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Updated: June 20, 2025
Matilde's maid and a housemaid, the cook, and the butler went quietly to their several rooms, took the most valuable of their own possessions, and slipped out. They felt that the house was doomed, with every one in it. But some one had gone for the doctor, and he arrived in a short time.
She was struck, too, and startled, by Gregorio's hideous laugh, which broke out twice during the meal without any apparent reason. Even the servants seemed to shudder at it and looked at him anxiously, and Matilde's dark eyes tried to control him. Indeed, when she looked at him, he seemed docile enough, except that his face twitched very strangely as he nodded to her.
Bosio, seated at a little distance, looked on, his brain still disturbed by what had gone before, and wondering at Matilde's power of seeming at her ease in such a desperate situation; wondering, too, at his brother's hard, cold face the mask that had so well hidden the passion of the gambler, and perhaps many other passions as well, of which even Bosio knew nothing, nor cared to know anything, having secrets of his own to keep.
But after she had closed the door, she turned in the outer room, stood still a moment and looked back, allowing her face for a moment to betray what she felt. The expression was a strange one; for it showed doubt, fear, conditional hatred, and potential vengeance a complicated state of mind, which the cleverest judge of human faces could hardly have understood from Matilde's features.
Then, thinking that she had discovered the clue to the attempted wholesale murder, and that she might obtain pardon for her defection, she came to the bedside and held it up to the doctor. He, too, looked at it, and read the words. Matilde's heavy eyes opened, and then stared as she recognized the package.
But the footman had hardly delivered his answer, and Bosio was in the act of turning, when one of the two masked doors under the pictures opened suddenly, and Matilde spoke into the room, calling him by name. He turned pale and stopped short, as though a cold hand had taken him by the throat. The footman went out to the hall, as Bosio met Matilde's eyes.
The woman suspected that the doctor had gone first to Matilde, and she decided in a moment that it was better to leave her mistress alone for two or three minutes than not to have the physician's assistance at once. She hastened to Matilde's room.
Bosio felt that shock of shame which smites a man in the back, as it were, when a woman is too strong for him and orders him brutally to do her will. "I told him the truth," he answered, and his pale cheeks reddened with futile anger. "The truth!" Matilde's face darkened. "What? What did you tell him?" Bosio was weakly glad to have frightened her a little.
"It is a crime," he said in a low voice. Matilda raised her eyes, with an almost imperceptible movement of the shoulders. "Murder is a crime," she answered simply. Then Bosio started violently and turned very white, almost rising from his seat. "Murder?" he cried; "what do you mean?" Matilde's smooth red lips smiled.
Cf. other stock expressions used in the play on other occasions, as Matilde's *beso a V. la mano* and don Pedro's *a la disposición de V.* *qué pero le puede poner la señorita*: 'what fault can the young lady find with. *geringonza*: cf. vocabulary, *jerigonza*. *hágame decir: hágame el favor de decir.*
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