“No, you distract my mind from them, it is a great comfort to tell you of my troubles.  Up there I feel in despair, and have to exert all my self-command to suppress my anger.  I do not wish my servants to understand, for they are quite capable of laughing at me, neither do I wish poor Visitacion to know anything.  I cannot dissimulate.  I cannot feign happiness when I am so irritated!  What a hell I suffer!  I cannot say that I have been a man, and that I have been weak as the flesh of which I am made, that I have with me the fruit of my faults, and that I will not separate myself from them, though persecuted by calumny.  Every man acts as he is able, and I wish to be good in spite of my faults.  I might have separated from my children, I might have deserted them, as others have done to preserve their reputation as saints, but I am a man, and I am proud of them; I am a man with all his defects and all his virtues, neither greater nor less than the general run of humanity.  The feeling of paternity is so deeply rooted in me that I would sooner lose my mitre than abandon my children.  You remember when Juanito’s father, who passed as my nephew, died, how deeply I felt it, I thought I should have died also.  Such a fine, handsome man, and with such a brilliant future before him!  I would have made him a magistrate, president of the supreme court, minister, anything I wished!  And in twenty-four hours he was dead as though Heaven wished to punish me.  It is true I have my grandson remaining, but this Juanito in no way resembles his father, and I confess it to you, I do not care much for him.  I can only see in him the most distant reflection of my poor son.  Of my past, of that time which was the happiest of my life, all I have left me is Visitacion.  She is the living image of the poor dead one.  I worship her! and this feeble ray of happiness these wretched people disturb with their calumnies.  It is enough to make one kill them!”

Overcome by the happy recollection of the spring-time which had flowered during the first years of his episcopate, far away in an Andalusian diocese, he repeated once again to Tomasa the tale of his relations with a certain devout lady, who from her childhood had felt a horror of the world.  Devotion had drawn them together, but life was not long in asserting her rights, opening herself a way by their almost mystical relations, and finally uniting them in a carnal embrace.  They had lived faithful to each other in the secrecy of ecclesiastical life, loving each other with scrupulous prudence, so that no rumour of their relations had ever publicly transpired, until she died, leaving two children.  Don Sebastian, a man of strong passions, was almost vehement in his paternal feelings—­those two beings were the image of the poor dead woman, the remembrance of the only idyll which had softened a life wholly given over to ambition, and the calumnies circulated by his enemies, founded on the presence of his daughter in the archiepiscopal palace nearly drove him mad.