And, when the clearness has come from a Spanish, smuggled match, she says in a tone of caress infinitely sweet, as one talks to a very little child whom one adores:
“Oh, your mustache! The long mustache which has come to you, my son!—I do not recognize my Ramuntcho!—Bring your lamp here, bring it here so that I can look at you!—”
He also sees her better now, under the new light of that lamp, while she admires him lovingly. And he is more frightened still, because the cheeks of his mother are so hollow, her hair is so whitened; even the expression of her eyes is changed and almost extinguished; on her face appears the sinister and irremediable labor of time, of suffering and of death—
And, now, two tears, rapid and heavy, fall from the eyes of Franchita, which widen, become living again, made young by desperate revolt and hatred.
“Oh, that woman,” she says suddenly. “Oh, that Dolores!”
And her cry expresses and summarizes all her jealousy of thirty years' standing, all her merciless rancor against that enemy of her childhood who has succeeded at last in breaking the life of her son.
A silence between them. He is seated, with head bent, near the bed, holding the poor, feverish hand which his mother has extended to him. She, breathing more quickly, seems for a long while under the oppression of something which she hesitates to express:
“Tell me, my Ramuntcho!—I would like to ask you.—What do you intend to do, my son? What are your projects for the future?—”
“I do not know, mother.—I will think, I will see.—You ask—all at once.—We have time to talk of this, have we not?—To America, perhaps—”
“Oh, yes,” she says slowly, with the fear that was in her for days, “to America—I suspected it. Oh, that is what you will do.—I knew it, I knew it—”