Minguitos turned round and walked in silence toward the door. As her eyes fell on the protuberance of his back, a sharp pang pierced the heart of the schoolmistress. How many tears that hump had cost her in other days. She raised herself on her elbow.
"Minguitos!" she called.
"What is it, mamma?"
"Don't go away. How do you feel to-day? Have you any pain?"
"I feel pretty well, mamma. Only my chest hurts me."
"Let me see; come here."
Leocadia sat up in the bed and, taking the child's head between her hands, looked at him with a mother's hungry look. Minguitos' face was long and of a melancholy cast; the prominent lower jaw was in keeping with the twisted and misshapen body that reminded one of a building shaken out of shape by an earthquake or a tree twisted by a hurricane. Minguitos' deformity was not congenital. He had always been sickly, indeed, and it had always been remarked that his head seemed too heavy for his body, and that his legs seemed too frail to support him. Leocadia recalled one by one the incidents of his childhood. At five years old the boy had met with an accident—a fall down the stairs; from that day he lost all his liveliness; he walked little and never ran. He contracted a habit of sitting Turkish fashion, playing marbles for hours at a time. If he rose his legs soon warned him to sit down again. When he stood, his movements were vacillating and awkward. When he was quiet he felt no pain, but when he turned any part of his body, he experienced slight pains in the spinal column. The trouble increased with time; the boy complained of a feeling as if an iron band were compressing his chest. Then his mother, now thoroughly alarmed, consulted a famous physician, the best in Orense. He prescribed frictions with iodine, large doses of phosphates of lime, and sea-bathing. Leocadia hastened with the boy to a little sea-port. After taking two or three baths, the trouble increased; he could not bend his body; his spinal column was rigid and it was only when he was in a horizontal position that he felt any relief from his now severe pains. Sores appeared on his skin, and one morning when Leocadia begged him with tears to straighten himself, and tried to lift him up by the arms, he uttered a horrible cry.
"I am broken in two, mamma—I am broken in two," he repeated with anguish, while his mother, with trembling fingers sought to find what had caused his cry.
It was true! The backbone had bent outward, forming an angle on a level with his shoulderblades, the softened vertebræ had sunk and cifosis, the hump, the indelible mark of irremediable calamity, was to deform henceforth this child who was dearer to her than her life. The schoolmistress had had a moment of animal and sublime anguish, the anguish of the wild beast that sees its young mutilated. She had uttered shriek after shriek, cursing the doctor, cursing herself, tearing her hair and digging her nails into her flesh. Afterward tears had come and she had showered kisses, delirious, but soothing and sweet, on the boy, and her grief took a resigned form. During nine years Leocadia had had no other thought than to watch over her little cripple by night and by day, sheltering him in her love, amusing with ingenious inventions the idle hours of his sedentary childhood. A thousand incidents of this time recurred to Leocadia's memory. The boy suffered from obstinate dyspnœa, due to the pressure of the sunken vertebræ on the respiratory organs, and his mother would get up in the middle of the night and go in her bare feet to listen to his breathing and to raise his pillows. As these recollections came to her mind Leocadia felt her heart melt and something stir within her like the remains of a great love, the warm ashes of an immense fire, and she experienced the unconscious reaction of maternity, the irresistible impulse which makes a mother see in her grown-up son only the infant she has nursed and protected, to whom she would have given her blood, if it had been necessary, instead of milk. And uttering a cry of love, pressing her feverish lips passionately to the pallid temples of the hunchback, she said, falling back naturally into the caressing expressions of the dialect:
"Malpocadiño. Who loves you? say, who loves you dearly? Who?"