Part 8

“Why, she has the best nurse she could possibly have! Don’t be afraid but that our friend Doña Aurora will be well taken care of by the sympathetic Esclavita. You may be sure she will wait on her like a sister of charity. Don’t pity Doña Aurora; pity a poor fellow like me, rather, who will have no Esclavita at his pillow to close his dying eyes, when his last hour comes.”

The company here all protested, with the exception of Lain Calvo, whose attention seemed to be occupied in adjusting his trumpet in his ear.

“You, Don Gaspar, why, you will live to bury us all! Why you are only in the prime of life! You are as vigorous as a boy.”

Don Gaspar shook his head, but with an air of such Olympic serenity, with so animated an expression on his classical features that he seemed rather a demi-god of antiquity affirming his immortality than an old man of our restless age announcing the decline of his vital powers.

“The truth is,” interposed Lain Calvo, “that we are all like moldy parchment, ready to burn to dust at a touch, like the mummies of Peru. Is not that what you were saying, Don Gaspar?”

“He was saying,” screamed Rojas, “that he would like to have Esclavita, Doña Aurora’s maid, to nurse him when he is sick.”

“What an idea!” exclaimed the Asturian. “With a girl like that to take care of him, an old man would soon be in his grave, even if he were as strong as an oak, _caray_. Unless he were like King David.” And turning to Rogelio, he added. “What does the son of the house say to that? Would he be willing to give up the pretty girl to the old fellows? Wouldn’t he protest against it?”

Whether because of the manner in which the question was put to him, or because his conscience was not altogether tranquil, or finally because owing to his youth and inexperience he had not the self-possession demanded by the occasion, Rogelio turned crimson (which was the more noticeable in him, on account of his habitual pallor), and stammered:

“No--to Señor Febrero--I--I--” And in his own mind, he said “Hypocrite! You can’t hear, indeed. I verily believe you can hear the grass grow.”

The arrangements for the night were the same as on the previous night, only that, in order not to vitiate the air of the bed-room, Rogelio’s bed was placed in the dressing-room, the door between the two rooms being left open. It was long before the patient fell asleep; she complained of much pain, of a sensation of heat in the injured leg, and an unaccountable feeling of weariness. Rogelio, laying his hand on her forehead, noticed that it was hot, a fact which kept him from sleeping, without preventing him, however, from wondering a little if Esclavita would come to chat a while with him, a thing which he at once feared and desired. Debating this question in his mind, he at last fell asleep, and waking toward morning, he saw the girl approach his bedside. Leaning over him, she said quickly, “I can’t stir from there; she is continually asking for water. She complains of pains all over her body. It is all the effect of the fall.” Rogelio, greatly troubled, answered softly, “Very well, Suriña.” But this bad news prevented him from falling asleep again. Was there any danger? Was this the beginning of a fever? The doctor, who came at an early hour, relieved him from his apprehensions. “All this,” he said, “is the after-effect of the fall. The fever is slight. The inflammation we will soon have under control. Give me a piece of paper. You will see an improvement by evening.” In the evening, instead of the promised improvement, there was an increase in the fever, but at nightfall a change for the better took place, and at ten o’clock the patient ate with appetite the wing of a chicken. “Ah, God be praised!” she cried. “The pain in my bones seems better now. I felt such an oppression inside. Child, I think I shall soon be myself again.” This cheerful prognostication was followed by a period of freedom from pain, and toward midnight Doña Aurora was enjoying the profound and peaceful slumber of a convalescent.

“To-day she will come flying,” said Rogelio to himself, resolving to keep awake, and notwithstanding his sophistical arguments to prove _all that_ of no importance whatever, he felt his nerves thrill with excitement, and his heart throb tumultuously.

XVI.

She came on tiptoe with an air of gayety and animation that contrasted with her usual reserve of manner, and curled herself up on the floor like a pet kitten, at the foot of her master’s bed. The latter, however, did not dedicate his first words to her, but instinctively consecrated them to the real love of his life, the mother who had borne him; who was sleeping close by in the next room.

