Part 7

Her head had struck against the edge of one of the steps, and the wound was bleeding slightly. Half stunned as Señora de Pardiñas was by the force of the blow, the agonized voice of her son recalled her to herself, and she answered faintly:

“Don’t be frightened, child; it is nothing; you may believe me, it is nothing. I am a little better now.”

“There is no one in the porter’s room. I am going upstairs to get some vinegar--some water----”

“No, child, no, for Heaven’s sake. Don’t call any one; make no disturbance. Help me gently to the carriage. For illness or the like, the best place is home.”

Trembling, and covered with a cold sweat, Rogelio assisted his mother to the carriage, into which he lifted her bodily, and then made her lean back in a corner while he fanned her with his handkerchief, thinking, with terror, “Can there have been any injury to the brain?”

“Home--drive slowly,” he said to the coachman, who had turned round curious to know what had happened. And unable to control himself, he threw his arms around his mother, putting the question usual in such cases:

“But mamma, how did you fall?”

“I don’t know, child. My foot slipped; it must have been the heels of the new shoes; or my foot may have caught in the flounce of my dress.”

“It was my fault not to have given you my arm. I am a brute. Where does it pain you? How do you feel now, mamma?”

“I don’t know; I think I am going to faint,” answered his mother, in a weak voice.

And indeed she looked as if she were going to faint, to judge from the cold perspiration and the deathly pallor that overspread her face. Rogelio, greatly alarmed, was on the point of calling out to the coachman to drive to an apothecary’s when his mother revived a little and made signs to him that she was better, and the carriage rolled on toward the house. When Rogelio, assisted by the footman, was helping his mother out of the carriage, she uttered a cry.

“Where do you feel pain?” Rogelio asked her.

“In this leg. There, don’t be frightened. It is nothing.”

When Esclavita was informed of what had occurred, she hastened to her mistress without useless outcries, and quickly and skillfully loosened her clothing, applied vinegar to her temples, and afterward undressed her and put her comfortably to bed. Doña Aurora complained of a desire to retch, of heaviness, of oppression, of continued nausea, and an inclination to vomit--all which made the student say to himself with terror, “My God! there is concussion of the brain.” He called Esclavita apart and said to her hurriedly: “Take care of her, I am going to Sanchez del Abrojo and I will not come back without him.”

In effect, he returned with him after a delay of two hours, and the distinguished physician, having made a careful examination of the patient, and a minute and skillful investigation into the manner of the fall, was obliged to acknowledge that there had been a little, a very little, cerebral congestion. The only treatment he prescribed was rest in bed, and diet until the disturbance in the stomach should be settled. The other injuries were of little consequence--the lesion on the forehead did not go beyond the skin; the contusion on the left leg was no more than a bruise of little importance. In short, it was nothing. All she required was rest.

To carry out the physician’s orders, then took place that revolution in the habits of the household, and that transformation in the aspect of the house itself, which sickness always brings with it. The household concentrated itself within the narrow limits of the bedroom and dressing-room of the patient. Rogelio and Esclavita took up their station there--the former receiving the visitors; the latter changing the cloths wet with arnica, bringing cups of lime-leaf tea, burning lavender, and undertaking whispered commissions and receiving keys slipped into her hand secretly. “Don’t let the boy want for anything. Remember to warm his bed.” To these recommendations, which Esclavita listened to with religious attention, followed suppressed groans. “Oh, how this wretched leg hurts me. My head is splitting with pain!”

Esclavita performed her duties as sick nurse with that earnest and silent assiduity which she always displayed when employed in the service of others. She came and went with noiseless footsteps and without rustling of garments. She took charge of everything, and if she was absent for a moment from the bedroom it was because she was in the kitchen, compounding some potion. She even managed to get time to give Rogelio his dinner, without neglecting her mistress; but no one knew at what hour she herself had taken food on that memorable day.

