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
[Illustration: “The girl ... turned her back quickly to her, pretending
to be looping up a curtain.”]
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.
But whether he were or were not on a level with his Pachita (and perhaps
the only superiority he possessed over her was his masculine acuteness
of intellect and his learning), it was certain that Don Nicanor seemed
at times a little ashamed of his better half. A concealed observer,
stationed at Doña Aurora’s door and noting first Señor de Rojas and then
Señor de Candás, each accompanied by his wife, as they entered the house
on the day in question, might, from this observation alone, have been
able to form a correct idea of the psychic natures of each of the
couples and of the moral atmosphere of their houses. Rojas offered his
arm to his wife as they were going upstairs, hurried forward to ring the
bell, and then stood aside courteously at the door to allow her to enter
first, afterward drawing aside the portière of the dining-room (where
the receptions were once more held). His manner of seating himself
beside her, of associating her with him in his inquiries for the health
of Rogelio’s mother, was full of the same consideration, the same
delicate feeling of reverential familiarity, if I may say so, and the
magistrate, in respecting his partner, showed that he respected himself.
Señor de Candás, on the contrary, entered with the same want of ceremony
as on the other days, and almost left his wife in the corner where he
left his umbrella. One might have thought that Pachita and her husband
were strangers to each other who had met by chance on the staircase. But
further: while Señor de Rojas, conversing with his wife in the same
deferential tone as with Doña Aurora, made no motion to go until Señora
de Rojas gave the customary signal, saying: “When you wish, Prudencio,
we will go home,” Señor de Candás, brusquely cutting short a harangue of
Pacha on the dearness and the rancidness of bacon in Madrid, said, with
the greatest rudeness:
“Eh, Pacha, hold your tongue and come on; it is time for us to go.”
Señor de Candás left the room first, doubtless to show the way to his
wife, who was floundering through the ceremonies of leave-taking, and
was just in time to surprise two persons who were whispering earnestly
together at the further end of the hall. No one could excel the sly
Asturian in the art of appearing not to see what was not meant for him
to see, but as for seeing, _carapuche_, he saw so much that long after
he had quitted the house a smile still played among the wrinkles of his
Voltairian countenance.
[Illustration: “Great news, Suriña! This summer we are to go home--all
of us.”]
What Rogelio was saying to the girl with so much eagerness was:
“Great news, Suriña! This summer we are to go home--all of us. Mamma has
promised me.”