“Only think what happiness, Esclavita! Mamma is almost entirely well. I can scarcely believe it. She gave me a terrible fright. This morning when you told me how ill she felt, I could not go to sleep again.”

Esclavita gave the student a curiously penetrating and meaning glance, and then answered:

“I prayed earnestly to Our Lady of Slavery that the mistress might get better. I offered her a mass, besides. You see how the Virgin has listened to my prayers, Señorito.”

“Of course. You must have a great deal of influence with the saints.”

“Yes,” murmured the girl, “I have--to obtain what is against myself.”

“Against yourself!” exclaimed Rogelio, surprised and somewhat displeased. “And is it against yourself that my mother should get well?”

“That she should get well--no,” stammered Esclavita; “that she should get well, no, indeed; and I hope God will take me to himself before he takes her. But as soon as her illness is over our sitting up with her will be over. And when that is over, these pleasant times will be over.”

The explanation flattered Rogelio’s vanity, assuring him once more that he was loved, and not as a child is loved, but as a man is loved by a woman; in which consisted the whole charm of this singular intercourse, that not even to himself did he venture to call amorous. These words, that were rendered sweeter to him by the tremulous and regretful tones in which they were uttered, impelled Rogelio to put his arm around her head, and, drawing it toward him, he tenderly pressed it to his breast. Esclavita’s breath came and went so tumultuously that Rogelio said to her at last, affectionately:

“There, I will release you. I don’t want to hurt you or distress you.”

“Hurt me, no,” murmured the girl; “hurt me, no.”

Rogelio did not again attempt to caress her. It was not necessary that he should impose any restraint upon himself in order to treat Esclavita with respect here, almost at his mother’s bedside, or to refrain from these manifestations of affection, that were fraternal rather than lover-like; of whose real meaning and significance he himself was ignorant. He only permitted himself to pass his hand now and again over her loosely-flowing and luxuriant auburn hair. Esclavita’s hair looked softer than it really was, but it was certainly pleasant to pass his hand over the warm, wavy tresses.

“Don’t you want to sleep a little?” he said. “You have been sitting up for two nights, and you must be worn out. If mamma moves I will waken you. I will not sleep in any case.”

Esclavita refused. To sit up three nights! What was that? She had spent forty nights without taking off her clothes, when nursing the priest during his last illness, without other rest than such as was afforded her by leaning back in an old arm-chair and dozing for five minutes or so at a time. Do without rest for three nights! She could do without rest for three months if it were necessary.

“Well, if you don’t want to sleep, amuse me, then. Tell me something,” he said.

“Ah, Señorito, a good person you ask to tell you something! One who knows nothing herself.”

“Of course you know something, silly girl. Tell me something about our native place. I am dying to hear about it. When I left there I was only a child. I can scarcely remember it.”

Hearing him speak of her native land, Esclavita’s eyes glowed in the darkness like the eyes of a cat.

“Don’t you remember it at all, Señorito?” she asked.

“Well, I will tell you. Searching in my memory I fancy I can see a great many green fields and a rough sea, very green, too. But it is all very confused. Do you know what I can remember most distinctly? A sailor taking me in his arms to bathe me; I fancy I can see him now before me, as black as pitch and smelling of sardines.”

“And why don’t you go back there to see it all again?”

“This year it will go hard with me or I will persuade mamma to go. We will pass through Marineda and Compostela. We shall see the provinces of Pontevedra and Orense. We will feast upon oysters and lobsters. It must be like Paradise there. We will take you with us. You shall see.”

“Me?” said the girl, shaking her head. “Me? Ah, no; you will see that you will not take me.”

“Why not, silly girl?”

“When my heart tells me anything it always comes true, and my heart tells me that my eyes shall never see home again.”

“Be still, bird of ill omen! Let me get through with the worry of the examinations and you shall see. So it is a beautiful place, eh? Come, tell me all about it? What is it like? They say it is the loveliest province in all Spain.”

