At this moment Doña Aurora sighed profoundly and both started, although their conversation could in no sense be called guilty. The nurse rose to go see what was the matter. She returned in a moment, saying:
“She sleeps like a saint.”
“Settle yourself comfortably again. I want to ask you something. Give me your hand. What put it into your head to care so much whether I liked you or not?”
“Ah, I don’t know. From the first day I said to myself, If they don’t want you here, Esclavita, it is because there is no room for you in the world. You came into it against the will of Our Lord. God has always looked on you with disfavor. Didn’t you know it, Señorito?”
“Yes, I knew it, Suriña. But it is dreadful to say that. Why should God look on you with disfavor?”
The girl half raised herself in her place, her eyes wide open, terrified at seeing that the fact which she was trying to bring herself to disclose was already known.
“Don’t be foolish,” murmured Rogelio, kindly. “What fault is it of yours, child? The same thing might have happened to me or to any one. We don’t choose our parents. Foolish girl!”
“If you knew how that weighs on me here,” exclaimed the girl vehemently, opening her heart as one seeks to open one’s lungs to the air when one feels that one is going to faint. “I am always saying to myself, Esclavita, it is impossible that God should love you. You can never have any good fortune, never. Since the hour in which you were born you have been in the power of the Evil One, and he is not likely to let go what he has once got hold of. No matter how hard you may try to be an angel, you will be forever in mortal sin. You must be so; there is no remedy for it. For you there is neither father nor mother, nor anything but shame when you are asked about them. And in the same way all you undertake must go against you, and if you take a liking to any person, worse still; for God will take away that person’s affection from you.”
“Well, with me that is not going to happen, my white dove. I am as fond of you as if you were a king’s daughter. And mamma is very fond of you, too; don’t you know that she took a liking to you from the very first day?”
Esclavita, when she heard this assertion, raised her head and turned her eyes toward Señora de Pardiñas’s bed. Her glance and her smile were full of meaning, but Rogelio was in no mood to interpret them. He was not in a condition of mind for reasoning; he wanted to be gently soothed by the affection which he needed as a sedative and a medicine. Seeing that in Esclavita’s presence he no longer felt the same temptations as before, he thought that his affection for her had been purified, and that this anomalous courtship was the most innocent thing in the world. Or to say the whole truth; he was passing through an emotional crisis, and he neither weighed nor measured his words nor his affirmations. This was for him one of those moments in which we obey our natural impulses, our secret egotism, and abandon ourselves to the pleasure of feeling ourselves loved and of making ourselves still more dearly loved. It is as natural for one who is sad to seek consolation as it is for one who is hungry to seek food.