Marianela 25
Nela did not answer.
"I saw you happy enough, and content with life to all appearance, only
a few days since. Why have you suddenly gone mad in a single night?"
"I want to go to my mother--" replied Nela, after hesitating a moment.
"I do not want to live any longer. Of what good am I in the world? Is
it not much better that I should die? And if God will not make me die,
I will kill myself, my own way."
"This notion that you are of no use is at the bottom of all your
miseries, poor little creature! Curses on him--or on them, for they are
many--who ever put it into your head. They are all equally responsible
for the neglect, the isolation, and the ignorance in which you lived.
You are of no use! God knows what you might have been if you had fallen
into other hands! A refined nature is yours, perhaps an exquisitely
superior one.--But good Heavens! If you put a harp into clumsy hands
what can they do with it but break it.--Because your fragile frame is
not strong enough to break stones and carry earth like those brutes in
human form Mariuca and Pepina, who shall say that you are of no use?
Were we all born to toil like mere animals? Are you to be forbidden to
have any intelligence, any feeling, any of the gifts of nature which
no one has ever cultivated in you? Nonsense! You are of some use; you
might be of great good if you only fell into hands that could mould you
and train you."
Nela, whose intuition gathered the purport of this speech, though the
words were beyond her, was deeply impressed. She kept her eyes fixed on
Teodoro Golfin's rugged, shrewd, and expressive countenance. Her heart
was full of astonishment and gratitude.
"Still there is a mystery about you," the dusky, leonine doctor went
on: "The most perfect opportunity was offered you to escape from your
miserable lot, and you refused it. Florentina, who is an angel if ever
there was one, was ready to adopt you as a friend and a sister; I never
knew an instance of greater kindness and generosity.--And what have you
done? Fled from her like a wild thing.--This is sheer ingratitude--or
some other feeling which I cannot at all comprehend."
"No, no, no," cried Nela, much distressed, "I am not ungrateful. I
adore Señorita Florentina; she seems to me not to be made of flesh and
blood like the rest of us; I do not deserve even to look upon her...."
"Well, my child, you may mean what you say; but from your behavior we
can only conclude that you are ungrateful--most ungrateful...."
"No, no," sobbed Nela. "I am not, indeed I am not ungrateful. I was
afraid--I knew--that you would all think me ungrateful, and that was
the only thing that troubled me when I was going to kill myself.--But I
am so stupid; I did not know how to ask pardon of the Señorita before I
ran away, nor how to explain it all."
"I will make your peace with Florentina; and even if you wish never to
see her again, I will undertake to tell her and convince her that you
were not ungrateful. Now, open your heart to me and tell me everything;
what makes you so miserable and desperate? However wretched a human
being may be--however great his misery and loneliness, he does not take
his own life unless he has some overpowering reason for hating it."
"No, Señor--so it seems to me."
"Then you hate your life?"
Nela was silent for a minute. Then, crossing her arms, she exclaimed
vehemently.
"No--no. I do not hate it; on the contrary, I want to find it!"
"A pretty way you were going to work to look for it!"
"I thought that when you were dead you would have everything you could
not get here. If not, why is death always, always calling us to come?
I have dreams, and when I dream I see all who are dead happy and at
peace."
"You believe in dreams?"
"Yes, Señor.--I look at the trees and the rocks that I have seen here
ever since I was born, and in their face...."
"Come, come--the trees and rocks have faces?"
"Yes--everything that is lovely can see and speak.--And they say to me:
'Come to us--die, and you will live quite happy.'"
"What a lamentable fancy!" Golfin muttered to himself. "A perfectly
pagan spirit!"
And he added aloud:
"But if you want to live, why did you not accept Florentina's offer? I
come back to the same question."
"Because--because--what the Señorita offered me was worse than death!"
cried Nela vehemently.
"How unjustly you think of her kind charity. There are, of course,
beings so wretched that they prefer a low and vagabond existence to
the dignity of a superior position. You are accustomed to a free life
in direct contact with nature, and you prefer this debased freedom to
the sweet affections of home life. Have you been so happy then in this
mode of life?"
"I was beginning to be happy...."
