The vision of the precious stones persisted in her memory with the tenacity of an obsession. It filled her mind and dominated all her thoughts with a dangerous kind of introspective tyranny.
Eight o'clock sounded. Enrique Darlés got up.
"Going, already?" asked the girl.
"Yes, I'm going to supper."
She looked him over, from head to foot, and saw that he was slender, with an almost childish beauty, as he stood there in his modest suit of black. Then she thought about having nothing to do, that night, and how horribly bored she was going to be.
"Why not stay here and have a bite with me?" she questioned.
"What for?" he demanded.
"What a question! Why, so we shan't have to separate, so soon."
"I—well, all right. Anything you like. But I'm afraid I'll bother you."
"What an idiot you are! Quite the contrary. Your conversation will amuse me. You'll see how quickly I'll be good-natured, again."
She got up with a swift, supple movement that made her petticoats rustle and that infused a perfume of violets through the room. She pressed an electric button. A maid appeared.
"Tell Leonor," she ordered, "that I have a guest. Señor Enrique is going to have supper with me."
She approached a mirror, to arrange her hair. She seemed happy, transfigured with joy.
"Have you seen the play they're giving at the Princess Theater to-night?" asked she.
"No, I haven't."
"They say it's awfully good. Shall we take it in? There's time enough, yet. We'll have supper right away."
Darlés felt a bit disconcerted, and secretlyinvestigated his pockets, estimating the money he had. Mentally he counted:
"Five pesetas, ten, fifteen."
Yes, there was enough for two seats and a carriage to come back in.
"All right, just as you like," he answered, more reassured.
"Then I'll go change my dress. I'll be back in a minute."
She vanished behind the crimson curtain that draped the door of her bedroom. The student heard a little rustling of lingerie that slid to the floor. He heard corset-steels being tightened over a soft breast; heard mysterious, silken sounds of undressing and of dressing; heard closet-doors vivaciously opened and shut.
Enrique felt upset and very happy. He had known Alicia more than a month. During that time, using his visits to Don Manuel as a pretext, he had seen the young woman several times. In spite of the intimacy of these calls he had never dared let the girl see his love. His innocence had been too great to let him approach any such difficult avowal. When Alicia had tried to help him out of the embarrassment she had seen in him, and had tried to turnthe conversation into confidential channels, he had evaded declaring himself. For he had been afraid of making some stupid blunder and of appearing absurd.
But now he felt calmer, more self-confident. Without quite understanding why, he suspected that Alicia's ill-humor was working to his benefit. She was keeping him with her because she was bored, because she was afraid to pass the night alone with that gnawing desire for the jewels that in all probability could never be hers. And Enrique reflected that the necklace, made to encircle some wonderful throat, might become the symbol of a bond of love now growing up between them.
Then he realized there was something sweet and intimate in the confidence Alicia manifested by dressing so very near him, and in the complacency shown by the maid when Alicia had told her that Señor Enrique was taking supper there. These were important details that roused up his failing heart and made him understand that all this—if his own cowardice were not too great—might lead to something much more complete and exquisite than a mere chaste, warm friendship.
Enrique lost himself in pleasant fancies. Heremembered many novels in which the daring and eloquent heroes had taken part in situations quite parallel to this now confronting him, poor country boy that he was. The beveled mirror of a clothes-press flung back at him the reflection of his tall, slim body, his black clothes, his rather poetic face. Pale, beardless, romantic-looking, why might not he be a hero, too? What surprises might not destiny have in store for his youthfulness?
To calm himself he began looking at the little bronze and porcelain figures in the cabinets. There were cowled gnomes, dogs, cats looking into a little mirror, with astonished grimaces. Then Darlés studied the marble clock and the big vases on the chimney-piece. He examined the portraits and the little fancy pictures, of slight merit but gaudily framed, that covered the green wall-paper almost to the ceiling. And in a kind of analytical way he reflected that these portraits, these little paintings, these pretty, frivolous furnishings were the aftermath of all the mercenary love-affairs which had taken place here in this apartment.
His attention was now called to a large collection of picture post-cards stuck into a Japanese screen. There were dancers, love-making scenes and all sorts of things. Nearly every card bore the signature of some man, together with a line or two of dedication. Many of the cards were dated from Paris—that City of the Sun, beloved by adventurers—while others had come from America, from Egypt or elsewhere. And all the cards seemed a kind of incense offered to the beauty of the same woman. Through all the longings of exile, and from every zone, memories had come back to her. You might almost have thought the warmth of her flesh had infused a deathless glow in all those wanderers.
Alicia Pardo came in again, bringing with her a gust of violet perfume.
"Have I kept you waiting long?" asked she. "I hope not. Come on, now, let's go to the dining-room. If we want to get to the theater in time, we mustn't lose a minute."
It was a light, pleasant supper—vegetable soup, partridgesà l'anglaise, lobster and crisp bacon, then a bit of orange marmalade and dead-ripe bananas. At the theater, they had a couple of seats in the second row. The play had already begun, when they got there. None the less, Goldie's presence roused up interest among the masculine element in the boxes. Numbers of opera-glasses focused themselves at her. On the stage, an actor profited by one of his exits to give her an almost imperceptible smile, to which she replied with a nod.
Such marks of attention usually fill men of the world with pride and complacency. But they disturb young lovers. According to the temperaments of such youthful blades, public recognition of this kind excites jealousy or shame. Enrique Darlés felt suppressed and ill at ease. A wave of hot blood burned in his cheeks. Not for one instant did it occur to him that these grave, rich gentlemen—old men who never win the favors of the demi-monde along the flowery path of real affection—might be envying his beauty and his youth.
Alicia felt, in the student's silence, something of the embarrassment that possessed him.
"What's the matter with you?" asked she. "Are you ashamed of being seen with me?"
Enrique tried to seem astonished.
"Ashamed?" he repeated. "How could I be? On the contrary——"
And his fingers closed over hers with unspeakable ardor.
At the end of the act, the audience began to applaud. Many enthusiastic voices called: "Author! Author!" Alicia clapped her hands wildly.
"Oh, how I'd like to know him!" cried she.
Enrique also applauded noisily, to please her. The curtain rose again, in the midst of that uproarious tempest of triumph, and the author appeared. His profile was aquiline; his theatrical triumphs and loose way of living had enveloped him in a cloud of prestige, blent of talent and scandal. He looked a little above forty, but his lithe body still kept all the graceful activity of youth. The spot-light brilliantly illuminated him; he smiled, with the arrogant expression and gestures of a conqueror. Still applauding, Alicia exclaimed to Enrique:
"Isn'the lovely? I've got to get some one to introduce me to him. My friend Candelas knows him very well."