When the night was advanced and every one had retired, she trimmed a lamp carefully and set it on the floor so that the light should not disturb the patient. She then placed a low chair at the head of the bed and seated herself in it. As Rogelio, who was sitting in an easy-chair in the dressing-room, made no motion to retire, she went to him and whispered to him, in tones of entreaty, “Go to bed, Señorito; don’t stay here.” The patient, who had begun to doze, overheard the words and added her entreaties to Esclavita’s, saying, “Child, do go to bed. You are not accustomed to sitting up; it will injure your health. Don’t be foolish; go to bed. Esclavita is taking the best possible care of me.” But it was impossible to persuade Rogelio, and they compromised the matter by deciding that a temporary bed should be made for him on the floor. The little Galician, displaying extraordinary strength, brought in two mattresses, beat the pillows noiselessly, and as noiselessly made up the bed. Rogelio divested himself of his coat and waistcoat only, and thus, half dressed, lay down. Then only did he begin to feel the extreme exhaustion which follows great shocks and profound emotions. At the same time a comical recollection crossed his mind.

“And my sweetheart,” he said to himself, “will she be at the window to-morrow to see me pass by?”

XIV.

Although tired out by the emotions of the day and comparatively tranquil in his mind in regard to his mother’s condition, Rogelio tossed and turned about for a long time before he fell into a light doze. He did not succeed, however, in obtaining a sound and restorative sleep; his slumbers were interrupted and restless and visited by distressing dreams, in which he seemed to be always falling down, down, rapidly, interminably, with the added distress of never being able to reach the ground and of seeing below him the place on which he was about to be dashed. In one of those painful and involuntary efforts which we make in our sleep to shake off a bad dream or to change its character, he woke with a start and looked about him wonderingly, unable to remember at first how it was that he came to be sleeping here, in his mother’s room.

Absolute silence reigned around. The room, dimly lighted by the little lamp, was in a semi-obscurity; his mother, he thought, must be asleep, for he could hear her breathing deeply, almost snoring; at the head of the bed he saw Esclavita sitting motionless, with large, wide-open eyes fixed on himself. An irresistible impulse made him call to her with the accent of a child who, because of some nocturnal fright, begs not be left alone.

“Esclavita! Hist! Esclavita!” he called softly. “Come here!”

The girl glided toward him, silently as a shadow, and bent over him.

“Is mamma asleep?” he asked.

“Sound asleep.”

“Well, I am wide awake now. Talk to me--softly, so that we may not waken her.”

“Ah, Señorito, and how if we should disturb her?”

“There is no fear of that. Come closer, and speak softly.”

“Wouldn’t it be better for you to go to sleep?”

“Sleep! If you knew the horrible dreams I have had! No, I would rather stay awake now. Sit down here.”

“Where?”

“Here on the floor beside me. Otherwise we cannot speak in a whisper--and we might waken mamma.”

Esclavita acceded to the proposal without demur, and stretched herself on the floor, almost cheek to cheek with Rogelio, but without losing her modest and reserved air, showing in this that she was born in the land, where bucolic naturalness of action is united to modesty of demeanor. The girl’s pure virginal breath mingled for the second time with that of the student, but the feelings it awakened in him now were of a very different nature from those he had experienced on the former occasion. Whether it was that the shock caused by his mother’s fall had transformed his youthful sensations into sentiment, or that the place in which he was did not admit of evil thoughts, certain it is that near to him as Esclavita was, and easy as it would have been to take liberties with her, it did not even enter into his mind to attempt doing so; all he was conscious of was a sort of affectionate effusiveness, unusual with him, a feeling of inexplicable tenderness, which caused his eyes to fill with tears. Reaching out his hand, he grasped Esclavita’s and, pressing it with force, said:

“Esclavita, mamma came near being killed to-day.”

“Thank God it was nothing serious, Señorito!” answered the girl, returning the pressure.

“And if she had been killed, what should I have done, tell me that?”

