within
reach of her on the marble step, she suddenly shot forth one of her
hands and patted mine. The thing was done, and she was back in her
accustomed attitude, before my mind had received intelligence of the
caress; and when I turned to look her in the face I could perceive no
answerable sentiment. It was plain she attached no moment to the act,
and I blamed myself for my own more uneasy consciousness.

The sight and (if I may so call it) the acquaintance of the mother
confirmed the view I had already taken of the son. The family blood had
been impoverished, perhaps by long inbreeding, which I knew to be a
common error among the proud and the exclusive. No decline, indeed, was
to be traced in the body, which had been handed down unimpaired in
shapeliness and strength; and the faces of to-day were struck as sharply
from the mint as the face of two centuries ago that smiled upon me from
the portrait. But the intelligence (that more precious heirloom) was
degenerate; the treasure of ancestral memory ran low; and it had
required the potent, plebeian crossing of a muleteer or mountain
_contrabandista_ to raise what approached hebetude in the mother into
the active oddity of the son. Yet of the two, it was the mother I
preferred. Of Felipe, vengeful and placable, full of starts and shyings,
inconstant as a hare, I could even conceive as a creature possibly
noxious. Of the mother I had no thoughts but those of kindness. And
indeed, as spectators are apt ignorantly to take sides, I grew something
of a partisan in the enmity which I perceived to smoulder between them.
True, it seemed mostly on the mother's part. She would sometimes draw in
her breath as he came near, and the pupils of her vacant eyes would
contract as if with horror or fear. Her emotions, such as they were,
were much upon the surface and readily shared; and this latent repulsion
occupied my mind, and kept me wondering on what grounds it rested, and
whether the son was certainly in fault.

I had been about ten days in the residencia, when there sprang up a high
and harsh wind, carrying clouds of dust. It came out of malarious
lowlands, and over several snowy sierras. The nerves of those on whom it
blew were strung and jangled; their eyes smarted with the dust; their
legs ached under the burthen of their body; and the touch of one hand
upon another grew to be odious. The wind, besides, came down the gullies
of the hills and stormed about the house with a grea