"Perhaps you are not sorry to part with it?"
"I deserve that you should say so," answered Gonsalvo, with unwonted gentleness. "But the truth is," he added, with a wan, sickly smile, "nothing can part me from it now, for I have learned almost every word of it by heart."
"How could you, in so short a time, accomplish such a task?" asked Juan, in surprise.
"Easily enough. I was alone long hours of the day, when I could read; and in the silent, sleepless nights I could recall and repeat what I read during the day. But for that I should be in truth what they call me--mad."
"Then you love its words?"
"I fear them," cried Gonsalvo, with strange energy, flinging out his wasted arm over the counterpane. "They are words of life--words of fire. They are, to the Church's words, the priest's threatenings, the priest's pardons, what your limbs, throbbing with healthy vigorous life, are to mine--cold, dead, impotent; or what the living champion--steel from head to heel, the Toledo blade in his strong right hand--is to the painted San Cristofro on the Cathedral door. Because I dare to say so much, my father pretends to think me mad; lest, wrecked as I am in mind and body, I should still find one terrible consolation,--that of flinging the truth for once in the face of the scribes and Pharisees, and then suffering for it--like Don Carlos."
He was silent from exhaustion, and lay with closed eyes and deathlike countenance. After a long pause, he resumed, in a low, weak voice,--
"Some words are good--perhaps. There was San Pablo, who was a blasphemer, and injurious."
"Don Gonsalvo, my brother once said he would give his right hand that you shared his faith."
"Oh, did he?" A quick flush overspread the wan face. "But hark! a step on the stairs! My mother's."