"Nothing."
And she accompanied this brief statement by turning over in the bed, disdainfully, with her back to the master.
The painter received these evidences of hostility with quiet resignation. It was his duty; perhaps she might die! But this possibility of death did not stir him; it left him cold and he was angry at himself, as if two distinct personalities existed within him. He reproached himself for his cruelty, his icy indifference before the invalid who now produced in him only a passing remorse.
One afternoon at the Alberca woman's house, after one of their daring meetings with which they defied the holy calm of the noble, who had now returned from his trip, the painter spoke timidly of his wife.
"I shall have to come less; don't be surprised. Josephina is very ill."
"Very?" asked Concha.
And in the flash of her glance, Renovales thought he saw something familiar, a blue gleam that had danced before him in the darkness of the night with infernal glow, troubling his conscience.
"No, maybe it isn't anything. I don't believe there is any danger."
He felt forced to lie. It consoled him to discount her illness. He felt that, by this voluntary deceit, he was relieving himself of the anxiety that goaded him. It was the lie of the man who justifies himself by pretending not to know the depth of the harm he has caused.
"It isn't anything," he said to his daughter, who, greatly alarmed at her mother's appearance, came to spend every night with her. "Just a cold. It will disappear as soon as good weather comes."