“Let me mount myself; I will go myself.”—And the excellent man rushed for the door, when the poor heart-broken Picador clung to his knees.
“No, no, don’t leave me. Send some one else”
“Take care, man, let me go”
Transom and I volunteered in a breath—“No, no, I will go myself,” continued Don Ricardo; “let go, man—God help me, the old creature is crazed,—el viejo no vale.”
“Here, here! help, Don Ricardo!” cried his wife.
Off started Transom for the doctor, and into the room rushed Don Picador and Campana, and, from the sounds in the sick-chamber, all seemed bustle and confusion; at length the former appeared to be endeavouring to lift the poor sufferer, so as to enable her to sit up in bed; in the meantime her coughing had gradually abated into a low suffocating convulsive gasp.
“So, so, Ii ft her up, man,’ we could hear Campana say; ‘lift her up quick—or she will be suffocated.”
At length, in a moment of great irritation, excited on the one hand by his intense interest in the poor suffering girl, and anger at the peevish, helpless Don Picador, Don Ricardo, to our unutterable surprise, rapped out, in gude broad Scotch, as he brushed away Senor Cangrejo from the bedside with a violence that spun him out of the door—“God—the auld doited deevil is as fusionless as a docken.”
My jaw dropped—I was thunderstruck—Bang’s eye met mine “Murder!” quoth Bang, so soon as his astonishment let him collect breath enough, “and here I have been for two whole days practising Spanish, to my great improvement no doubt, upon a Scotchman how Edified he must have been!”
“But the docken, man,” said I—“fusionless as a docken—how classic! what an exclamation to proceed from the mouth of a solemn Don!”