Esclavita did not answer, thereby showing her wisdom, for the question put to her was one of those which do not admit of being answered in words. She pressed more forcibly than before the student’s hot, trembling hand in hers, and her eyes responded in the half shadow with a long and eloquent glance.

“If she had died,” continued Rogelio, yielding to his involuntary emotion, “you see that I should have no one in the world but you, no one.”

“I?” stammered the girl, whose hand trembled in the student’s clasp.

“Yes, you; and no one but you. Relations I have none--that is to say, I have several aunts at home in Galicia, with whom we are on cat-and-dog terms. You see what a protection they would be, child. As for friends--well, two or three in the University over there--college friends, that are of little account. Then the old men who come to see mamma. Of much use they would be; they are all in their dotage. It is as I say, Suriña. I should have only you.”

Rogelio had raised himself on his elbow as he spoke, in order to make himself heard by the girl without disturbing his mother, and this lowering of his voice made his words more persuasive, bestowing on them the passionate and mysterious air of a confession. Persuaded himself, he persuaded his hearer. He was not in a frame of mind to measure the importance of his words or to calculate the effect they might produce, still less did he suspect that sensibility and goodness may, on certain occasions, be more fatal than anger and hate. There was a large share of nervousness in his emotion, and the words fell from his lips in the reaction after the morning’s fright as a groan follows a painful hurt, involuntarily and almost unconsciously. All there was in him of the child--and there was much--overflowed in this affectionate unburthening of his heart, and he neither desired nor could he foresee any further consequence, granting even that in moments like these it is possible to calculate effects.

“You, Suriña,” he repeated, yielding his hand to the hands that with almost convulsive force pressed his. “You care for me, and a great deal, too, do you not?”

Unable to respond in words, she nodded her head energetically.

“I knew it. I had guessed it; and that is the reason why I told you that no one would be left me but you and that I should cling to you; do you know that? Even if you had told me that it was not so, I should not have believed it. You care for me--and for mamma, too.”

“That I do,” said the girl at last, recovering her speech and withdrawing a little from the student. “I don’t know what it was that came over me in this house that made me take a--a kind of affection for it--a very, very great affection from the first moment I crossed its threshold. Why, it seemed to me as if I was at home again. As you are from there--But I think the more one tries to explain these things, the less one is able to do it. What I know is that if I had remained with those other ladies, it would have soon been all over with me.”

“And why, then, were you so sad at first here, Esclavita?”

“You shall hear. I thought you had taken a dislike to me.”

“I a dislike to you!”

“Yes, and thinking of that I became very melancholy. The _worm_ got into my head.”

“The _worm_?”

“That is what we say at home, when one gets a notion one can’t get rid of into one’s head. I would spend the whole blessed night trying to untangle the skein--What shall I do to make the Señorito lose his dislike for me? What means shall I take to please him? And the worst of it was--you may believe what I say, for it is as true as that God is in heaven--that heavy as my heart was, I did not feel as I did in the other house. No; from this house I would not have gone, not if I was to be cut in quarters--unless I was turned out of it.”

“Because you knew I liked you, Sura?”

“No, indeed I didn’t know it. I give you my word I thought you hated me. It made me so wretched that I wanted to die.”

“And I am ready to die with joy at hearing you, Suriña. You are not comfortable there, child. Put your head on this pillow. Here, let me pull it out to make room for you.”

Esclavita laid her head on the pillow without embarrassment or mistrust, and both remained silent for a while, absorbed in the happiness of the moment. The dim light of the lamp threw the girl’s features into relief, bestowing on the lights a pure pale tint, on the shadows a uniform grayish rose. Her head had the effect of a fine engraving, and Rogelio expressed his admiration by saying:

“Suriña, you are lovely.”

At this moment Doña Aurora sighed profoundly and both started, although their conversation could in no sense be called guilty. The nurse rose to go see what was the matter. She returned in a moment, saying:

“She sleeps like a saint.”

