Part 51

The glamour around the husband first began to dim when he tried to approach the subject of the rice powder by remarking that nothing is so ugly as the false or so admirable as the natural. Doña Victorina looked unpleasantly at his teeth, and he was silent. Indeed, at the end of a very short time the doctora had arrived at the complete subjugation of her husband, who no longer offered any more resistance than a little lap-dog. If he did anything to annoy her, she forbade his going out, and in her moments of greatest rage she tore out his false teeth, and left him, sometimes for days, horribly disfigured.

When they were well settled in Manila, Rodoreda received orders to engrave on a plate of black marble:

"Dr. De Espadaña, Specialist in All Kinds of Diseases."

"Do you wish me to be put in prison?" asked Don Tiburcio in terror.

"I wish people to call you doctor and me doctora," said Doña Victorina, "but it must be understood that you treat only very rare cases."

The señora signed her own name, Victorina de los Reyes de de Espadaña. Neither the engraver of her visiting cards nor her husband could make her renounce that second "de."

"If I use only one 'de,' people will think you haven't any, imbecile!" she said to Don Tiburcio.

Then the number of gewgaws grew, the layer of rice powder was thickened, the ribbons and laces were piled higher, and Doña Victorina regarded with more and more disdain her poor compatriots who had not had the fortune to marry husbands of so high estate as her own.

All this sublimity, however, did not prevent her being each day older and more ridiculous. Every time Captain Tiago was with her, and remembered that she had once really inspired him with love, he sent a peso to the church for a mass of thanksgiving. But he had much respect for Don Tiburcio, because of his title of specialist, and listened attentively to the rare sentences the doctor's impediment of speech let him pronounce. For this reason and because the doctor did not lavish his visits on people at large he had chosen him to treat Maria.

As to young Linares, Doña Victorina, wishing a steward from the peninsula, her husband remembered a cousin of his, a law student at Madrid, who was considered the most astute of the family. They sent for him, and the young man had just arrived.

Father Salvi entered while Don Santiago and his guests were at the second breakfast. They talked of Maria Clara, who was sleeping; they talked of the journey, and Doña Victorina exclaimed loudly at the costumes of the provincials, their houses of nipa, and their bamboo bridges. She did not omit to inform the curate of her friendly relations with the "Segundo Cabo," with this alcalde, with that councillor, all people of distinction, who had for her the greatest consideration.

"If you had come two days earlier, Doña Victorina," said Captain Tiago, profiting by a slight pause in the lady's brilliant loquacity, "you would have found His Excellency the governor general seated in this very place."

"What! His Excellency was here? And at your house? Impossible!"

"I repeat that he was seated exactly here. If you had come two days ago----"

"Ah! What a pity Clarita did not fall ill sooner!" she cried. "You hear, cousin! His Excellency was here! You know, Don Santiago, that at Madrid our cousin was the friend of ministers and dukes, and that he dined with the Count del Campanario."

"The Duke de la Torre, Victorina," suggested her husband.

"It is the same thing!"

"Shall I find Father Dámaso at his pueblo to-day?" Linares asked Brother Salvi.

"Father Dámaso is here, and may be with us at any moment."

"I'm very glad! I have a letter for him, and if a happy chance had not brought me here, I should have come expressly to see him."

Meanwhile the "happy chance," that is to say, poor Maria Clara, had awakened.

"Come, de Espadaña, come, see Clarita," said Doña Victorina. "It is for you he does this," she went on, turning to Captain Tiago; "my husband attends only people of quality."

The sick-room was almost in obscurity, the windows closed, for fear of draughts; two candles, burning before an image of the Virgin of Antipolo, sent out feeble glimmers.

Enveloped in multiple folds of white, the lovely figure of Maria lay on her bed of kamagon, behind curtains of jusi and piña. Her abundant hair about her face increased its transparent pallor, as did the radiance of her great, sad eyes. Beside her were her two friends, and Andeng holding a lily branch.

De Espadaña felt her pulse, examined her tongue, asked a question or two, and nodded his head.

"Sh--she is s--sick, but she can be c--cured."

Doña Victorina looked proudly at their audience.

"Lichen with m--m--milk, for the m--m--morning, syrup of m--m--marshmallow, and two tablets of cynoglossum."