IN THE DOG-DAYS.
The season of exodus and dispersion had arrived. Madrid was swarming and bustling like an ant-hill, every one exhausted by the heat and eagerly seeking money. The price of gold went up as though war were impending, and transactions in small shares were as lively as though there were some real increase of business. Many a family drew the rope that the extravagances of the past winter had tied round its neck, yet a little tighter; while others, not owning even a rope to pull, consoled themselves by singing the praises of the Madrid Summer, and declaring the charms of its promenades and its beautiful nights to be far superior to the solitude and dulness of the country. A summer at Pinto or Getafe was as bad as a winter at El Escudo or Pajares!
The Tellerías were among the number of those who would not for worlds have stayed in town. They too were off in defiance of all the laws and logic of arithmetic and economy. The marquesa, however, stretched out the spring to its utmost span, saying that the heat was still very endurable and that in the north the weather was rainy and cold. Leon, having no motive for deferring his departure, but, on the contrary, every reason for hastening it, fixed it for the first week in July. But the day before they started an unexpected event upset every body’s plans. The sons of the marquis had long known that their brother, Luis Gonzaga, was out of health; Gustavo and Leon knew more indeed—they knew that he was suffering from a painful and lingering complaint, that scourge of the young, consumption, which frequently attacks a delicate constitution or one that has been undermined by dissipation or study. As the fathers of the seminary where the young man was living pronounced his malady to be only at its incipient stage, nothing had been said to his mother, with the idea that it would come quite soon enough to her knowledge when, in the course of the summer, she should go to see her son. But now, suddenly, like a bolt of wrath from Heaven, came a letter from the Principal, announcing that Luis Gonzaga’s disease had assumed an aggravated form and that “as the young man was anxious to see his family he would travel to Madrid next day by the express train.”
They were all startled and dismayed at the news and still more so when, on the following day, the poor lad appeared, so surely stamped with the marks of suffering that he looked like a spectre in a priest’s gown. Though his features were shrunk under the cold kiss of Death, they had a strong resemblance to the bright and lovely face of his sister. As has been said they were twins, and were as much alike as a man and woman can be, but that the girl, full of health and vigour, had always had the advantage in strength and beauty over her brother, who had been frail from infancy. Delicate and beardless, he had believed himself destined by Nature for the priesthood and had accepted his vocation to prayer and devotion. His eyes, which in form and colour were the very duplicates of María’s were set in dark circles; he had even in childhood always had the hectic flush of fever which had lurked in his veins as though it were part of his temperament, and now, when the end was drawing near, it was an internal fire, consuming his existence. The flowing black robe revealed every angle of his emaciated frame as he sat or walked; his voice was that of a man speaking in some deep, invisible airless pit, where the sound dies away in dull vibrations like the dropping of hidden waters.
Leaning back in an easy-chair, he responded to the warm and loving greetings of his family with short sentences, in which intensity of feeling made up for brevity of expression, pressing their hands and gazing at them with tender and hungry eyes. His mother, in utter despair, could not control her grief, though her lamentations always ended in schemes for giving her son change of air—pure, country air—the air of cowsheds, or for taking him to some health-giving waters. The first thing decided on was a medical consultation; the sick man smiled incredulously, but he offered no opposition; the long habit of obedience in which he had been so severely trained, gave him strength to endure to be tormented even in his suffering.
Leon had never yet seen him. When he came in the marquesa introduced them:
“Here,” she said, “is a brother you do not know.”
“Yes—I know him,” said Luis Gonzaga, placing his thin, damp, burning hand in Leon’s strong one, while he fixed on him a steady, piercing gaze for so long, that his mother, alarmed by his mute examination, added anxiously:
“You know how good he is?”