The boy, who was impatient to be mounted on the ass, asked his father why people must be still when the bell rung for prayer.
"Don't you remember," said his sister Angela, "what Aunt Elvira tells us, that when it strikes this hour dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, our guardian angels stand still, and if we go on then, we shall be alone--without them?"
"That is true, sister," answered the boy, giving, with all his little might, a blow to the ass upon which his father had placed him, a blow of which, fortunately, the patient creature took not the least notice.
Six years had passed since the occurrence of the sorrowful events we have related. To make the remembrance of them still more sorrowful, the unhappy Marcela, who witnessed from her hiding-place the insult to her [{661}] father, the terrible vengeance taken by her brother, and the flight of the latter, had gone mad.
No tidings of Ventura had ever been received, and all believed that he was dead. Notwithstanding, in their tenderness for Elvira and their friendship for Pedro, the others spoke to them in the words of a hope which did not exist in their own hearts.
Time, the great dissolvent, in which joys and griefs alike are lost--as in water disappear both the sugar and the salt--had made those memories, if not less bitter, at least more endurable. Only from Pedro's lips, instead of his lively songs and habitual jokes, was often heard, "My poor son! my poor daughter!"
Elvira, alone, was excepted from this influence of time. She was wasting in silence, like those light clouds in the sky, which, instead of falling to the earth in noisy torrents, rise softly and gradually until they are lost from sight. She never complained, nor did the name of Ventura, of him upon whom she had looked as the companion the church would give her, pass her lips.
"A worm is gnawing at her heart," said Anna to her son; "the rest do not see it, but it is not hidden from me."
"But, mother," he answered, "where do you see it? She complains perhaps?"
"No, my son, no: but, Perico, a mother hears the voice of the dumb daughter," replied Anna with sadness.