Gil Blas, Alain-René Lesage [best romance ebooks .txt] 📗

got to Oviedo in four days, without any untoward accident on the road, in spite of the proverb which says that robbers lay their ears to the ground when pilgrims are going with rich offerings, and traders are riding with fat purses. It would have been a feasible as well as a tempting speculation. Two tenants of a subterraneous abode might have presented an aspect to have frightened our doubloons into a surrender; for courage was not one of the qualities I had imbibed at court; and Bertrand, my mule-driver, seemed not to be of a temper to get his brains blown out in defending a purse into which he had no free ingress. Scipio was the only one of the party who was anything of a bully.

It was night when we came into town. Our lodgings were at an inn near my uncle, Gil Pérez, the canon. I was very desirous of ascertaining the circumstances of my parents before my first interview with them; and, in order to gain that information, it was impossible to make my inquiries in a better channel than through my landlord and landlady, into the lines of whose faces you could not look without being satisfied that they knew every tittle of their neighbors’ concerns. As it turned out, the landlord kenned me after a diligent perusal of my features, and cried out, “By Saint Antony of Padua! this is the son of the honest usher, Blas of Santillane.”

“Ay, indeed!” said the hostess; “and so it is, without a single muscle altered! just for all the world that same little stripling Gil Blas, of whom we used to say that he was as saucy as he was high. It brings old times to my memory, when he used to come hither with his bottle under his arm, to fetch wine for his uncle’s supper.”

“Madam,” said I, “you have a most inveterate memory; but for goodness’ sake change the subject, and tell me the modern news of my family. My father and mother are doubtless in no very enviable situation.”

“In good truth, you may say that,” answered the landlady; “you may rack your brains as long as you like, but you will never think of anything half so miserable as what they are suffering at this present moment. Gil Pérez, good soul! is defunct all down one side by a stroke of the palsy, and the other half of him is little better than a corpse; we cannot expect him to last long: then your father, who went to live with his reverence a little while ago, is troubled with an inflammation of the lungs, and is standing, as a body may say, quavery-mavery between life and death; while your mother, who is not over and above hale and hearty herself, is obliged to nurse them both.”

On this intelligence, which made me feel some compunctious yearnings of nature, I left Bertrand with my stud and baggage at the inn: then, with my secretary at my heels, who would not desert me in my time of need, I repaired to my uncle’s house. The moment I came within my mother’s reach, a natural emotion of maternal instinct unfolded to her who I was, before her eyes could possibly have run over the traces of my countenance. “Son,” said she, with a melancholy expression, after having embraced me, “come and be present at your father’s death; your visit is just in time to take in all the piteous circumstances of so deplorable an event.”

With this heartrending reception, she led me by the hand into a chamber where the wretched Blas of Santillane, stretched on a comfortless bed, in cold and dismal accord with the thinness of his fortunes, was just entering on the last great act of human nature. Though surrounded by the shades of death, he was not quite unconscious of what was passing about him. “My dearest friend,” said my mother, “here is your son Gil Blas, who entreats your forgiveness for all his undutiful behavior, and is come to ask your blessing before you die.”

At these tidings my father opened his eyes, which were on the point of closing forever: he fixed them upon me, and reading in my countenance, notwithstanding the awful brink on which he stood, that I was a sincere mourner for his loss, his feelings were recalled to sympathy by my sorrow. He even made an attempt to speak, but his strength was too much exhausted. I took one of his hands in mine, and while I bathed it with my tears, in speechless agony of soul, he breathed his last, as if he had only waited my arrival to pay the debt of nature, and wing his way to scenes of untried being.

This event had been too long present to my mother’s mind to overwhelm her with any unparalleled affliction. Perhaps it sat more heavily on me than on her, though my father had never in his life given me any reason to feel for him as a father. But besides that mere filial instinct would have made me weep over his cold remains, I reproached myself with not having contributed to the comfort of his latter days; then, when I considered what a hardhearted villain I had been, I seemed to myself like a monster of ingratitude, or rather like an impious parricide. My uncle, whom I afterwards saw lying at his length on another wretched couch, and in a most lamentable pickle, made me experience fresh agonies of upbraiding conscience. “Unnatural son!” said I, communing with my own uneasy thoughts, “behold the chastisement of heaven upon thy sins in the disconsolate condition of thy nearest relations. Hadst thou but thrown to them the superflux of that abundance in which before thy imprisonment thou rolledst, thou mightest have procured for them those little comforts which thy uncle’s ecclesiastical pittance was too scanty to furnish, and perhaps have lengthened out the term of thy father’s life.”

Gil Pérez had fallen