Nela went at once. Her spirit had felt a shock as of a sudden gleam of great hope. She looked at herself in the quivering surface of the water, and her heart shrank within her.
"No difference," she muttered. "As ugly as ever; the same child's face with a woman's years and a woman's heart!"
But after washing herself she went through the same experience as before—a sort of agony of anticipation, and, in spite of her narrow vocabulary, Nela could classify these feelings as presentiments.
"Pablo and I," said she to herself, "have often talked of how we feel when something sad or something pleasant is going to happen. Pablo told me that just before an earthquake people have strange sensations; there is something in the air, and the beasts feel it too. Is there going to be an earthquake, I wonder?" And she knelt down and felt the ground with her hand.
"I cannot tell. But something is going to happen, and I cannot doubt that it will be something good.—The Virgin told me last night that to-day she would comfort me. What has come over me? The Heavenly Queen seems to be close to me. I cannot see her, but I feel her—before me—behind me...."
She went close by the machines for washing the ore towards the inclined plane, looking about her with eager eyes. There was nothing to be seen but the arms and wheels of iron, toiling with fiendish shrieks amid the hideous confusion of whirling cylinders, lashing the water to powder, as it seemed, and breathing out dust and smoke. Presently, when she had gone some little distance, she stopped; putting her hand to her forehead, and fixing her eyes on the ground in all the bewilderment of doubt: "The question is," said she to herself, "am I happy or am I sad?"
She looked up at the sky, half wondering to see it appear the same as on other days—and it was a lovely day—and then she walked on faster, to reach Aldeacorba as soon as possible. Instead of going through the gallery in the mines and up the wooden steps, she kept above the hollow way, along by the gutter that bordered the inclined tram-way, intending to get out into the fields, and walk straight on by the level road to the village. This way was much the prettiest, and she almost always chose it, for that reason. It went by lanes full of sweet and gay flowers, where crowds of bees and butterflies fluttered and sipped; there were thickets of bramble loaded with the black fruit beloved of children; clumps of cherry-trees overgrown with honeysuckles, and enormous ilex, tall, spreading, densely shady, and proud, it would seem, of their wide, black shadows.
Here Nela went more slowly, uneasy in herself, puzzled at her own sensations, and at the anxious excitement that stirred in her. Her rapid fancy presently hit upon a formula to express the state of her feelings, and remembering having heard it said of such and such a one, "the devil is in him," she said to herself: "The angels are in me, the Virgin Mary is with me this day. What I feel are the wings of her angels fluttering inside me. Thou art near me, Lady Mother, I see you and yet I do not see you—as we see with our eyes shut."
She shut her eyes, and then she opened them again. She had just passed a grove of trees and turned an angle of the road to go to a place where she knew of a bramble copse, the greenest, prettiest, and most fruitful in all the neighborhood. There were luxuriant ferns too, honeysuckle, wild vine, and other climbing plants, all clinging and tangled together in mutual dependence.
Nela heard a rustle in the brushwood close to her, and turning round she saw—Merciful Heaven! There, in a frame of greenery, stood the Immaculate Virgin herself—the face, the eyes, which in their gaze seemed to have all the calm beauty of the sky. Nela stood silent, petrified; with a feeling at once of devotion and terror. She could not stir, nor cry out, nor hardly breathe, nor take her eyes off this beatific vision.