"And when did you cease to be happy?" After a long pause, Nela replied:
"When you came here."
"I--what harm have I done you?"
"None, none--nothing but the greatest good."
"I have given your master his sight," said Golfin, looking at Nela's
face with the narrow attention of a physiologist. "Do you not thank me
for that?"
"Much, Señor, very much," and she gazed up at him with eyes full of
tears.
Golfin watched her closely, so as not to miss the slightest change
of __EXPRESSION__ which might guide him to a comprehension of the girl's
feelings, as he went on:
"Your master told me that he loved you dearly, when he was blind; and
now that he can see, he constantly asks for Nela. He knows very well
that for him the whole outer world was filled by one person--Nela; and
the sight which has been mercifully bestowed on him is of no value to
him, unless he can use it to see Nela."
"To see Nela--but he never shall see Nela--Nela will never let him see
her!" she exclaimed excitedly.
"Why not?"
"Because she is so ugly.--He may have cared for María Canela when his
eyes were shut; but now that they are open and he can see the Señorita,
he can never, never care for a poor little dwarf."
"Who knows but...."
"It is impossible," she said positively.
"It is your fancy--you cannot tell whether your master will be pleased
with you or not till you try. I will take you to the house."
"I will not go--I cannot go!" she cried, starting to her feet and
standing in front of Teodoro, who was utterly astounded at the
determination of her gesture and the flash of her black eyes, which
both revealed her resolute nature.
"Be calm, be easy--come here," he said persuasively. "It is true that
you are not very pretty--but a sensible man does not think so much as
you fancy of mere outside beauty. You are too self-conscious, little
woman."
But Nela, paying no sort of heed to the doctor's moralities, and as
resolute in her attitude as she was in her opinion, gravely went on as
if pronouncing sentence:
"There ought to be nothing ugly in the world.--Nothing that is ugly
ought to be allowed to live."
"But, my child, if all we ugly people were to be obliged to take
ourselves out of the world, it would be left almost depopulated.
Poor, unhappy, little simpleton! But this notion of yours is not a
new one. Other persons had it before you, centuries ago; persons with
an imagination like yours--living, as you have lived, in the midst of
Nature, and lacking the light which your ignorance and loneliness have
deprived you of, and which they had not, because it had not then dawned
on the world.--But you must be cured of this delusion; you must reflect
that you have your portion of gifts more precious than beauty--gifts of
the mind, which neither fade with time, nor change with the caprices of
taste. Seek for them in your soul and you will find them. They will not
perish as beauty would which, seek it as you may in your looking-glass,
you will never find. But seek out these really good and precious
gifts; cultivate them, and when you see them thriving and blooming,
all this misery you are suffering will vanish--take my word for it.
And meanwhile you will soon rise superior to the wretched situation in
which you now are, and acquire a beauty which may not perhaps charm
the eye, but which will be a source of pride and happiness to yourself."
This wise advice was either not heard or not heeded by Nela; she sat
down again by Golfin and gazed fixedly in his face. Her small eyes,
more eloquent just then than the finest could have been, seemed to say:
"And what is the upshot of all these fine speeches, learned Sir?"
"Now you see," Golfin went on, warming to his subject, and giving it,
in spite of himself, the character of a psychological lecture--"there
is one important question, and that is...."
But Nela had guessed it, and covered her face with her hands.
"There is nothing strange in it--on the contrary, it is the most
natural thing that could happen to you. You have a sensitive
temperament and an excitable imagination. You and your master had led
a life together of free and poetic communion with nature, and of most
perfect and innocent intimacy. He is as wise and clever as a man can
be, and as handsome as a statue. His beauty, when blind even, seemed
formed to delight the eyes of those who could see. His kindness of
heart too, and generous spirit are enough to charm and win the love of
any woman. It is not strange that they should have captivated you--a
child so womanly--or a woman looking so like a child.--Do you love him
so much? More than anything else in the world?"
"Yes, yes--Señor," the girl sobbed out.
"And you cannot bear the idea of his ceasing to love you?"
"No--Señor."
"And he used to say loving words to you and make you promises?..."
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