And her big green eyes widened with emotion. Her curly reddish hair shook like a lion's mane, over her willful forehead. At that moment, Enrique Darlés once more felt himself small and obscure. He saw his love meant nothing in the exuberant life of this girl. Whilehe had been holding her pretty little hand, a few minutes before, he had thought her conquered and in love with him. Now all of a sudden he beheld her transfigured, beside herself, her scatter-brained little head flung back in an attitude of giving, that offered the victorious playwright her snowy throat. Ethnological reasons underlie woman's adoration of everything strong, shining, violent.
"If I were not here," thought Darlés with melancholy, "surely she would go to him."
The student got back his gayety, during the second act. Alicia pressed up against him, slyly and nervously, and her restless curls produced little electric ticklings on his temples. When the play was done, the ovation broke out again, and the author once more appeared. Enrique's applause was only mild. For a moment he thought the playwright's eyes fell with avidity on Alicia. This painful impression still lay upon the student as they went out into the street. The young woman walked beside him, holding his arm and shivering with cold in her handsome gray cloak. The night was sharp. Rain had been falling. Alicia said:
"Well, where are we going?"
He answered, in surprise:
"I'm going to take you home. We'll call a carriage."
"No, I don't want to go home."
"What?"
"Come on! I'm going to give you a treat, to-night."
She looked up at him, smiling in a fascinating, promising way that foreshadowed paradise. In anguish the poor fellow remembered he had hardly ten pesetas left. To escape the jostling and rude staring of the passers-by, Alicia took refuge in a doorway. Her feet were stiff with cold. The wetness of the pavement was soaking through the thin soles of her shoes.
"Decide on something, quick," she shivered. "I'm dying of cold!"
Enrique exclaimed, with a resolution he thought very like that of a man of the world:
"If you want to eat, we'll go to Fornos."
The girl made a grimace of horror.
"Never!" she cried. "Everybody knows me there!"
"Well then, let's go to Moran's."
"Worse still! I'd be sure to run into some friend or other."
"How about Viña P?"
"I should say not! I don't dare." Then with cruel frankness she added: "Do you know why I don't dare? The women there look down on girls like me. And if any of my friends—they're all serious men—should see me with you, there, they'd call me flighty. They'd think me mad."
Enrique understood but little. He vaguely felt, however, that all this held some kind of humiliation for him. Suddenly, like one who clutches at a saving idea, Alicia exclaimed:
"What time is it?"
"Quarter past one."
"Well then, see here. Let's go to Las Ventas, or La Bombilla. The same carriage that takes us out can bring us back."
"Well—it——"
He hesitated, knowing not how to confess his absurdity, how to own up to the enormous, unpardonable stupidity of being poor. At last he made up his mind to speak, wounded by the questions of Alicia, who by no means understood his uncertainty.
"You know, I—forgive me, but—I haven't got money enough," said he.
"What a boy you are!" she answered."Why, you don't need hardly any, at all. Haven't you even got, say, two hundred pesetas?"
"Two hundred pesetas!" stammered Enrique, horror-stricken. "No, no, I haven't."
"Well, a hundred, then?"
"No."
"All right. Come, tell me. How muchhaveyou got?"
Enrique would have gladly died. Gnawing his lips with desperation, he answered:
"I've hardly got ten left."
She burst out laughing, one of those frank, bold laughs such as perhaps she had never known since the time when some rich man, setting her feet on the path of sin, had taken from her the gentle happiness of being poor.
"And you were talking about going to Fornos?" she demanded.
Enrique answered, in shame:
"I'm not good enough for you, Alicia! I'm not worthy of you! I'll take you home."
The girl answered, charmed by the bohemian novelty of the adventure:
"Never mind about the money. I want to have something to eat with you. Take me tosome tavern or other, some cheap little dive. It's all right."
He still hesitated. She insisted. The terror of falling from her good graces enfolded him.
"What if the food is bad, and you don't like it?" he asked.
"Fool! I don't want luxury, to-night. I want memories of other times. Was I always rich, do you think?"
"Well, in that case——"
"Yes, yes, take me along! Show me something of your life!"
Arm in arm they went down the street. Their feet kept time, together. Feverishly he repeated:
"Alicia! Oh, my Alicia!"
Then, as he buried his white and trembling lips in the hair of the greatly desired one, it seemed to him that all Madrid was filled with perfumes of fresh violets.
SOME days drifted by, after that unforgettable night, without Darlés getting any chance to see Alicia. Several afternoons he went to her house, between half-past two and three, at which hour Don Manuel was never there. But Teodora, the maid, never let him get beyond the parlor. Sometimes Alicia was out, the maid said; again, she was asleep or had a headache, and could not see him. Teodora spoke drily, disconcertingly. If there is any way to sound the good or bad opinion any one has of us, it is surely in the attitude of that person's servants. The student would murmur:
"And she didn't leave any word for me?"
"No, sir. Not any."
Then, at sight of the maid's sly and mocking face, Enrique would feel his countenance lengthen with sadness. His eyes would grow dim with grief and humility, like those of a discharged servant. But then, not being quite able to give up the illusion that had brought him there, he would say:
"Well, all right, if that's how it is. Tell her I called, and say I'll be back to-morrow."
As he went down the stairs, very sadly, that idea of his own inferiority which had wounded him on the night he had been introduced to Alicia once more overcame him. Yes, he was beaten at the start. He was inept and worthless. What could he offer her? Not money, since he was poor; nor fame, since he was not a noted artist; nor yet could he bring her gayety and joy, for whatever of these he had until now possessed in his sentimental, introspective soul, had been taken away from him by Alicia's indifference.
Many days, at nightfall, the student went to Calle Mayor and stood in front of the jeweler's window where he could see the sparkling of that magnificent emerald necklace that Alicia had told him about. Now he would walk up and down the street, wrapped in his cloak with a certain worldly aplomb; now he would pause to look at the shop, whose electric lights flooded the passers-by under a rain of brilliancy. He would stand a long time in front of the window, enthralled by the spell of the bleeding rubies, the topazes which burned like wounds, the celestial blue turquoises. Hewould stare at the chains and rings, shimmering with gold on the artistically-wrinkled, black velvet, which finely carpeted the broad reach of the window. And this vagrant attraction, wakened in him by the jewels, seemed to cause a kind of presentiment. All the time, his immature mind would be thinking:
"Alicia would be happy if she should pass along, now, and see me here."
During those first days of separation, the memory of the beloved one rooted itself into the student's memory under the strange sensation of violet perfume. He either did not remember, or he pretended not to remember, the big, green eyes of the girl, her cruel and epigrammatic little mouth, her firm, white body. But all the more did that violet perfume possess him. He seemed to find his clothes, his hands, his text-books, his poor little bed all odorous of violets. Still, even this sweet illusion began to fade. Time began to blur it out, as it had blurred his recollections of the girl. Darlés wept a great deal. And one night he wrote her a desperate, somewhat enigmatic note:
"I'm going to see you, to-morrow. If youwon't let me in, I shall die. Be merciful! My little room no longer smells of violets."