“Settle yourself comfortably again. I want to ask you something. Give me your hand. What put it into your head to care so much whether I liked you or not?”

“Ah, I don’t know. From the first day I said to myself, If they don’t want you here, Esclavita, it is because there is no room for you in the world. You came into it against the will of Our Lord. God has always looked on you with disfavor. Didn’t you know it, Señorito?”

“Yes, I knew it, Suriña. But it is dreadful to say that. Why should God look on you with disfavor?”

The girl half raised herself in her place, her eyes wide open, terrified at seeing that the fact which she was trying to bring herself to disclose was already known.

“Don’t be foolish,” murmured Rogelio, kindly. “What fault is it of yours, child? The same thing might have happened to me or to any one. We don’t choose our parents. Foolish girl!”

“If you knew how _that_ weighs on me here,” exclaimed the girl vehemently, opening her heart as one seeks to open one’s lungs to the air when one feels that one is going to faint. “I am always saying to myself, Esclavita, it is impossible that God should love you. You can never have any good fortune, never. Since the hour in which you were born you have been in the power of the Evil One, and he is not likely to let go what he has once got hold of. No matter how hard you may try to be an angel, you will be forever in mortal sin. You must be so; there is no remedy for it. For you there is neither father nor mother, nor anything but shame when you are asked about them. And in the same way all you undertake must go against you, and if you take a liking to any person, worse still; for God will take away that person’s affection from you.”

“Well, with me that is not going to happen, my white dove. I am as fond of you as if you were a king’s daughter. And mamma is very fond of you, too; don’t you know that she took a liking to you from the very first day?”

Esclavita, when she heard this assertion, raised her head and turned her eyes toward Señora de Pardiñas’s bed. Her glance and her smile were full of meaning, but Rogelio was in no mood to interpret them. He was not in a condition of mind for reasoning; he wanted to be gently soothed by the affection which he needed as a sedative and a medicine. Seeing that in Esclavita’s presence he no longer felt the same temptations as before, he thought that his affection for her had been purified, and that this anomalous courtship was the most innocent thing in the world. Or to say the whole truth; he was passing through an emotional crisis, and he neither weighed nor measured his words nor his affirmations. This was for him one of those moments in which we obey our natural impulses, our secret egotism, and abandon ourselves to the pleasure of feeling ourselves loved and of making ourselves still more dearly loved. It is as natural for one who is sad to seek consolation as it is for one who is hungry to seek food.

“Mamma is very fond of you,” he repeated. “You don’t seem to believe me. Silly girl! why, she herself scolded me because I treated you--well--a little coldly at first. She told me you were unhappy on that account.”

Esclavita lowered her eyes, doubtless lest they should betray her thoughts and forebodings regarding the future.

“See,” said Rogelio, softly, “if you knew how well I feel with you here beside me! I even think I am beginning to grow sleepy, and that I shall have no more bad dreams or such nonsense. I think I shall sleep as sound as a patriarch; but for that you must have the good nature to stay there at my feet. If you go away I shall waken up again.”

“I won’t go away!” the girl answered with decision. “Not with pincers would they be able to pull me away from here.”

“Well, then, I shall go to sleep. Ah, how pleasant!”

Tasting already the first sweet sip of that cup of oblivion which sleep, when it follows some great moral or physical shock, presents to our lips, Rogelio spoke once more:

“Suriña?”

“Well?”

“Do you care for me?”

He only half-heard her answer, and for this reason he was never quite certain that it was this--so romantic and unsuited to a country girl:

“Until the hour of my death.”

XV.

Notwithstanding her positive promise, when Rogelio opened his eyes after a peaceful and beneficial sleep, he saw Esclavita standing at his mother’s bedside, giving her a cup of broth. Señora de Pardiñas complained greatly of the contusion in the spine, but her headache was much better. Sanchez de Abrojo soon came and justified her complaints by saying that, judging by the symptoms, the contusion threatened to assume an erysipelatous character, for which reason, in order to avoid the pernicious effects of cold on the injured parts, it would be well to remain in bed. “And even if he had given me permission, I could not have got up,” Señora de Pardiñas said. “I feel as if I had been tossed in a blanket and been beaten with sand-bags afterward. There is not a bone in my body that does not ache. It is only now that I begin to feel the full effects of the bruise.”

