“I?” stammered the girl, whose hand trembled in the student’s clasp.
“Yes, you; and no one but you. Relations I have none—that is to say, I have several aunts at home in Galicia, with whom we are on cat-and-dog terms. You see what a protection they would be, child. As for friends—well, two or three in the University over there—college friends, that are of little account. Then the old men who come to see mamma. Of much use they would be; they are all in their dotage. It is as I say, Suriña. I should have only you.”
“Rogelio had raised himself on his elbow.”
Rogelio had raised himself on his elbow as he spoke, in order to make himself heard by the girl without disturbing his mother, and this lowering of his voice made his words more persuasive, bestowing on them the passionate and mysterious air of a confession. Persuaded himself, he persuaded his hearer. He was not in a frame of mind to measure the importance of his words or to calculate the effect they might produce, still less did he suspect that sensibility and goodness may, on certain occasions, be more fatal than anger and hate. There was a large share of nervousness in his emotion, and the words fell from his lips in the reaction after the morning’s fright as a groan follows a painful hurt, involuntarily and almost unconsciously. All there was in him of the child—and there was much—overflowed in this affectionate unburthening of his heart, and he neither desired nor could he foresee any further consequence, granting even that in moments like these it is possible to calculate effects.
“You, Suriña,” he repeated, yielding his hand to the hands that with almost convulsive force pressed his. “You care for me, and a great deal, too, do you not?”
Unable to respond in words, she nodded her head energetically.
“I knew it. I had guessed it; and that is the reason why I told you that no one would be left me but you and that I should cling to you; do you know that? Even if you had told me that it was not so, I should not have believed it. You care for me—and for mamma, too.”
“That I do,” said the girl at last, recovering her speech and withdrawing a little from the student. “I don’t know what it was that came over me in this house that made me take a—a kind of affection for it—a very, very great affection from the first moment I crossed its threshold. Why, it seemed to me as if I was at home again. As you are from there—But I think the more one tries to explain these things, the less one is able to do it. What I know is that if I had remained with those other ladies, it would have soon been all over with me.”
“And why, then, were you so sad at first here, Esclavita?”