head under the clothes.  If he cried about going to bed so early, his mother would say to him in a mysterious voice: 

“If you don’t keep quiet and go right to sleep I’ll send for Doctor Moreno!”

A weird, a formidable personage, the Doctor!  Rafael could see him as clearly as if he were sitting there in front of him; with that huge, black, curly beard; those large, burning eyes that always shone with an inner fire; and that tall, angular figure that seemed taller than ever as young Brull evoked it from the hazes of his early years.  Perhaps the Doctor had been a good fellow, who knows!  At any rate Rafael thought so, as his mind now reverted to that distant period of his life; but he could still remember the fright he had felt as a child, when once in a narrow street he met the terrible Doctor, who had looked at him through those glowing pupils and caressed his cheeks gently and kindly with a hand that seemed to the youngster as hot as a live coal!  He had fled in terror, as almost all good boys did when the Doctor petted them.

What a horrible reputation Doctor Moreno had!  The curates of the town spoke of him in terms of hair-raising horror.  An infidel!  A man cut off from Mother Church!  Nobody knew for certain just what high authority had excommunicated him, but he was, no doubt, outside the pale of decent, Christian folks.  Proof of that there was, a-plenty.  His whole attic was filled with mysterious books in foreign languages, all containing horrible doctrines against God and the authority of His representatives on earth.  He defended a certain fellow by the name of Darwin, who claimed than men were related to monkeys, a view that gave much amusement to the indignant dona Bernarda, who repeated all the jokes on the crazy notion her favorite preacher cracked of a Sunday in the pulpit.