Alicia felt annoyed by the student's note. What was the idea of these ostentatious hyperboles of passion? Could Darlés have got it into his head that what had happened—one of many adventures in her path—had been anything but perfectly worthless and common? Alicia felt so sure of this that her emotion was one of astonishment, more than of disgust. Yet, in the beginning, her surprise caused her a certain pleasure.
"It really would be interesting," thought she, "if this boy should fall in love with me like the hero of a play."
But the pleasure of such a curiosity hardly lasted a minute. Soon the girl's cold, selfish spirit, that always traveled in straight lines toward its own ends—the spirit and the will that never let themselves be interfered with—reacted against this romantic possibility. Alicia neither wanted to love nor be loved. For through the experiences of her girl friends she had learned that love, with all its jealousies and pains, is harshly cruel to lover and beloved, alike.
She attached no importance whatever to thecaprice that had momentarily thrown her into the student's arms. The evening before their first and only night together, Darlés had just happened to find her in one of those fits of the blues, of eclectic relaxation, in which the volatile feminine sense of ethics swings equidistant from good and evil. Her virtues and her vices, alike, were arbitrary and without any exact motive. If the student had perhaps had finer eyes, she would have yielded to him, just the same; then too, perhaps if the emerald necklace that, just a few minutes before, she and Don Manuel had been quarreling about had been less desirable, she would have refused him.
The only certain thing about it all was this, that she had accepted the student's comradeship because in a kind of good-natured way she had reckoned the conversation of even a poor man more entertaining than the remembrance of a necklace. And next morning when she had got back home, she had found herself a little surprised at her own conduct. She felt that she had shown a generosity, a fanciful whim such as perhaps might have driven a critic like Sarcey, after forty years of the real theater, to some miserable little puppet-show. At allevents the thing should never happen again. It was absurd!
Next day, Teodora had informed her that Darlés had come to see her while she had been out. Day after day, the same thing had occurred. The girl had ended up by feeling very much annoyed at the young fellow's sad obstinacy. A veritable beggar for love, he had come to trouble the easy currents of her idleness. Every time Teodora had told her the student had been back again, Alicia had grown angry.
"What the devil does he want, anyhow?" she would exclaim. "Blest ifIknow!"
In this she was really sincere. She did not know. The selfish frivolity of her disposition could not understand how any man, after having received the supreme gift from a woman, could do other than get tired of her. Darlés' note, complaining of her desertion of him, increased her annoyance. Once for all she felt she must cut this entanglement. What better way could there be than to receive the importunate young fellow and talk to him in a perfectly impersonal way, as if no secret existed between them?
When Darlés arrived, next day, at the usual time, Teodora led him into the dining-room.
"I'll tell mistress you're here," said she.
Darlés remained standing there, reflective, one elbow leaning against the window-jamb. Once, when he had been nothing but "Don Manuel's friend," Alicia had used to receive him informally. Nobody had announced him, then. Now he felt himself isolated, stifled by that kind of friendly hostility used on boresome callers. The maid came back and said:
"Mistress will see you. Come this way."
Darlés found the girl in her little boudoir, together with a tall, dark-haired girl, dressed in gray. This girl wore English-looking, mannish clothes, well set off by her red tie and by the whiteness of her starched collar and cuffs. When Alicia saw the student, she neither moved nor stretched out her hand to him. All she said was:
"Hello, there! Is that you?"
Something in the rather scornful familiarity of her greeting infinitely humbled him. He grew pale. All the blood in his body seemed flooding his heart, turning to ice there. Still discourteous, Alicia introduced him to the other girl:
"Señor Darlés—my friend, Candelas."
Candelas fixed her keen, vivid eyes on thenew-comer. Then she peered at Alicia, as if asking whether this visit might not perhaps veil some amorous secret. The girl understood, and gave her friend's sophisticated question a vertical answer:
"No, you're wrong. Enrique comes here only because he's Don Manuel's friend."
The student nodded assent to this, and Candelas smiled coldly. Then the two girls once more took up the thread of the conversation broken by the arrival of Darlés. The poor fellow sensed that he was isolated and dismissed. Five, ten, fifteen minutes passed, with no break in that animated chatter. Men's names came into it; and Candelas laughed heartily as she reviewed the details of a recent supper she had had. Alicia laughed, too. Quite possibly she did this to hurt the student's feelings and to persuade herself Enrique really was nothing more to her than just Don Manuel's friend.
A visitor dropped in; an old woman who dealt in clothes and trinkets. She had a heavy bundle with her, and this she put down on the floor. Alicia asked her:
"Well, Clotilde, what's new?"
Clotilde fairly oozed enjoyment, in her thick cloak, as she answered:
"I've got the finest petticoats and stockings in the world."
"High-priced?"
"Dirt cheap! I don't know why, but I've got it into my head you want to spend a little money, to-day."
Then the furnishings of the little boudoir vanished under a many-colored flood of showy silks—green, brown, blue—which, as they were spread out, diffused a most delightful perfume of cleanness. As if under some magic spell, Alicia and Candelas fell a prey to the intense, acquisitive passion that tortures women in front of shop-windows. The two girls vied in asking the price of every treasure.
"This petticoat here, how much?"
"Seeing it's you, a hundred pesetas."
"And that heliotrope one?"
"Seventy-five. Just take a good look at it. Wonderful!"
With amazement, Enrique studied this profusion of elegance and luxury. He had never even dreamed civilization wove so many refinements about the art of love. And as his frank eyes observed these petticoats that gently rustled, or took in the lace of these night-dresses—majestically full as senatorial togas—he sadly recalled the poor little white chemises and coarse underwear lacking in all adornment, that the women of his home-town hung out to dry on their clothes-lines.
Now a new detail came to increase his misery. The peddler and Alicia were arguing excitedly over the price of the heliotrope petticoat. Clotilde wanted seventy-five pesetas, and the young woman vowed she couldn't go over fifty. The peddler insisted:
"You'd better make up your mind to take it, because you won't get such a bargain anywhere else. I'm only selling it at this price just to please you, but I'm not making a penny on the deal."
Then she turned to Enrique, and added:
"Come now, this gentleman will buy it for you!"
Darlés blushed, and found nothing to say. Men without money are contemptible; and as Alicia did not even deign to look at him, the student knew he had lost her. Dear Lord, if there had only been some devil's bank where lovers might barter off the years of their life, for money, gladly would he have sold his wholeexistence for those curséd seventy-five pesetas!
