-Xxi- · II

Saying this, he dropped on one knee upon the ground. Alarmed and blushing, Florentina ceased attending to her sewing.

“Cousin... for heaven’s sake!...” she murmured.

“Cousin... for heaven’s sake!” exclaimed Pablo with candid enthusiasm. “Why are you so beautiful?... My father is very reasonable... nothing can be urged against his logic or his goodness.... Florentina, I thought I could never love you; I thought it possible to love another more than you.... What folly! Thank God there is logic in my affections.... My father, to whom I confessed my errors, told me that I loved a monster.... Now I can say that I idolize an angel. The stupid blind man has seen at last, and at last pays homage to true beauty... but I tremble... do you not see me tremble? I am looking at you and desire nothing more than to take you and shut you up within my heart, embracing you and pressing you against my breast... tightly, very tightly.”

Pablo, who had placed both knees on the ground, embraced himself.

“I know not what I feel,” he added in confusion, his tongue thick, his face pale. “Every day I discover a new world, Florentina. I discovered that of light; today I discover another.... Is it possible that you, so beautiful, so divine, are for me? Cousin, my own cousin, wife of my soul!”

It seemed he was about to fall swooning to the floor. Florentina made a movement to rise. Pablo took one of her hands; then, drawing back the wide sleeve that covered it, kissed her arm with vehement ardour, counting the kisses.

“One, two, three, four.... I am dying!”

“Cease, cease,” said Florentina, rising to her feet and making her cousin rise after her. “Señor Doctor, scold him!”

Teodoro shouted:

“Quick... that bandage over your eyes, and to your room, young man!”

Confused, the youth turned his face toward that side. Directing his gaze in a straight line, he saw the doctor beside the straw sofa covered with blankets.

“Are you there, Señor Golfín?” he said, approaching in a straight line.

“Here I am,” replied Golfín gravely. “I believe you ought to put on the bandage and retire to your room. I will accompany you.”

“I feel perfectly well.... Nevertheless, I will obey... But first let me see this.”

He observed the blanket, and between the blankets a cadaverous head of very disagreeable appearance. In truth, it seemed that Nela’s nose had grown sharper, her eyes smaller, her mouth more insignificant, her skin more freckled, her hair sparser, her forehead narrower. With closed eyes, labored breath, and livid lips half open, the unhappy creature seemed to be in the last agony, that inevitable harbinger of death.

“Ah!” said Pablo. “My uncle told me that Florentina had taken in a poor girl.... What admirable kindness!... And you, poor girl, be glad: you have fallen into the hands of an angel.... Are you ill? In my house you shall lack nothing.... My cousin is the loveliest image of God.... This poor child is very ill, is she not, doctor?”

“Yes,” said Golfín; “it is best for her to be alone and hear no talking.”

“Then I will go.”

Pablo reached out a hand until he touched that head, which seemed to him the saddest expression of human misery and misfortune. Then Nela moved her eyes and fixed them upon her master. Pablo felt himself looked upon from the depth of a sepulchre, so great was the sadness and grief in that gaze. Then Nela drew from beneath the blankets a lean, sunburnt, rough hand and took that of the young gentleman of Penáguilas, who on feeling her touch shuddered from head to foot and uttered a cry in which his whole soul cried out.

There was an anguished pause, one of those pauses that precede catastrophes of the spirit, as if to render them more solemn.

With a trembling voice that produced a tragic emotion in all, Nela said:

“Yes, my young master, I am Nela.”

Slowly, as if moving a heavy weight, she brought the young master’s hand to her dry lips and pressed a kiss upon it... then a second kiss... and as she gave the third, her lips slipped lifelessly over the youth’s skin.

Afterward all fell silent. They stood silent, gazing at her. The first to break the silence was Pablo, who said:

“It is you... It is you!...”

Afterward many things occurred to him, but he could utter none. For that it would have been necessary to discover a new language, just as he had discovered two new worlds: that of light, and that of love for form. He did nothing but gaze, gaze, and recall that darksome world wherein he had lived, where his passions, his ideas, and his blind man’s errors remained lost amidst the mist.

Florentina drew near, shedding tears, to examine Nela’s face; and Golfín, observing her as a man and as a philosopher, pronounced these mournful words:

“He has killed her! Cursed be his sight!”

And then, looking at Pablo with severity, he said:

“Retire, sir.”

“To die... to die thus without any cause.... This cannot be,” exclaimed Florentina in anguish, laying her hand upon Nela’s brow. “María!... Marianela!”

She called her repeatedly, bending over her, looking at her as one looks and calls from the brim of a well to someone who has fallen into it and is sinking into the deep, black waters.

“She does not answer,” said Pablo in terror.

Golfín felt for that life so near extinction and observed that beneath his touch the blood still pulsed.

Pablo bent over her, pressed his lips to the dying girl’s ear, and cried:

“Nela, Nela, dearest friend!”

Then she stirred, opened her eyes, and moved her hands. It seemed she had returned from very far away. Seeing Pablo’s gaze fixed upon her with observing curiosity, she made a movement of shame and terror, and sought to hide her poor face as one hides a crime.

“What is the matter with her?” exclaimed Florentina passionately. “Don Teodoro, you are no man if you do not save her.... If you do not save her, you are a quack!”

The noble maiden seemed furious by dint of being charitable.

