"I am broken in two, mamma--I am broken in two," he repeated with anguish, while his mother, with trembling fingers sought to find what had caused his cry.
It was true! The backbone had bent outward, forming an angle on a level with his shoulderblades, the softened vertebræ had sunk and _cifosis_, the hump, the indelible mark of irremediable calamity, was to deform henceforth this child who was dearer to her than her life. The schoolmistress had had a moment of animal and sublime anguish, the anguish of the wild beast that sees its young mutilated. She had uttered shriek after shriek, cursing the doctor, cursing herself, tearing her hair and digging her nails into her flesh. Afterward tears had come and she had showered kisses, delirious, but soothing and sweet, on the boy, and her grief took a resigned form. During nine years Leocadia had had no other thought than to watch over her little cripple by night and by day, sheltering him in her love, amusing with ingenious inventions the idle hours of his sedentary childhood. A thousand incidents of this time recurred to Leocadia's memory. The boy suffered from obstinate dyspnoea, due to the pressure of the sunken vertebræ on the respiratory organs, and his mother would get up in the middle of the night and go in her bare feet to listen to his breathing and to raise his pillows. As these recollections came to her mind Leocadia felt her heart melt and something stir within her like the remains of a great love, the warm ashes of an immense fire, and she experienced the unconscious reaction of maternity, the irresistible impulse which makes a mother see in her grown-up son only the infant she has nursed and protected, to whom she would have given her blood, if it had been necessary, instead of milk. And uttering a cry of love, pressing her feverish lips passionately to the pallid temples of the hunchback, she said, falling back naturally into the caressing expressions of the dialect:
"_Malpocadiño._ Who loves you? say, who loves you dearly? Who?"
"You don't love me, mamma. You don't love me," the boy returned, half-smiling, leaning his head with delight on the bosom that had sheltered his sad childhood. The mother, meantime, wildly kissed his hair, his neck, his eyes--as if to make up for lost time--lavishing upon him the honeyed words with which infants are beguiled, words profaned in hours of passion, which overflowed in the pure channel of maternal love.