Tired of arguing, the peddler gathered up her things and packed them into her valise. The conversation drifted off to other things. The women began talking about jewels. Candelas showed a brooch that had been given her. Clotilde offered the girls a necklace.
"If you'd like to see it, I'll bring it," said she. "I've got it at home."
Alicia sighed deeply; and that long sigh, broken like a child's, expressed enormous grief. She said:
"I'm in love with a necklace in a shop on Calle Mayor, and I don't want any other. I dream about it all the time. I never saw anything so wonderful! I tell you the man who gives methat, can have me."
"How much is it?"
"Fifteen thousand pesetas."
Then she fixed an inscrutable look on Darlés, and added:
"I think this gentleman here is going to get it for me. Aren't you, Enrique?"
Candelas was about to laugh, but checked herself. Her penetrating eyes had just seen in the student's congested face something of the terrific inner struggle now possessing him.Darlés was no longer able to contain himself. He got up to leave, and his eyes showed such despair and shame that Alicia took pity on him.
"I'll see you out," said she.
They left the little boudoir. When they got to the parlor, the student—who hardly knew what he was doing—seized the girl's hands and covered them with kisses. He began to weep desperately.
"Alicia! Alicia!" he stammered, "what makes you so cruel to me? I'm dying for you! Alicia! Oh, why can't you love me?"
But she had already recovered from her brief emotion, and now tried to rid herself of him.
"Come, come, now," she exclaimed, "what a fool you are!"
"I adore you, Alicia! Heart of my soul!"
"Come now, be good! Keep quiet—good-by! You're getting me into trouble!"
"But I've got to see you—see you!"
"All right! Onlydokeep quiet! Good-by—keep quiet, I tell you! Candelas might get wise to something, and I don't want her making fun of us!"
She spoke in a low tone, and at the sametime kept pushing Darlés toward the door. He murmured:
"Are you sending me away forever?"
"No."
"Yes, you are, too! You're trying to get rid of me!"
"No, no; but for heaven's sake, get out!"
"Yes, you are; you're throwing me out—getting rid of me because I'm poor, because I don't know how to win you! But howcanI win you, if you won't give me a little time?"
She was growing angry; her face became hard. The student clasped his hands and cried:
"You're doing a wicked thing to send me away like this!"
"All right, all right——"
"A wicked thing, because any man that loves as much as I do can do anything. Even if Iampoor, some time I might be rich. Even if Iamobscure, I might become a noted artist, if you wanted me to. I'd kill, I'd steal for you!"
"For heaven's sake, shut up and get out!"
"Yes, I'll go because you tell me to. But—hero or thief—I'd be anything to stay with you, anything for you! Alicia, oh, my Alicia,I'll do anything you want me to—yes, by God, if I get twenty years for it!"
The poor, innocent young chap, without suspecting it, was uttering a great phrase; he was laying all his youth at the feet of this ungrateful woman—offering her the same treasure of youth to gain which Faust lost his soul.
Alicia already had the door open.
"Good-by," she whispered. "Do get out! Manuel might come!"
"When am I going to see you again?"
"Oh, some time."
"When?"
"I don't know.Won'tyou go?"
"To-morrow?"
"No."
"Tell me! Tell me what day! I'll be patient. I'll wait. When can I see you?"
She hesitated. Ardently he insisted:
"When?"
"Oh, you make me sick!"
"Come, have it over with. Tell me, when?"
A look of perdition, of madness, gleamed in the green eyes of the Magdalene. This look seemed to illuminate her whole face, to change into a smile on the tyrannical line of her lips.
"When?" he repeated.
Without knowing why, the student was afraid; but almost at once he gathered himself together.
"Tell me, tell me, when?" he stammered.
"I don't know."
"You've got to tell me!"
"You're crazy!"
"No matter, tell me, when?"
Insidiously she replied:
"Never. Or—when you bring me the necklace I asked you for!"
Struck dumb, he peered at her, because he realized the girl meant what she said. She added:
"Then——"
The door closed. Enrique Darlés blundered, weeping, down the staircase.
DARLÉS got up next morning very early and went wandering out into the street. He was completely done up. The night had been one of terror and insomnia; and when day had dawned, finding him in his miserable little room—a room whose only furniture was a bureau covered with books and magazines, a rickety pine table and a few rush-bottomed chairs, all mean and old—the realization of his solitude had struck him with the violence of a blow. He had felt that profound agitation which psychologists call "claustrophobia," or the fear of enclosed spaces.
For a long time he wandered about, absorbed in vacillations that had neither name nor plan. He hardly knew himself. His conscience had been cruelly wrung in a few hours of suffering; and from this savage convulsion of the soul unsuspected developments were emerging, enormous moral unfoldings, filled with terrifying perplexities. His despair hadloosed a stupendous avalanche of problems against the bulwark of those moral principles which had been taught him as a child. And each of these questions was now a terrible problem for him. Where, he wondered, does virtue end? Where does sin commence? And if all our natural forces should go straight toward the goal of happiness, why should there be any desires that codes of formulated ethics should judge depraved and sinful? Why should not everything which pleases be allowed?
When he reached the Calle de Atocha, he met a friend of his, called Pascual Cañamares. This friend was a medical student like himself. The two young fellows greeted each other. Cañamares was on his way to San Carlos.
"Do you want to come along with me?" he asked. "I'll show you the dissecting-room."
Darlés went along with his friend. Cañamares noticed Enrique's pallor.
"You don't look a bit well this morning," said he.
"No, I didn't sleep much last night."
"Maybe you were out having a good time?"
"No. On the contrary, I cried all night."
There was such a depth of manly pain in this reply that Cañamares did not dare probe the matter any further.
The dissecting-room, cold and white, produced some very lively sensations in Darlés. Floods of sunlight fell from the tall windows, painting a wide, golden border over the tiled walls. A good many corpses lay on the marble tables, covered with blood-stained sheets; and all these bodies had shaven heads and open mouths. Their naked feet, closely joined together, produced a ghastly sensation of quietude. An indefinable odor floated in the air, a nauseating odor of dead flesh. Darlés felt a slight vertigo which forced him to close his eyes and leave the room. For more than an hour he wandered about the gravely-echoing, spacious cloisters of San Carlos. A strange sadness hovered over the building; the damp, old building which once on a time had been a convent and now had become a school—the building where the vast tedium of a science unable to free life from pain was added to the profound melancholy of a religion which thinks only of death.
When Pascual Cañamares left his classroom, he asked Darlés to go and dine withhim. Enrique accepted. It was just noon. Cañamares usually ate at a little tavern in the Plaza de Anton Martín. This was a gay little establishment, with high wooden counters, painted red. The two students sat down before a table, on which the hostess had spread a little tablecloth.
"Well, what do you want?" asked Cañamares.