Rogelio took his chocolate, seated at the foot of his mother’s bed, and showed little inclination to stir from there. But Doña Aurora soon observed this. “Oh, oh, child,” she cried, “Hurry off to college! You know very well that the professors, especially Ruiz del Monte, won’t excuse absences. The examinations will come afterward, and then you will be wondering why you didn’t pass.”

He must, then, shake off his laziness, go to his room, bathe his face with cold water, wrap himself well in his cloak and proceed to the confounded “_chocolate factory_,” as he called the University, for the reason that in no place is there more grinding going on. When he left the warm atmosphere of the house, his faculties brightened by his matutinal ablutions, and felt the cold of the early morning in his eyes and on his lips, it seemed to Rogelio as if a veil of fog had suddenly been rent apart and his recollections of the day before took clear and distinct shape in his mind. At this hour his sweetheart, the little girl with the superfluous tooth, would be leaning over the balcony to see, first the mounted artillerymen, and then himself pass by. Rogelio shook with laughter when he recalled this episode. “What a joke!” he said to himself. “What a way I took to find a sweetheart!” Then he remembered what had passed during the night. “I don’t know what came over me,” he thought. “Mamma’s fall dazed me. I said some stupendous things to Esclavita. That, indeed, was like a declaration of love, in earnest; yes, truly. And I felt it all, and if I had not tried hard to control myself, I should have cried. And she, too, was inclined to be sentimental. But looking at it calmly, nothing that we said to each other compromises either of us. They were words that slip from one--well--because at times--if I were required now to give an explanation of why I said them I could not do it. They came without my thinking. Perhaps this is _love_; as for the other, that was pure make-believe. Well, _this_ at least, if mamma were to find it out, would not vex her so much as what was near happening the other day. In what happened last night I don’t see anything bad.” And as he exchanged a salutation at the door of the University with the sleepy door-keeper, his thoughts took another direction, and he said to himself, “I shall make a nice show of myself if I am questioned on the lesson to-day.”

In the afternoon the house was full of friends who had heard of the accident and who had come to offer their services. There were two or three ladies who were allowed into the bed-room to chat with the patient, whose head was well now and who, consequently, was not disturbed by the noise. The _habitués_ of the house came as usual and remained in the dressing-room to accompany the “son of the victim,” as Rogelio laughingly called himself. They discussed the possible consequences of the fall; they devoted a good half hour to a consideration of what would have happened if the patient, instead of setting her heel down in _this_ way had set it down in _that_. Only Lain Calvo, the representative in that senile assemblage, at once of common sense and of malevolence, pretended deafness more than ever, confining himself to stirring the fire and looking over the pictures and caricatures in the illustrated periodicals. Two or three times he took his ear-trumpet from his pocket and made a pretense of cleaning it and putting it into his ear, but the plainest proof that he heard perfectly was, that under pretense of showing some illustration or other in _La Ilustracion Iberica_ to Rogelio, he leaned toward the student and said to him with a look that would better have become the face of a mischievous urchin than of a grave old man:

“When are those manikins going to stop their senseless chatter, boy? They are even more idiotic to-day than usual. What is the use of talking about what the possible consequence might be of something that might possibly have happened but that didn’t happen? It is like saying, ‘If she had fallen on her head instead of on her side it would have killed her.’”

Then another discussion arose--in relation also to the great event of the fall--as to whether it might not be well for some friend to stay and take care of the patient, as there were certain services which Rogelio, being a man and inexperienced in such matters besides, could not very well render her. But here Don Gaspar Febrero broke out, emphasizing his asseverations by striking the ferule of his crutch against the chimney-guard: