7
The Foundations of Happiness

They both indeed loved each other to distraction, did the Miller and his lady. It seemed almost that she was the more in love in spite of her husband’s ugliness and her own great beauty. This was because she was inclined to grow jealous and call Lucas to account whenever he was unduly late home from the city or the small towns where he went for grain. Tio Lucas, for his part, actually seemed to delight in the attentions to which the gentry who frequented the mill treated Frasquita. He took a genuine pride and joy in the fact that she was just as attractive to everyone else as she was to himself. Though he knew well enough that in their heart of hearts they had an understandably human desire for her and would have given anything for her to be less chaste, yet he would leave her on her own for whole days together without the least anxiety, never asking questions afterwards about what she had been doing or who had been there in his absence.

The truth was not that Tio Lucas’s love was less strong than Frasquita’s. It was rather that he had more trust in her faithfulness than she had in his. Moreover, he excelled her in penetration, and knew exactly how far her love for him extended and how much she respected herself. He was, to sum up, a complete man – a man of Shakespearean stamp, of few but intense passions, incapable of doubt, a man whose faith was all or nothing, who either loved or hated to the death, and admitted no comparative degree between total felicity and the utter wreck of happiness. He was, in short, an Othello in homespun, and we meet him now playing his part in what could prove the first act of a tragedy.

Here the reader may ask: “How come these notes of gloom in so cheerful an overture – these fateful lightnings in so cloudless an atmosphere? Why these premonitions of high drama in such a setting?”

Reader, you shall soon learn.