"Oh, I don't care. Anything you do."
"Soup and stew?"
"All right."
Cañamares ordered, in a free and easy way:
"Landlady! Bring us a stew!"
He was a big, young fellow, twenty, plump and full-blooded, vivacious with that healthy, turbulent kind of joviality which seems to diffuse vital energies all about it. He was very talkative; and in his picturesque and frivolous chatter lay a contagious good-humor. Darlés answered him only with distrait monosyllables. His whole attention was fixed on a few coachmen at the next table. They were talking about a certain crime that had been committed that morning. Two men, in love with the same woman, had fought for her with knives, and one had killed the other. The murderer hadbeen captured. It was a vulgar but intense crime of passion; it seemed to have a certain barbarous charm which, in its own way, was chivalric, since there had been no foul play in the crime. The fight had been fair and open. And the student admired, he even envied those two brave men who, for the sake of love, had not shrunk before the solemnity of a moment in which the death-dealing wound coincides with the knife-thrust which carries a man off to the penitentiary.
As they left the tavern, Pascual took unceremonious leave of his companion.
"I'm going to leave you," said he, "because no one can have any fun with you. Hanged if I know what's the matter with you, to-day! Why, you won't even listen to a fellow!"
Then he took his leave. Unmoved, Enrique saw him walk away; but after that he felt a painful sensation of loneliness. Yes, and this loneliness had come upon him because he had been frank enough not to hide his ugly state of mind, because he had let all the melancholy of his soul shine forth freely from his eyes. And in that moment he understood that to be thoroughly sincere is tremendously expensive,for all sincerity—even the most innocent—invariably exacts a heavy price.
That evening he ate only a very light supper and went to bed early. He lay awake a long time, tortured by a flood of disconnected memories. His father, who represented all his past, and Alicia Pardo, who symbolized his whole present, seemed to be striving for him. The image of the girl at last prevailed.
Little by little he fell to studying the perverse and mocking spirit of the woman, who, even when she had waked up in the morning with him, had looked at him and shrugged her shoulders disdainfully. Well, what had happened? Between them, where had the fault lain? Was the girl naturally a hard-hearted creature, incapable of high and lasting sentiments; or was it that he, himself, quiet and peaceful, had not been able to live up to her illusions?
Scourged by the agonizing tyranny of his will, the student's memory recalled moments, evoked phrases, and once more endowed with new reality all the details of that enchanted night in which it had seemed to him all Madrid had been perfumed with violets. And as the human heart always yearns to forgive the object of our love, Enrique succeeded at last, after much reflection, in convincing himself that Alicia was innocent.
He decided that from the first moment she had been blameless. She had encouraged him to undertake the conquest of her; and afterward completely and with no other wish than to see him happy she had opened her arms to him—Venus-like arms, which had cast about his neck a bond of pity and sweet tenderness. And he, in exchange for such supreme happiness, what had he given?
Accusingly an implacable voice began to cry out in the student's conscience. Alicia, he pondered, was accustomed to the ways of the world; she was a woman of exacting and refined tastes, who adored luxury and understood Beethoven. Many men of the aristocracy worshiped her, making a fashionable cult of her beauty; and more than one famous tenor had sung for her, alone in the intimacy of her bedroom, his favoriteracconto. The inexorable voice continued:
"And what have you done, Darlés the Obscure, to be worthy of this treasure? What merits have you had? Women of such complete beauty as hers seek that which excels—they love strength, which is the supreme beauty of man; strength, which is glory in the artist, money in the millionaire, elegance and breeding in the man of the world, despair in the suicide, courage and outlawry in the thief who boldly dares defy the law. But you, you who are nothing, what do you aspire to? Of what can you complain?"
The student heaved a sigh, and his eyes filled with tears. He was a fool, a shrinking coward, a poltroon. A man who has ruined himself for a woman, or who, to keep her as his own, has committed murder and been sent to prison, may justly complain of her. Buthe, quite on the contrary——
Suddenly Darlés shuddered so violently that the electric shock of his nerves made him utter a cry. Deathly pale, he sat up in bed. Since he could not give Alicia either a fortune or the glory of a great artist, he must drink a toast to her with his whole honor—he must steal. This came to him as a terrible revelation, resonant of Hell. And all at once he understood the enigmatic expression which had shone in the eyes of the girl and had sounded from her lips the last time they had talked together. He had asked her: "Whenam I going to see you again?" And she had answered: "Never—until you bring me the necklace I have asked you for!"
Now these mystic words clearly reëchoed in his mind; now he fully understood them. Alicia was in love with a priceless jewel; and often, thinking about it, she grew very sad. Her sadness was real; he himself had seen it. Perhaps the girl, when she had dismissed him, reminding him of that necklace, had spoken in jest; perhaps it had been in earnest. Who could tell? At all events, when she had declared that they would never see each other again, she had in a veiled manner expressed her belief that he was a coward, incapable of ruining himself for her.
The feverish eyes of Enrique Darlés burned like coals. Why, indeed, should he not steal? Why should he not prove himself brave, capable of everything? At the basis of every great sacrifice lies something superhuman, that confuses and that rends the soul. If he were a thief and could pay with his bravery something that his small, poor money could not buy; if he should ruin his whole career just to please her, should bring down upon his head the rigors of the law and his father's curses,Alicia—so he fondly believed—would love him blindly, with the same sort of frenzy that Balzac's hero, Vautrin, inspired in women.
The voice which until now had been thundering accusations in the student's storm-tossed conscience, now with soft flatterings began to wheedle and cajole him, saying:
"Alicia, your beloved Alicia would be happy with the emeralds of that necklace. If you have no way to buy it for her, go steal it! You're a cowardly wretch if you don't! What does the opinion of the crowd matter to you, egoist that you are? A man incapable of becoming a thief for a woman may love her greatly, but he does not love her to distraction. What your Alicia desires, you should give her. Have no longer any doubts, but go and steal! Steal this necklace for her and then clasp it about her neck—that neck whose snow so many times in the space of one night offered its refreshing coolness to your lips!"
These ideas combined to strengthen his more recent impressions—the impression of his visit to the dissecting-room where once more he had seen that nothing matters; and the impression of that crime of jealousy which he had heard talked about in the tavern. And all at once,Enrique Darlés felt himself calmed. His future had just been decided. He would steal. Fatality, incarnate in the body of Alicia Pardo, had just mapped out his road for him.
Every evening at sunset, at that hour of mystery when the street-lights begin to shine and women to seem more beautiful, the student left his lodgings and, passing through the Calle Romanos and the Calle Carmen, took his way toward the Puerta del Sol, always full of an idle, loitering crowd which seems to have nowhere to go. He always stopped in Calle Mayor, to cast an eager, timorous look into the jeweler's shop, whose show-window glowed like a bed of living coals.
