Here his wife called loudly to her husband, “Ricardo, Ricardo, por amor
de su alma, manda por el medico, she has burst a blood vessel Maria is
dying!”
“Let me mount myself; I will go myself.”--And the excellent man rushed
for the door, when the poor heart-broken Picador clung to his knees.
“No, no, don’t leave me. Send some one else”
“Take care, man, let me go”
Transom and I volunteered in a breath--“No, no, I will go myself,”
continued Don Ricardo; “let go, man--God help me, the old creature is
crazed,--el viejo no vale.”
“Here, here! help, Don Ricardo!” cried his wife.
Off started Transom for the doctor, and into the room rushed Don Picador
and Campana, and, from the sounds in the sick-chamber, all seemed
bustle and confusion; at length the former appeared to be endeavouring
to lift the poor sufferer, so as to enable her to sit up in bed; in the
meantime her coughing had gradually abated into a low suffocating
convulsive gasp.
“So, so, Ii ft her up, man,’ we could hear Campana say; ‘lift her up
quick--or she will be suffocated.”
At length, in a moment of great irritation, excited on the one hand by
his intense interest in the poor suffering girl, and anger at the
peevish, helpless Don Picador, Don Ricardo, to our unutterable surprise,
rapped out, in gude broad Scotch, as he brushed away Senor Cangrejo from
the bedside with a violence that spun him out of the door--“God--the
auld doited deevil is as fusionless as a docken.”
My jaw dropped--I was thunderstruck--Bang’s eye met mine “Murder!” quoth
Bang, so soon as his astonishment let him collect breath enough, “and
here I have been for two whole days practising Spanish, to my great
improvement no doubt, upon a Scotchman how Edified he must have been!”
“But the docken, man,” said I--“fusionless as a docken--how classic!
what an exclamation to proceed from the mouth of a solemn Don!”
“No gibes regarding the docken,” promptly chimed in Bang; “it is a
highly respectable vegetable, let me tell you, and useful on occasion,
which is more.”
The noise in the room ceased, and presently Campana joined us. “We must
proceed,” said he, “it will never do for you to deliver the jewels now,
Mr Cringle; she is too much excited already, even from seeing me.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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