Then the music of the guitar continued the air with more vehemence and ardor than ever.
“It is I who will lighten thee with a torch of hell!” cried Rosa Mistica, in a sharp and angry voice. “Libertine! Profaner! Everlasting and insupportable singer!”
Ramon Perez, recovered from his first surprise, set off to run lighter than a buck, and without casting a single look behind.
This was the decisive coup. Marisalada was sent back to her room, in spite of the timid efforts at reconciliation tendered in her favor by Don Modesto.
“Señor,” replied Rosita to her guest, “charges are charges, and while this shameless girl is under my responsibility, I must render account of her actions to God and to men; each one has enough of his own sins, without charging himself or herself, in addition, with those of others. You view it otherwise, she is a creature who will never follow the good path. When she is pointed to the right, she turns always to the left.”
CHAPTER X.
STEIN had inhabited his peaceful retreat during three years. He had adopted the customs of the country in which he had found himself; he lived, day after day, or, in other terms, according to the counsels of his good hostess Maria, who said that the morrow should not so disquiet us as to lose the present day, and that we should occupy us with but one thing, viz., that to-day should not make us lose to-morrow.
During those three years, the young doctor had been in correspondence with his family. His parents had died while he was with the army of Navarre; his sister Charlotte was married to a farmer in easy circumstances, who had made of his wife’s two brothers cultivators—not much instructed, but handy and assiduous at their work. Stein, therefore, believed himself free and sole arbiter of his fate.
He devoted himself to the education of the young invalid, who owed her life to him, and although he cultivated a soil ungrateful and sterile, he succeeded, by patience, to ingraft on her mind the elements of a preliminary education. But what surpassed his expectations was the development of the musical faculties, really extraordinary, with which nature had endowed the fisherman’s daughter. Her voice was incomparable, and Stein, who was a good musician, could easily and surely direct her, as one trains the branches of the vine, which are at once flexible and vigorous, strong and elastic.
But the master had a heart soft and tender, and a craving for confidence which turned to blindness. He was devoted to his scholar, stimulated by the exalted love of the fisherman for his daughter, and by the admiration of the good Maria for Marisalada. Stein and his scholar possessed a certain powerful communicative sympathy, which could exercise its influence upon a soul frank and open, candid and good-humored as that of the young German. He then persuaded Pedro Santalo that his daughter was an angel, and Maria, that she was a prodigy. Stein was one of those men who could assist at a masked ball without convincing himself that under these absurd masks, under these caricatures of painted cardboard, there were other physiognomies and other faces—the work of nature, in one word. And if impassioned affection blinded Santalo, if extreme goodness of soul blinded Maria, both succeeded in putting a bandage over the eyes of the good doctor.