This calculating, daily contemplation of those treasures completely overturned Enrique's moral standards. He, himself, did not grasp the profound change coming upon him. Steadily this thought of stealing kept growing in his soul, obsessing him, evolving into a resistless, overwhelming determination.
As if to increase his torment, the emerald necklace which served as an advertisement for the shop, found no purchaser. It was far too dear.
With his nose pressed against the plate glass of the window, Enrique suffered long moments of anguish, unable to take his eyes from that abyss, that precipice of gold and velvet at the bottom of which the diamonds, topazes, emeralds, pearls, rubies and amethysts seemed the eyes of a strange multitude peering out at him. All this time his imagination was developing a mad, adventurous tale. With his prize hidden in his most secret pocket, he would go to see Alicia and would say to her: "Here, take it! Here is your necklace, the necklace that neither Don Manuel nor any of your millionaire aristocrats would buy for you. I, gambling my life, have got it for you! What do you say now?"
And thinking thus, he would close his eyes, seeming to feel that all about him the air was perfumed with violets. And then when he once more opened his eyes, the emeralds of the necklace, green and hard as Alicia's pupils, seemed to say to him: "All your dreams and hopes, all your sweet visionings, shall now come true!" It was the secret voice of temptation, a voice which had transformed itself to radiance.
One night, as he was recovering from oneof these long, deep fits of abstraction, before the jeweler's window, he saw that Alicia Pardo and her friend Candelas were really drawing near. They, too, had seen him. Upset, almost speechless, the student saluted them. Alicia affectionately pressed his hand; and now more strongly than ever he breathed that violet odor which had perfumed all his dreams of theft. The girl asked:
"Well, what are you doing here?"
"Nothing much, only passing a little time."
Alicia inspected the shop window.
"Ah, yes, yes, you were looking at my necklace, weren't you?"
"Yes, that's just what Iwasdoing."
And as he said this, he blushed deeply, because this confession was equivalent to another, that he was drawing closer to her. Smilingly Candelas peered at the student. Alicia added with cruel malice:
"You know, dear, I asked him to get it for me."
"Yes, I know, I remember," said Enrique.
He spoke sadly. Alicia began to laugh.
"Well, how about it? Are you really thinking of giving it to me?"
"¿Quién sabe?"
Sudden anger had endowed his face with virile and aggressive tension. Forehead and lips grew pale. Candelas, good-natured in a careless way, tried to salve his misery.
"You'd better leave us women alone," said she. "We're a bad lot. Believe me, the best of us, the most saintly of us, isn't worth any man's sacrificing himself for."
Alicia interrupted her friend, exclaiming:
"What a little fool you are, to be sure! We were only joking. Do you think Enrique would really do any such crazy thing for me? What nonsense!"
Proudly the student repeated:
"¿Quién sabe?"
Then, after a little silence, he added:
"I don't know what makes you talk that way. You've never proved me. You don't know what kind of a man I am!"
Two months earlier, the laughing, mocking words of these girls would have disconcerted him. But now he felt himself transfigured; he felt new, vigorous ardors in his blood. He no longer doubted. An extraordinary dominating concept of his own person had taken possession of him; and this concept of his youth and boldness, of his strength and courage, hadexalted him like strong drink. In a single moment the youth had grown to be a man.
Alicia closely observed him. Her mouth grew serious, and under the parting of her hair, that lay symmetrically on her forehead, her eyes became pensive. She knew little of primitive man's hunting-ways, but was expert in judging characters and stirring up passions. And though she did indeed care little for books, men's consciences lay open to her eyes; which kind of reading is far better. Her keen instincts, rarely amiss, perceived something dominant, something desperate in the student's voice and gestures. She judged it wise to end the conversation.
"So long, Enrique. By the way, Manuel's been asking for you, a number of times."
"Thanks. Give him my best regards."
"When are you coming to see me?"
Still shrouded in gloom, Darlés answered:
"I don't know, Alicia. But you can be sure I'll come as soon as I have the right to."
In this allusion to what he now called his duty, trembled indefinable bitterness and pride.
When the student found himself alone, rage seized him—rage that, unable to express itselfin words, found vent in tears. He felt convinced that his answers, somewhat mysterious, had duly impressed the girl. Yes, they had been good. Now his conduct must back up his words, or he would lose all his gains. Boastingly he had pledged himself to something very serious. Nothing but ridicule could fall on him, if he failed to make good his offer. This meant he must go through, to the bitter end.
"Yes, I will become a thief," he pondered.
Calmer now, he took his way to his tavern, where he ate a peaceful supper, and went home and early to bed. He slept well, with that peace which irrevocable decisions produce in minds long racked by stress and storm. It was noon when he awoke. He got up at once, put on clean clothes and wrote his father a quiet letter that contained nothing except his studies. Then he tied up all his books and went down to the street with them enveloped in a big kerchief.
"They've all got to be sold," thought he. "If I'm caught, I'll need money. If I get away and nothing is ever found out about me, I can get them back, some time."
After having disposed of the books, he went to a fashionable restaurant and had rather afine dinner. In all these little details, so different from the order and simplicity of his usual life, you could have seen a certain sadness of farewell. After dinner, he went to drink coffee on the terrace of the Lion d'Or, and stayed a while there, observing the women. Many, he saw, were beautiful. As yet he had decided nothing definite about what he meant to do. He preferred to let things take their own, impromptu course. Sometimes great battles are best decided off-hand, on the march, in the imminent presence of danger.
At exactly six o'clock he got up, crossed the Calle de Sevilla and went through the Carrera de San Jerónimo toward the Puerta del Sol. The street-lamps and the lights in the shops had not yet begun to burn. It was an April evening; a cool, fresh, damp breeze wafted through the streets. Far to the west, shining in rosy space, Venus was shedding her eternal beams. Darlés went peacefully along, his calm movements in harmony with the perfect equanimity that had taken possession of him. When he reached the Ministerio de la Gobernación, he stopped a while to watch the street-cars, the carriages, the crowds circulating about him. Then the idea that, before long, these peoplewould catch him, rose in his mind once more.
"To-morrow," thought he, "I'll be seeing nothing of all this."
In his eyes gleamed the sadness of a last farewell. It seemed to him he had gone too far, now, to change his resolution of stealing.
A romantic desire, almost a dandified pride, that drove him to make good with the girl, formed the basis of his madness, rather than any carnal desire. This desire, which had at first possessed him, had now evolved into a refined and purely artistic sentiment, a wish to accomplish some heroic deed. At last analysis, merely to get possession of Alicia had become unimportant. The most vital factor, practically the only one now, was to assume in her opinion a splendid heroism. Darlés wanted to show this kind of heroism, which the adventurous soul of woman always admires. He was finding himself on a par with great criminals, with illustrious artists, with multimillionaires who wreck their fortunes in a single night, with every man who steps outside the common, beaten paths. And the poor student, reflecting how the girl would always remember that an honorable man had gone to jail for loveof her, thought himself both happy and well-paid.