“Or in all the world; I have already told you so,” Esclavita answered, with profound conviction. “If you were to see the rivers of Pontevedra you would be struck dumb with admiration. If you were to see them casting the nets for sardines!”

“It must be delightful. You are already making me long to see it. And the pilgrimages with their drums and bagpipes, what do you say of them?”

“A festival like one of those,” declared the girl, very seriously, “is better than all the diversions of Madrid put together. There I was very gay and I danced every Sunday; here I feel as if my _paletilla_[A] had sunk in.”

[A] Paletilla: xiphisternum, metasternum, or ensiform cartilage.

“And what do you mean by that? Tell me.”

“It is a bone that we have here,” she answered, touching her breast, “that when it sinks in, it seems as if one’s soul sank, too; one keeps growing sadder and sadder, and one loses one’s color and appetite, so that after a while if one doesn’t get it raised again, one dies.”

“Do you believe that, child?”

“It is the truth. Some people say that all that about the _paletilla_ is the effect of witchcraft, but I have seen two or three die already because they wouldn’t have it raised.”

“Well, then, Suriña, sometimes it seems as if my _paletilla_, too, had fallen, for I have fits of the spleen and I lose my appetite completely. I have got the notion into my head that as soon as I go home I shall get strong and grow as fat as a pig--so,” and he puffed out his cheeks to show how fat he expected to become. “Here, I will always be as thin as a lath. The life here is not calculated to make one grow strong. Come, tell me something about home.”

Esclavita obeyed, and began to narrate, without order or descriptive skill, incidents connected with her own history rather than having any relation to the country. “When I was a child, such or such a thing took place--” “One afternoon when I went to see the sardine fishing--” “When I was learning to make lace with the bobbins--” “Once when we were baking the bread in our oven.” The very personality of these recollections lent them a singular charm in Rogelio’s eyes. While he listened to the girl’s words, it seemed as if the vanished memories of his childhood took definite and distinct shape in his mind. The room seemed to be filled with rural scents of mint, anise, new-mown hay. The illusion was so strong that he drew Esclava’s head toward him and smelled it. “Your hair smells like--like the fields,” he said. While the girl talked, his determination to go _home_ grew every moment stronger. “If I don’t go home,” he thought, “I shall never be a man. It is the first thing to be done. I am going to ask mamma to go when she is well. It is a wonder she has never gone there before to spend the summer instead of going to that ill-smelling, crowded San Sebastián. The moment I set foot in the old land I shall grow as strong as a young ox.”

“Ah, Señorito,” said Esclavita softly, “how ugly and arid all the country on the way coming here seemed to me! Not a solitary tree, not a streamlet, not a green bush. How can the farmers live here?”

“Better than there, foolish girl. This is the land that produces bread and wine.”

“Holy Mother! It seems impossible that people could live contented in that parched land. And then, never to see the sea! When you look at the sea, it seems the same as if you were looking at the grandeur of God. Isn’t it true that only God could create a thing so grand as the sea, and all that comes out of it? Those pretty little shells; so many, many kinds of fishes, the sardines, that are the maintenance of the poor.”

“You talk like a book, Esclavita. I am not surprised that your devoted Nuño Rasura----”

“Who?”

“Señor de Febrero, child.”

“The old man with the crutch?”

“Yes. Well, he says that you are a treasure. You must know that he is head over ears in love with you.”

“Nonsense. Don’t make sport of me.”

“I am in earnest. Why, he wants to take you to his own house. They say it will end by his offering you his lily-white hand and his lame foot. He has conceived for you an insensate passion which will carry him to the tomb in the flower of his youth, in the smiling age of illusion, before he has reached his eighty-sixth April.”

“Well, well! Poor man, he hasn’t even the use of his legs.”

“Hold your tongue, ungrateful girl; hypocrite, rather. You will gain nothing by concealing the profound impression which his curling locks have made upon you.”

“Yes, taken from some dead man’s head,” said the girl, smiling humorously.

“His pearly teeth and his slender form. But lay no plans, traitress, for I will not allow you to follow that Don Juan. If you should prove false to your duty, be prepared to die at my hands. I will tear your heart out if you betray me.”