“Nela!” repeated Pablo, pierced with grief and not yet recovered from the astonishment the sight of his guide had caused him. “It seems you are afraid of me. What have I done to you?”

The sick girl then stretched out her hands, took Florentina’s and placed it upon her breast; then she took Pablo’s and placed it also upon her breast. Then she pressed them there, summoning a little strength. Her sunken eyes looked at them; but her gaze was distant—it came from far down below, from some deep and shadowy pit. One must say, as before, that she looked from the gloomy hollow of a well that grew deeper at every moment. Her breathing suddenly became very labored. She sighed several times, pressing the hands of the two youths more tightly to her breast.

Teodoro set the whole house in motion; he called and shouted; he had medicines and powerful revulsives brought, and sought to arrest the rapid sinking of that life.

“It is hard,” he exclaimed, “to stop a drop of water that glides, that glides, alas, down the slope and is already within two inches of the ocean; but I will try.”

He ordered everyone to leave. Florentina alone remained in the room. Ah! The powerful revulsives, the nerve stimulants biting into the swooning body to irritate life, made the unhappy sufferer’s muscles quiver; yet despite this she sank deeper at every moment.

“It is a cruelty,” said Teodoro in despair, casting aside the mustard and stimulants, “it is a cruelty what we are doing. We set hounds upon the dying creature so that the pain of the bites may make her live a little longer. Away with all of it!”

“Is there no remedy?”

“Such as God may ordain.”

“What malady is this?”

“Death,” he vociferated with a delirious agitation unbecoming a physician.

“But what malady has brought death?”

“Death.”

“I do not explain myself clearly. I mean to say, of what...”

“Of death! I know not whether to think she died of shame, of jealousy, of despair, of sorrow, of thwarted love. Singular pathology! No, we know nothing... we know only trivialities.”

“Oh, what doctors!”

“We know nothing. We know a little of the surface.”

“What is this?”

“It seems a fulminant meningitis.”

“And what is that?”

“Anything you please.... Death!”

“Is it possible for a person to die without known cause, almost without illness?... Señor Golfín, what is this?”

“Do I know, by chance?”

“Are you not a physician?”

“Of the eyes, not of passions.”

“Of passions!” she exclaimed, speaking to the dying girl. “And you, poor creature, what passions kill you?”

“Ask your future husband.”

Florentina remained absorbed, stupefied.

“Unhappy child!” she exclaimed with a choked sob. “Can grief of the soul kill in such a manner?”

“When I picked her up at the Trascava, she was already consumed by a dreadful fever.”

“Yet that is not enough—alas, not enough!”

“You say it is not enough. God and Nature say it is.”

“It seems as though she had received a stab.”

“Remember what these eyes, soon to close forever, saw a moment ago. Consider that a blind man loved her, and that this blind man is blind no longer, and has seen her... has seen her!... has seen her!, which is like a murder.”

“Oh, what a frightful mystery!”

“No, no mystery,” shouted Teodoro with a certain terror; “it is the hideous collapse of illusions, the rude blow of reality, of that relentless leveler which has interposed at last between those two noble beings. I brought that reality—I!”

“Oh, what a mystery!” repeated Florentina, who in her state of mind could not fully comprehend.

“No mystery, no,” Teodoro said again, more agitated at every moment; “it is pure reality, the sudden disappearance of a world of illusions. Reality has been new life to him; to her it has been grief and suffocation, humiliation, sorrow, slight, pain, jealousy... death!”

“And all for...”

“All for eyes that open to the light... to reality!... I cannot put this word out of my mind. It seems written upon my brain in letters of fire.”

“All for eyes.... But can grief kill so quickly?... almost without giving time to try a remedy!”

“I know not,” replied Teodoro, restless, confounded, terrified, contemplating that human book of dark characters in which scientific sight could not decipher the mysterious legend of death and life.

“He does not know!” said Florentina in despair. “Then what are you a physician for?”

“I know not, I know not, I know not,” exclaimed Teodoro, beating his shaggy head with his lion’s paw. “Yes, one thing I do know, and that is that we know only superficial phenomena. Señora, I am a carpenter of the eyes, nothing more.”

Then he fixed his gaze with deep attention upon that which wavered between human being and corpse, and in an accent of bitterness exclaimed:

“Soul! What is passing within you?”

Florentina burst into tears.

“Her soul,” she murmured, bowing her head upon her breast, “has flown already!”

“No,” said Teodoro, touching Nela. “There is still something here; but it is so little that her soul seems already gone, leaving only her sighs.”

“My God!...” exclaimed the maiden of Penáguilas, beginning a prayer.

“Oh, wretched spirit!” murmured Golfín. “Clearly it was very ill housed....”

The two observed her very closely.

“Her lips are moving,” cried Florentina.

“Speak.”

Yes, Nela’s lips moved. She had articulated one, two, three words.

“What did she say?”

“What did she say?”

Neither could understand. It was doubtless the language in which those understand one another who live the infinite life.

Afterward her lips moved no more. They remained parted, revealing the row of small white teeth. Teodoro bent down, and kissing Nela’s forehead, said in a firm voice:

“Woman, you have done well to leave this world.”

Florentina burst into tears, murmuring with a choked and trembling voice:

“I wished to make her happy, and she would not be happy.”