And such a sorcerer!  Hardly a disease could resist Doctor Moreno.  He worked wonders in the suburbs, among the lower scum; and those laborers adored him with as much fear as affection.  He succeeded with people who had been given up by the older doctors, wiseacres in long frocks and with gold-headed canes, who trusted more in God than in science, as Rafael’s mother would say in praise of them.  That devil of a physician used new and unheard-of treatments he learned from atheistic reviews and suspicious books he imported from abroad.  His competitors grumbled also because the Doctor had a mania for treating poor folk gratis, actually leaving money, sometimes, into the bargain; and he often refused to attend wealthy people of “sound principles” who had been obliged to get their confessor’s permission before placing themselves in his hands.

“Rascal!...  Heretic!...  Lower scum!...” dona Bernarda would exclaim.

But she said such things in a very low voice and with a certain fear, for those days were bad ones for the House of Brull.  Rafael remembered how gloomy his father had been about that time, hardly even leaving the patio.  Had it not been for the respect his hairy claws and his frowning eye-brows inspired, the rabble would have eaten him alive.  “Others” were in command, ... “others” ... everybody, in fact, except the House of Brull.

The monarchy had been treasonably overturned; the men of the Revolution of September were legislating in Madrid.  The petty tradesmen of the city, ever rebellious against the tyranny of don Ramon, had taken guns in their hands and formed a little militia, ready to send a fusilade into the cacique who had formerly trodden them under foot.  In the streets people were singing the Marseillaise, waving tricolored bunting, and hurrahing for the Republic.  Candles were being burned before pictures of Castelar.  And meantime that fanatical Doctor, a Republican, was preaching on the public squares, explaining the “rights of man” at daytime meetings in the country and at night meetings in town.  Wild with enthusiasm he repeated, in different words, the orations of the portentous Tribune who in those days was traveling from one end of Spain to the other, administering to the people the sacrament of democracy to the music of his eloquence, which raised all the grandeurs of History from the tomb.

Rafael’s mother, shutting all the doors and windows, would lift her angry eyes toward heaven every time the crowd, returning from a meeting, would pass through her street with banners flying and halt two doors away, in front of the Doctor’s house, where they would cheer, and cheer.  “How long, oh Lord, how long?” And though nobody insulted her nor asked her for so much as a pin, she talked of moving to some other country.  Those people demanded a Republic—­they belonged, as she said, to the “Dividing-up” gang.  The way things were going, they’d soon be winning; and then they would plunder the house, and perhaps cut her throat and strangle the baby!