“Then swear to me, that only in honest wedlock will you ever belong to another man!”
And Clothilde swore; and now, before that portrait and that scene as it rose in her memory, she felt herself criminal, very criminal, lost, and unhappy. She did not leave the bureau; she could see the road, obscure in the night; she could see the little inn; some muleteers, the tavernkeeper, who spoke of robbers, ghosts, crops, and horses; she could see Alberto and now she dared not raise her eyes to look at his face in the plain frame. Turning her back to it, she lay down in the bed, buried her head among the pillows, and closed her eyes; but instead of conciliating sleep, there presented themselves before her, pictures of her brief domestic life with Alberto; and, worst of all, amid these pictures, the figure of Julio, of Julio supplicating and ill, of Julio wearied and weighed down with cares, was not hateful to her.
“Here is the fortnight’s pay, do me the favor of handling it.”
In the handling the cashier came out bankrupt, but could never make up her mind to tell Julio that to meet necessities she was forced to take in sewing, at night, while others slept and her loneliness was emphasized. The little Julio kept her company, studying his lessons or reading aloud one of those continued stories, which delight women and children by the complexity of their plot and by the happy exit, which ever favors virtue. Sometimes, the romantic history contrasted with her own, so mean and prosaic, and a tear or two, unnoticed by the reader absorbed in the story, fell upon the white stuff of the sewing and expanded in it as in a proper handkerchief. But if Julito learned of the tears, he stopped his reading and kneeling before his mother dried them, more by the loving words with which he overwhelmed her, than with his coarse schoolboy’s kerchief.
“Come, foolish mama; why are you crying? Don’t you know it isn’t true? The whole book is made up.”
He never added that he knew well that she was not weeping for the characters of the story, but for the neglect of her husband; but, as her husband was also his father, he employed this pretext in order not to condemn Julio, openly and aloud, to Carmen. Thus, there happened, what was to be expected, that between Carmen and Julito there grew up love in one of its sublimest forms, the love of mother and son, with open caresses, but caresses the most pure, with no touch of sin; and ideal love which illumines our spirit and assures us that we would have loved our mother so, had we not lost her too early.
Julito’s fifteen years spent in tenements and public schools, had acquired for him an undesirable stock of had habits, of which perhaps the least was smoking, inveterate, demanding his withdrawal at the end of each chapter, to the corridor to smoke a cigarette in the open air. One night Carmen, who knew not how to show him the extreme affection, which by his treatment of her he had gained, said, unexpectedly: “If you wish to smoke, you may do it before me.” And the boy, who, on the streets, at school, and in the neighborhood, was a positive terror, could not smoke near Carmen, look you! He could not; he loved her too much to be willing to puff smoke from mouth and nostrils in her presence. He did not smoke secretly, but as before, in the corridor, after each chapter.
How sadly beautiful was the sight of these two in the dismantled dining room of their miserable tenement! The immense house, the squalid quarter, so noisy and turbulent during the day, presented the silence of the tomb in the late hours of the night. Carmen and Julito, separated by a corner of the table with its tattered cover of oil-cloth, and a tallow dip, which needed snuffing every little while; Julito greatly interested in his reading and Carmen, sewing at her fastest, contemplating, with infinite love the black and curly head of her son, when she stopped a moment to thread her needle. Now and again, the coughing of the other children came to them from the adjoining room, and Julito exclaimed: “Listen to my brothers.”
“Yes, I hear them; poor little things.”