Leonora regained her composure, and slowly stepped back. Rafael sat up, and reached for his hat.
It was a painful moment. They stood there cold, as if the sun had gone out and a glacial wind were blowing through the orchard.
Rafael kept his eyes to the ground, afraid to look up and meet her gaze, ashamed at the thought of his disordered clothes, which were soiled with dirt; humiliated at having been beaten and pummeled like a robber caught by a victim he had expected to find powerless.
He heard Leonora's voice addressing him with the scornful "_tu_" a lady might use toward her lowest inferiors.
He raised his head and found Leonora looking at him, her eyes ablaze with anger and offended dignity.
"I'm never taken by force," she said coldly. "I give myself ... if I feel like it."
And in the gesture of scorn and rage with which she dismissed him, Rafael thought he caught a trace of loathing at some memory of Boldini--that repugnant lecher, who had been the only person in the world to win her by violence.
Rafael tried to stammer an excuse, but that hateful association of the brutal scene rendered her implacable.
"Go! Go, or I'll beat you again!... And never come back!"
And to emphasize the words, as Rafael, humiliated and covered with dirt, was leaving the garden, she shut the gate behind him with such a violent slam that the bars almost went flying.
Doña Bernarda was much pleased with Rafael. The angry glances, the gestures of impatience, the wordless arguments between mother and son, which the household had formerly witnessed in such terror, had come to an end.
The boy had not been visiting the Blue House for some time. She knew that with absolute certainty, thanks to the gratuitous espionage conducted for her by persons attached to the Brull family. He scarcely ever left the house; a few moments at the Club after lunch; and the rest of the day in the dining-room, with her and family friends; or else, shut up in his room, with his books, probably, which the austere señora revered with the superstitious awe of ignorance.
Don Andrés, her advisor, commented upon the change with a gloating "I told you so." What had he always said, when doña Bernarda, in the confiding intimacies of that friendship which amounted almost to a senile, a tranquil, a distantly respectful passion, would complain of Rafael's contrariness? That it would all pass; that it was a young man's whim; that youth must have its fling! What was the use? Rafael hadn't studied to be a monk! Many boys his age, and even older ones, were far worse!... And the old gentleman smiled, for he was thinking of his own easy conquests with the wretched flock of dirty, unkempt peasant girls who wrapped the oranges in the shipping houses of Alcira. "You see, doña Bernarda, you suffered too much with don Ramón. You are a bit too exacting with Rafael. Let him have a good time! Let him enjoy himself! He'll get tired of that chorus girl soon enough, pretty as she is. Then you can take hold and start him right!"