“Get up; go and see if you can find Señor Duhamel and bring him at once. Pilar is very ill.”
“Of course the crazy creature is ill. Why, she danced last night as if she were out of her senses! She was well-employed!”
Lucía looked at her husband in astonishment.
“Go at once,” she said, “go at once! She has had a chill--she complains of a pain in her side, and she has almost lost her voice.”
“I don’t know what her brother is here for,” he muttered, drawing on his boots. “He might very well go.”
“Tell him so, you, if you wish,” said Lucía, her eyes swimming in tears. “I cannot go into Gonzalvo’s room to waken him. In any case you were going to rise now to drink the waters.”
“It would be time enough for that in three quarters of an hour. One would suppose that girl was the only person here whose health is of any consequence. Other people, too, are sick and have to take care of themselves. To-day, precisely, I am feeling wretched.”
Lucía had been in the habit of manifesting a deep interest in Miranda’s health, asking him every day those minute particulars which mothers are wont to ask their children--and which bore the indifferent; but on this occasion she turned her back on him and went to the kitchen where she asked the wife of the _concierge_ for a cup of lime-leaf tea and carried it herself to Pilar.
Duhamel frowned when he saw the patient. What most displeased him was to learn that she had taken two or three iced drinks at the ball. Duhamel was a little old man with skin like parchment, in whose bright and searching eyes all the vitality of his body seemed to have concentrated itself. His hair and eyebrows were gray, but of his teeth, which were long and yellow as ivory, and which he showed when he smiled, which was often, not one was wanting.
In his movements he was quick and gliding as an eel. Having at one time gone to Brazil on a scientific expedition, he possessed a smattering of Brazilian Portuguese, which he persisted in trying to pass off for Spanish.
“Let the whole treatment, _ó tratamento_, be stopped,” he said, addressing himself exclusively to Lucía, although the sick girl’s brother was present, guided doubtless by that infallible instinct possessed by the physician and which enables him to distinguish at once the person most interested in his instructions and most capable of carrying them out: “The patient, _a doente_, has done wrong in disobeying my orders in this way.”