Absorbed in these chimerical fancies, Enrique Darlés came to the jeweler's shop in Calle Mayor. Its lights had just been turned on, and now they flung bright radiance across the sidewalk. The boy stopped in front of the window, which was filled with blinding splendor. There, in the middle of the display, was the terrible necklace of emeralds. It was hung about a half-bust of white velvet. Darlés studied it a long time, and at first felt that mingled chill and fear which the sight of firearms will sometimes produce in us. But soon this sensation faded. The green light of the emeralds exalted him. It seemed to exercise a kind of magnetic attraction, resistless as the force of gravitation. Nevertheless, the boy still hesitated. He still understood that in this little space between him and the shop-window a great abyss was yawning. But suddenly he thought:
"Suppose Alicia should see me here, now?"
This idea overthrew his last fears. With a sure hand he opened the shop door. He walked up to the counter. His step was easy and self-possessed. A tall, finely-dressedclerk, with large red mustaches, advanced to meet him.
"What can I show you, sir?" asked the clerk.
With an aplomb that just a moment before would have seemed impossible to him, Enrique answered:
"I'd like to see that emerald necklace in the window."
"Yes, sir."
Darlés glanced about him. He noted that a white-bearded old gentleman—doubtless the proprietor—was closely observing him from the rear of the shop. Already the student had made up his plan of attack. He would snatch the jewels and break for the door. He had left this door ajar, on purpose.
The clerk came back with the necklace, which he laid on the moss-green cloth that covered the show-case. Enrique hardly dared touch it.
"How much?" asked he.
"Fifteen thousand pesetas."
The student clacked his tongue, like a drinker savoring the state and quality of good wine. The clerk added:
"I'm sure you've seen very few emeralds like these."
The white-bearded old gentleman had now come nearer. Saying nothing, he slid his hands into his trouser pockets. His face looked grave and puzzled. You would have thought his merchant soul had scented danger. Darlés gave him a glance. It was not yet too late. He still was honest. There was still time for repentance.
The clerk set out a number of trays, and from these took various necklaces. His way of handling them, of caressing them with careful fingers, of spreading them out on the cloth, all showed his love of jewels. There were diamond, turquoise, sapphire, topaz necklaces.
The student hesitated. A dizzying pleasure, bitter-sweet, enveloped this nearness to crime. He kept asking:
"What's this one worth? And this?"
"This is very cheap. Two thousand pesetas."
"How about this ruby one?"
"Forty-five hundred."
Darlés took them up, studied them carefully, put them down again. Suddenly he felt his cheeks were growing very pale. To give himself countenance he commented:
"This black pearl one is very beautiful."
"Yes, and it's more expensive, too. Ten thousand pesetas."
Suddenly the old gentleman, who till then had uttered no word, exclaimed brusquely:
"Now then, I think you've talked enough!"
He turned to the clerk.
"Look out for these trays," he ordered.
Darlés raised his head, and proudly looked the old man in the eyes, with the hauteur of one still innocent.
"What areyouinterfering for?" he demanded. "What's the idea?"
"We can't waste any more time on you," answered the jeweler. "If I'm not mistaken, you're not overburdened with money."
He turned to his clerk again. The clerk stared in amaze. Imperatively the old man ordered:
"I tell you to put these trays away!"
The student had not yet, perhaps, fully decided to steal. Perhaps something good and sound still lay in his conscience, that might have barred him from fatal temptation at the crucial moment. But the merchant's provoking words spurred him on and made him sin. A spirit of revenge drove him to it. This is no novelty. How many times is crime nothingmore than the logical reaction against injustice!
Beside himself, Enrique stretched out his hand toward the place where lay the emerald necklace. His fingers clutched convulsively. He turned, and with one leap reached the door.
At that second, two shots crackled.
Darlés flung himself into mad, headlong flight toward the Viaducto. At first he heard a voice behind him, screaming:
"Stop him! Stop the thief! Stop thief!"
It was a horrible, nightmare voice. Then came the thunderous tumult of the pursuing mob. Before him, the pedestrians opened out. He saw astonishment and fear in their faces. As he rushed into the Calle de Bordadores, a man brandished a stick and tried to stop him. Darlés veered to the left, and ran up the grade of the Calle Siete de Julio with the speed of a hare.
Some one threw a chair at him, from a doorway. It hardly grazed him, but tripped up his nearest pursuers. When the human hunting-pack, raging and giving tongue, rushed in under the archways of the Plaza Mayor, its menacing tumult echoed louder than ever:
"Thief, thief! Stop thief!"
Beside himself with terror, the student flung himself along. He kept straight ahead, reached the park railing and leaped it with one bound. This saved him. The dim light and the shadows under the trees masked his figure. Still, he kept on running till he came to the fence again, and once more jumped it.
This time as he landed, his knees could no longer hold him up. They doubled, and he almost fell on his face. But he struggled up, once more, and still ran on and on. Now the pursuers' voices sounded far-off, under the echoing archways of the Plaza.
Darlés kept fleeing down the Calle Toledo. He noticed that a good many women were looking at him with uneasiness. One woman cried:
"He's wounded!"
When he reached the Puerta Cerrada, the student drew near the famous cross that gives its name to the square. He could do no more. His legs were collapsing with exhaustion, his heart was bursting, his tongue protruding. A number of women, frightened, crowded about him.
"You're wounded!" they exclaimed. "What's the matter? They've shot you!"
There was no anger in their cries, but only simple pity. The student felt calmer. One of the women had a water-jug.
"Give me a drink!" stammered Enrique. "Water! I'm dying of thirst!"
He raised the lip of the jug to his mouth, and drank in huge swallows. The women kept saying:
"You're wounded. Poor man! You'd better hurry to the hospital!"
To avoid waking suspicion, Darlés answered:
"Yes, I'm on my way there, now."
Then he swallowed a few more mouthfuls, and fled toward the Calle de Segovia. He ran a long, long time, till his last strength was gone. He stopped then, and gathered his wits together. His wet clothes were glued to his body, giving him a disagreeable feeling of cold. His hands were red. What he had believed to be sweat, was blood.
"I'm wounded!" he murmured.
Then he understood what the women at Puerta Cerrada had told him. Just at that moment a slight nausea overcame him, and he had to lean against a wall. Presently he opened his eyes, and looked about him. Hewas in a steep, deserted little alleyway, with humble houses on either hand. Very near, looming up against the black immensity of the sky, appeared the huge mole of El Viaducto—that splendid, sinister height, that bridge spanning the city, whence so many a poor soul had bowed itself down to death in the leap of suicide.
