He said it to himself in order that he might make himself feel sorry, and break out into sobs of grief, but he remained mute.
Josephina was going to die—and he was calm. He wanted to weep; it seemed to him a duty. He blinked, swelling out his chest, holding his breath, trying to take in the whole meaning of his sorrow; but his eyes remained dry; his lungs breathed the air with pleasure; his thoughts, hard and refractory, did not shudder with any painful image. It was an exterior grief that found expression only in words, gestures and excited walking, his interior continued its old stolidness, as if the certainty of that death had congealed it in peaceful indifference.
The shame of his villainy tormented him. The same instinct that forces ascetics to submit themselves to mortal punishments for their imaginary sins dragged him with the power of remorse to the sick chamber. He would not leave the room; he would face her scornful silence; he would stay with her till the end, forgetting sleep and hunger. He felt that he must purify himself by some noble, generous sacrifice from this blindness of soul that now was terrifying.
Milita no longer spent the nights caring for her mother and would go home, somewhat to the discomfiture of her husband, who had been rather pleased at this unexpected return to a bachelor's life.
Renovales did not sleep. After midnight when Cotoner went away he walked in silence through the brilliantly lighted rooms; he prowled around the chamber—entered it to see Josephina in bed, sweating, shaken from time to time by a fit of coughing or in a deathlike lethargy, so thin and small that the bed-clothes hardly showed the childlike outline of her body. Then the master passed the rest of the night in an armchair, smoking, his eyes staring but his brain drowsy with sleep.
His thoughts were far away. There was no use in feeling ashamed of his cruelty; he seemed bewitched by a mysterious power that was superior to his remorse. He forgot the sick woman; he wondered what Concha was doing at that time; he saw her in fancy; he remembered her words, her caresses; he thought of their nights of abandon. And when, with a violent effort, he threw off these dreams, in expiation he would go to the door of the sick chamber and listen to her labored breathing, putting on a gloomy face, but unable to weep or feel the sadness he longed to feel.
After two months of illness, Josephina could no longer stay in bed. Her daughter would lift her out of it without any effort as if she were a feather, and she would sit in a chair,—small, insignificant, unrecognizable, her face so emaciated that its only features seemed to be the deep hollows of her eyes and her nose, sharp as the edge of a knife.
Cotoner could hardly keep back the tears when he saw her.
"There isn't anything left of her!" he would say as he went away. "No one would know her!"
Her harrowing cough scattered a deathly poison about her. White foam came to her lips where it seemed to harden in the corners. Her eyes grew larger, they took on a strange glow as if they saw through persons and things. Oh, those eyes! What a shudder of terror they awakened in Renovales!