They went into the dining-room to take some tea. Sebastião related to Jorge, coloring faintly as he did so, how he had gone to his house, and how, as Juliana was telling him that she had been discharged, and talking and working herself into a passion, she suddenly fell upon the floor, dead! “Poor creature!” he ended.
Luiza, as he uttered this falsehood, gave him an adoring glance.
“And Joanna?” asked Jorge, suddenly.
“Ah, I forgot to tell you,” said Luiza, tranquilly; “she asked me for permission to go to Bellas to see her aunt, who is very ill. She said she would be back to-morrow. A little more tea, Sebastião.”
They forgot in the end to send Aunt Vicenta, and no one watched beside the dead woman.
CHAPTER XXIII.
THE LETTER.
LUIZA passed a feverish and uneasy night. In the morning Jorge was alarmed by the frequency of her pulse and the heat of her skin. He, too, owing to a feeling of nervousness, had spent a wakeful night. The room in which they slept had been shut up for a long time past, and was pervaded, in consequence, by a chill dampness; there were stains of mould on the wall near the ceiling; the antique bed, without curtains, with its pillars of bent-wood, and the old chest of drawers with its mirror of the last century, had an indefinable air of sadness, as though recalling lives long dead and gone. To find himself thus with his wife under a strange roof produced in his mind, without his knowing why, a vaguely superstitious feeling. It seemed to him as if a turning-point had come in his life, and that, like a river which changes its course, it would begin from this night forth to flow amid different surroundings. The northeast wind beat against the window-panes, and howled through the narrow street, seeking an outlet.
In the morning Luiza was unable to rise.
Julião, who was called in haste, allayed their fears, however.
“It is a slight nervous fever that will pass away with a little rest,” he said. “Last night’s fright, no doubt.”