Maria crossed herself perfunctorily and mumbled a few prayers. Doubtless the Señora was like all the English, a heretic, and therefore, according to the comfortable tenets of the Roman faith, eternally damned, but a little prayer would do no harm, and would be counted to herself as an act of charity.
That ceremony over, more mundane considerations engrossed her mind. She could smell the pungent odour of the olla podrida, or national stew, insinuating itself through the half-open door, and she knew that if she were not present at the meal, there would be more than one hungry mouth ready to devour her share.
She drew a breath of relief as she marched heavily downstairs to the more congenial surroundings of the kitchen. She had done her duty. Señor Poleski had not told her to stay in the room all the time he was away, and she could easily be back again before he came in.
Michael was the first to appear, almost aggressively sober, and carrying a small wooden box. His interest in his case was as much human as professional, and instead of wasting the afternoon, after his usual custom, loafing and drinking, he had gone, after one modest glass of the rough Val de Peñas, to search in out-of-the-way streets for a certain herbalist of repute.
This was an aged Spanish Jew, unclean and cadaverous, with patriarchal grey beard and piercing eyes, a man renowned for his marvellous cures among the peasantry.
He was regarded more or less as a wizard, though his wizardry consisted solely in a knowledge of natural remedies, and the exercise of a power which would have been described at the Paris Salpêtriére as hypnotic suggestion. By the aid of this he was able to inspire his patients with the faith so necessary to a successful treatment.
Michael was not fettered in any way by the ordinary conventions of a practitioner. He had neither drugs nor instruments of his own wherewith to effect a cure on ordinary lines, and what he had seen of herbalists in Spain had inspired him with a vast respect for the simplicity and success of their methods. The wooden box contained a quantity of leaves which, steeped in scalding water, and applied to the patient's throat, possessed the power of reducing the inflammation and drawing out the poison through the pores of the skin. Of their efficacy Michael entertained not the slightest doubt.
He walked straight to the bed, and glanced at Arithelli's throat, now almost covered with white patches of membrane. There was no time to waste if she was to be saved from the ghastliness of slow suffocation.
He went to the head of the stairs and yelled lustily for Maria, whom he commanded to produce boiling water immediately, thus further adding to the reputation of the mad English for haste and unreasonableness.
Then he took off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, and began busily to clear a space on the table, on which he emptied the contents of the box.