Enrique Darlés began to think again:
"Yes, I'm really wounded."
His ideas became more coherent. He thought of Alicia, of his little room in the Calle de la Ballesta. He felt of his pockets. His fingers closed on the necklace—"Her necklace!"
The student smiled. Unspeakable joy soothed his troubled heart. He sighed, and wiped away a few tears. Alicia was his! The book of his life was written, was at an end.
CANDELAS and Alicia were coming back in a landau from the race-track. The afternoon had been unseasonably chilly, but the sun had shone brightly, and the races had been exciting. Alicia smiled, contented. She had won eight hundred pesetas, and her eyes still beheld the jockeys speeding with dizzy swiftness against the background of the April landscape.
There suddenly, in the last half of the race, a horse had leaped ahead from that party-colored group of red, blue and yellow blouses and of white trousers. A horse had sped away to cross the tape; and she had found herself a winner.
There was something personal, something flattering to her vanity, in this triumph.
"The count's jockey rides like a centaur," she exclaimed. "He's English, isn't he?"
"No, Belgian," Candelas answered.
Alicia hardly remembered, very clearly, where the Low Countries might be. This answer did not satisfy her. But no matter; after all, it was enough for her to know the victorious jockey had come from one of those northern countries where all the men are blond and well-dressed.
Candelas began to explain the blind faith that the count, her friend, had in this remarkable Belgian connoisseur of horses. Then she briefly outlined the brilliant program of travels and pleasures the count and she were planning. Along toward the beginning of May they would go to London, and in June to Paris, where the count was hoping to win thegrand prixat Longchamps. They expected to pass the autumn at Nice.
Alicia answered:
"In September, the little marquis and I will be going to Monte Carlo. You and I simplymustsee each other, there. There's not much fun just with the men, you know. They don't really know how to amuse us."
When the landau reached the Plaza de Castelar, Alicia asked her friend:
"Have you anything on for to-night?"
"No."
"Well then, come to the Teatro Real with me. They're going to give the divine Bizet'sCarmen, and Nasi and Pacteschi are going to sing. Enough said!"
Candelas accepted.
"And now," said Alicia, "I want to go home, to see if any important message has come. Then I'll take you home, dear. You can change your dress and we'll go get Manuel, so he'll invite us out to supper."
The carriage stopped before Alicia's door. Teodora, who had been on the balcony, hurried down. She had a letter in her hand.
"This came for you," said she.
"Who from?"
"From Señor Enrique."
"Enrique!" repeated Alicia, surprised. And she tore the envelope with feverish haste. She read:
"Come to my room, I beg you. I must see you to-day, without fail."
The only signature was "E. D."
Alicia seemed to ponder. She peered at her friend.
"Do you understand this?" asked she. "It's from Enrique Darlés. Remember him? A young chap—Manuel's friend."
Then she asked Teodora:
"Who brought this?"
"An old woman."
"What kind of a looking woman?"
"I don't know. Well—she looked like a janitress."
Alicia lacked decision how to act. The curt authority of those few words had created a good deal of an impression on her. This was the letter of a man; children cannot speak thus. An impatient hand, perhaps a desperate one, had written with vigorous letters the one word, "Urgent," on the envelope.
"What shall we do?" asked she.
"When he summons you, that way," judged Candelas, "something serious must have happened to him. Well——"
Alicia looked at her watch. It was just six. Without upsetting the program for the evening, she could still afford the luxury of a little condescension. She ordered the coachman:
"Number X, Calle Ballesta. Hurry!"
For a moment the two young women remained silent. Suddenly Candelas exclaimed:
"Have you seen what the papers have been saying about the robbery in Calle Mayor, last night?"
"No. What about it?"
"Oh, a jeweler's shop was robbed."
"A jeweler's!" repeated Alicia.
Her face assumed an expression of unspeakable anxiety and alarm. She remembered the emerald necklace she had spoken of, so often; and she remembered the evening, too, when Candelas and she had come across Enrique standing motionless in front of the shop window. Suddenly the student's sad face seemed to rise up in her memory. She seemed to be hearing his last words: "You've never proved me. You don't know what kind of a man I am!" And those words, that she had never paid any attention to, now sounded in her ears with prophetic tones.
"What did they steal?" she asked.
"I can't say. I only just glanced over the paper."
"And who's the thief?"
"No one knows."
"Haven't they caught him?"
"No. He was too quick for them."
"And he got away?"
"Yes."
The mystery surrounding the criminal increased Alicia's uneasiness. Still, it was an agreeable sensation, which caused her a certainvanity. "Suppose the robbery really has been done for me!" she thought. She felt a proud, unhealthy emotion, like that of man when he meets his friends and they know some woman has killed herself for love of him.
Candelas, who could read Alicia's thoughts, exclaimed:
"Strange if the criminal were Enrique Darlés!"
"I don't think it could be!"
"Well, now—it might."
"That would be a terribly bad thing for him to have done."
"Of course!"
"But if he really did do it, I don't care! Let the fool suffer for it. DidItell him to? When you come right down to it, even if I had, what the devil? The one that does a thing is more to blame than the one that asks him to!"
The carriage stopped, and Alicia and Candelas got out. They made their way in under a poverty-stricken doorway. Candelas called:
"Janitress! Janitress!"
No answer.
"Follow me," said Alicia. "I know the way."
She started along, daintily holding up her pearl-hued petticoat and shaking the big plumeof her hat with a graceful motion. They went through a damp, ugly yard, then another, and began to climb a high stairway. The silken frou-frou of their skirts and the tinkling of their bangled bracelets broke the stillness. They reached the fourth story, and stopped in front of a door that stood ajar. Alicia tapped with her knuckles. No one answered. She knocked again. A voice, the voice of Enrique, feebly answered from within:
"Come!"
The girls found themselves in a dark room that stank of blood. Alicia could not repress a coarse exclamation of disgust.
"How sickening! Phew!" she cried. "What's this smell?"
At the end of the room, the silhouette of the bed was dimly visible. From that bed, Enrique Darlés stammered:
"There, on the little table—you'll find matches. Light—the lamp."
Candelas stood motionless, near the door, afraid of stumbling over something. When Alicia had made a light, the two friends cast a rapid glance about the room. The only furniture was a writing-table, a bureau with a looking-glass on it, and, along the walls, halfa dozen rush-bottomed chairs. The student was lying, fully dressed, on the bed. Against the whiteness of the pillow, his crisp and very black hair lay motionless. He opened his eyes, a moment, and then, very slowly, closed them again. Over his beardless face, saddened by the pallor of his lips, wandered the ethereal, luminous whiteness of the last agony.