Nieves looked at herself in the glass and saw that she was pale. She washed her teeth, and after satisfying herself by a rapid glance that her husband was resting in the other room, she stole softly into the parlor. She was trembling. This atmosphere of storm and danger, grateful to the sea-fowl, was fatal to the domestic bird. It was no life to be always shuddering with fear, her blood curdled by fright. It was not to live. It was not to breathe. She would end by becoming crazy. Had she not fancied just now that she heard steps behind her, as if someone were following her? Two or three times she had stopped and leaned, fainting, against the wall of the corridor, vowing in her own mind that she would never put herself in such a dilemma again.
When she reached the parlor she stopped, half startled. It was so silent and drowsy in the semi-obscurity, with the half-closed shutters through which entered a single sunbeam full of dancing golden motes, with its sleepy mirrors that were too lazy to reflect anything from their turbid surfaces, its drowsy asthmatic clock, whose face looked like a human countenance watching her and coughing disapprovingly. Suddenly she heard quick, youthful foot-steps and Segundo, audacious, impassioned, threw himself at her feet and clasped his arms around her. She tried to restrain him, to advise him, to explain to him. The poet refused to heed her, he continued pouring forth exclamations of gratitude and love and then, rising to his feet, he drew her toward him with the irresistible force of a passion which does not stop to consider consequences.
When Don Victoriano saw the child enter his room, white as wax, livid, almost, darting fire from her eyes, in one of those horror-inspired attitudes which can neither be feigned nor imitated, he sprang from the bed where he had been lying awake smoking a cigar. The child said to him, in a choking voice:
"Come, papa! come, papa!"
What were the thoughts that passed through her father's mind? It was never known why he followed his daughter without putting to her a single question. On the threshold of the parlor father and child paused. Nieves uttered a shrill scream and Segundo, with an impassioned and manly gesture, placed himself before her to shield her with his body. An unnecessary defense. In the figure of the man standing on the threshold there was nothing of menace; what there was in it to inspire terror was precisely its air of stupor and helplessness; it seemed a corpse, a specter overwhelmed with impotent despair—the face, green rather than sallow, the eyes opened, dull and fixed, the hands and feet trembling. The man was making fruitless efforts to speak; paralysis had begun with the tongue; he tried in vain to move it in his mouth, to form sounds. Horrible conflict! The words struggled for utterance but remained unuttered; his face changed from livid to red, the blood becoming congested in it, and the child, clasping her father around the waist, seeing this combat between the spirit and the body, cried:
"Help! help! Papa is dying!"
Nieves, not daring to approach her husband, but comprehending that something very serious was the matter, screamed too for help. And at the various doors appeared one after another Primo Genday and Tropiezo in their shirt-sleeves, and Mendez with a cotton handkerchief tied over his ears.
Segundo stood silent in the middle of the room, uncertain what course to pursue. To leave the room would be cowardly, to remain——Tropiezo shook him.
"Go, flying, to Vilamorta, boy!" he said. "Tell Doroteo, the cabman, to go to Orense and bring back a doctor with him—the best he can find. I don't want to make a trip this time," he added with a wink. "Run, hurry off!"
The Swan approached Nieves, who had thrown herself on the sofa and was weeping, her face covered with her dainty handkerchief.