wife? It is your intention to tell the truth, the entire truth?
Don Lorenzo. It is so.
Doña Ángela. Before the tribunal of human justice?
Don Lorenzo. We need not trouble ourselves about divine justice, which at this moment is weighing you and me.
Doña Ángela. Understand me well, Lorenzo. I want to know if you will repeat to the judge, to the lawyers and all, no matter whom, whose business it will be to take possession of your abandoned fortune in the interests of the rightful owners, the story you told us a little while ago?
Don Lorenzo. Yes.
Doña Ángela. You will tell them everything?
Don Lorenzo. I am bound to do so.
Doña Ángela. Hear me further. You will have to acknowledge Juana the nurse as your mother.
Don Lorenzo. That is the only way left me to wipe away the stain of an iniquitous sentence. Here alone were reason sufficient to prove the crime of the silence you counsel.
Doña Ángela. And here, I say, is reason sufficient to command silence as an imperative duty. Can't you see that if Juana be innocent of the wrong imputed, she is guilty of a much greater,—which is called illegal retention of personal rights? You know it well. Falsification of a family is quite as bad as degrading or destroying it. To deprive legitimate owners of their fortune is far worse than to lift a locket from the ground. To conceal an illegitimate birth under an honest name is the same as covering the plague-spot of vice with an ermine mantle. If Juana be your mother, all this has she done, and has persisted in the deception for forty years.
148