He ran his hand through her tresses caressingly, and murmured softly:

“Suriña will not go with the old man. Suriña belongs to me. Who wanted to steal her from me? Let them prepare to defend themselves; let them prepare to defend themselves. Suriña is mine!”

XVII.

On the following day Doña Aurora was so much better that she was able to sit up for a couple of hours, and when night came she refused to consent to Rogelio’s sleeping in her room. “It does not suit me,” she said. “You don’t sleep comfortably; you lie awake for a long time; you toss about; you chat with Esclavita. Last night I could hear you between sleeping and waking, and then you get up in the morning looking pale and miserable; and you have no appetite.” When Señora de Pardiñas was saying this the girl, who had been going about the room putting things in order, turned her back quickly to her, pretending to be looping up a curtain which had become unfastened, an operation which

engaged her attention for some time. The student fixed his eyes with alarm on his mother’s countenance; but that dear face, so little schooled in dissimulation, and so familiar to him in its every line, reflected no other thought than that to which her lips had given utterance, and the student, breathing freely once more, acceded to her wish that he should sleep that night in his own room. His mother was not without reason in saying that he needed sleep. At the most important stage of his development, his health not yet fully established after a childhood, if not precisely sickly, at least weakly, his delicate organization was easily disturbed, and the three nights of wakefulness he had spent had begun to tell upon him.

When he was in his own room, however, he felt sad and solitary. Accustomed to be surrounded by tenderness and indulgent care--wrapped in cotton, as it were--he was avid of affection, and two days had sufficed to habituate him to those tender and novel conversations, carried on at an unusual hour with a woman who offered him so large a measure of affection and loyalty that not even his own mother, seemingly, lavished love upon him more profusely. If Rogelio had been able to analyze his sentiments he would have found that a great part of the charm of his intercourse with Esclavita consisted in the fact that in it he was the one who commanded, while the woman of twenty-five, who at first had treated him like a stripling, a _boy_, was now all obedience, submissive as a very _slave_. No matter how loving and tender his mother might be, Rogelio was always conscious of his subjection to her; the habit of respecting and obeying her had become rooted in his nature, keeping him in a state of perpetual childhood. In his intercourse with the girl, on the contrary, he could gratify at once his youthful vanity and his vague and secret longing to assume the virile toga, the symbol of human dignity.

For this reason the interruption in those pleasant nocturnal chats vexed him greatly. He was on the point of stealing into his mother’s dressing-room on tiptoe at about one o’clock to bring back a smile to Suriña’s countenance that had grown a mile long. But what if his mother should surprise them? She would think all sorts of evil things; it would be a dreadful affliction to her; she might have a relapse; perhaps she would dismiss Esclavita. The instinct of cautiousness, which in moments of passion springs up in the soul to moderate the fever that urges to rash resolutions and wild extremes, counseled him to observe prudence; and on the following day, when he saw Esclavita’s face looking pale and haggard, he drew her into a corner of the hall and said to her, between jest and earnest, “Suriña, don’t wear that look of misery. Last night I thought a great deal about you and about our chats together. I longed to go to you, but I did not dare to do so. We must be careful for poor mamma’s sake. Come, Esclava, smile on your lord!”

This glimpse of happiness sufficed to bring back the color to the girl’s cheeks, and even to restore to her, apparently, cheerfulness and serenity.

Rogelio had consented to sleep in his own room, partly through prudence, partly through filial respect. “Only let mamma get quite well,” he thought, “let her be herself again; that is the first thing. Until she is strong and well, let Esclavita nurse her, that is all. But mamma is much better now, and will soon be convalescent; in eight or ten days more there will not be a trace of the injury left. Then we shall have time enough for all the chats we desire. Mamma will go out, or she will be occupied with her visitors, and--we shall have all the liberty we want. I must tell Sura this to make her completely happy.”

He watched for a favorable opportunity to communicate these agreeable plans to her. Kept a prisoner in the patient’s room during these days, Esclavita did not enter that of the student; it was necessary to take the hall as the center of operations, and Rogelio resolved to wait there for her in the afternoon, as the morning slipped away between breakfast and college. At about four o’clock, the coming and going of Doña Aurora’s daily visitors introduced a certain animation and disorder into the house which were favorable to Rogelio’s plans. And on these days there were many visitors, for Señora de Pardiñas’s illness not being of a nature to exact quietude, imposed upon her friends the duty of keeping her company. Not only the gentlemen came, but also the feminine contingent, composed almost entirely of mothers of families of moderate means, who, lacking Doña Aurora’s wealth, could indulge only occasionally in the luxury of visiting, and then not without much previous preparation so as to present themselves in public with the respectability demanded by their station as the wives of magistrates. On the afternoon in question two ladies came who allowed themselves to be seen but seldom: the wife of the President of the Court, Don Prudencio Rojas, and the wife of the ex-Crown Solicitor, Don Nicanor Candás, nicknamed Lain Calvo. If a painter, had desired to symbolize Dignity clad in the garb of modesty he need only have copied faithfully the costume and the features of Señora de Rojas. For one whose sentiments had not been perverted or distorted and whose sensibilities had not been blunted, there was something in the appearance of this simply dressed woman, socially insignificant, which would impel him irresistibly to uncover the head and bend the knee before her. Her worn black velvet wrap, scrupulously brushed, carefully altered to meet the fashion of the day at the cost of a week’s labor, perhaps; her bonnet, the lace on which betrayed by its gloss its home making-up; her new two-button gloves of a dark and serviceable color, bought for the occasion; her old-fashioned earrings, each a cluster of minute brilliants; her white hair, worn smooth over the temples with the supreme decorum of a widowed queen who has renounced the aspiration to please, revealed more courage, more endurance, more secret heroism than any beggar’s rags, any invalid’s uniform, any nun’s sackcloth. The living commentary and perhaps the best explanation of the strict integrity of the husband was the aureole of domestic patience and of serene acceptance of daily sacrifice which surrounded the brow of the wife. The severity and inflexibility of Rojas in his manner of interpreting and administering the law were softened by the sweetness of his wife, whom ancient Rome would have chosen as a priestess of domestic piety. This matron had never asked, even in her own mind, why her life, for thirty years or more, should be one continued act of self-abnegation. She knew, and this sufficed, that in her house the stern image of duty was worshiped side by side with the gilded statue of decorum, and without a protest she had consecrated herself to the worship of both deities.

There could not be a greater contrast than that which existed between Señora de Rojas and Señora de Candás. As in the magistracy great importance is attached to family antecedents, doubtless his marriage to so vulgar a woman, who, according to report, had been the landlady of an inn at Gijón, had had much to do with certain clouds that at one time had rested on the reputation of the Crown Solicitor, and had caused his colleagues, irritated at being obliged to associate with her, to regard him with a disfavor which was heightened by the incorrigible mordacity, the mocking cynicism, and the intermittent deafness of the Asturian. Señora de Candás, a stout woman with a wen on the left eye-lid, who was very showy in her dress, always wearing gowns full of furbelows, and bonnets looking like sentry-boxes or preserving kettles, who spoke partly in Spanish, partly in the Asturian dialect, calling her husband _this one_, and describing in mixed company ailments which, with more propriety, might have been allowed to remain buried in oblivion--was a perfect type of incurable and ingrained vulgarity; a vulgarity which was proof against example, against the atmosphere of the court, against ridicule, and against the influence of time, which smoothes and polishes, as the waves smooth and polish the roughest stone. If Don Nicanor had ever made the effort to civilize his wife, he had certainly long since given up the task; and besides, his colleagues affirmed that to polish Pachita it would be necessary for Don Nicanor to begin by polishing himself, and abjuring the roughness of his speech, the harshness of his manners, and the bad taste of his opinions; for even the opinions of the Crown Solicitor were in bad taste, or at least seemed to be so from his manner of expressing them.