Thus spoke Amadeo Zureda, in his chivalric attempt not to throw even the lightest shadow on the good name of the woman he adored. Who could have acted more nobly than he? The state's attorney arraigned him in crushing terms, implacably.
And the judge gave him twenty years at hard labor.
SCOURGED by poverty, which was not long in arriving, Rafaela had to move away to a little village of Castile, where she had relatives. These were poor farming people, making a hard fight for existence. By way of excuse for her coming to them, the young woman made up a story. She said that Amadeo had got into some kind of trouble with his employers, had been discharged and had gone to Argentina, for there he had heard engineers got excellent pay. After that, she had decided to leave Madrid, where food and lodging were very dear. She ended her tale judiciously:
"As soon as I hear from Amadeo that he's got a good job, I'm going out there to him."
Her relatives believed her, took pity on her and found her work. Every day, with the first light of morning, Rafaela went down to the river to wash. The river was about half a kilometer from the little village. By washing and ironing, at times, or again by pickingup wood in the country and selling it, Rafaela managed, with hard, persistent toil, to make four or fivereals[C]a day.
[C]Twenty or twenty-five cents.
Two years passed. By this time the neighbors were beginning to find out from the mail-carrier that the addresses on all the letters coming to Rafaela were written by the same hand and all bore the postmark of Ceuta. This news got about and set things buzzing. The young woman put an end to folks' gossip by very sensibly confessing the truth that Amadeo was in prison there. She said a gambling-scrape had got him into trouble. In her confession she adopted a resigned and humble manner, like a model wife who, in spite of having suffered much, nevertheless forgives the man she loves, and pardons all the wrongs done her. People called her unfortunate. They tattled a while, and then took pity on her and accepted her.
Worn out by time and hardships, her former beauty—piquant in a way, though a bit common—soon faded away. The sun tanned her skin; the dust of the country roads got into her hair, once so clean and wavy; hard work toughened and deformed her hands, which inbetter days she had well cared for. She gave over wearing corsets, and this hastened the ruin of her body. Slowly her breasts grew flaccid, her abdomen bulged, her whole figure took on heavy fullnesses. And her clothes, too, bit by bit got torn and spoiled. Her petticoats and stockings, her neat patent-leather boots bought in happier days, disappeared sadly, one after the other. Rafaela, who had lost all desire to be coquettish or to please men, let herself slide into poverty; and, in the end, she sank so low as to slop round the village streets, barefooted.
This disintegration of her will coincided with a serious loss and confusion of her memory. The poor woman began to forget everything; and the few recollections she still retained grew so disjointed, so vague that they no longer were able to arouse any stimulating emotion in her. She had never really loved Berlanga. What she had felt for him had been only a kind of caprice, an unreasoning will o' the wisp passion; but this amorous dalliance had soon faded out. And the only reason she had kept on with the silversmith had been because she had been afraid of him and had been weak-willed. The smith, moreover, had become jealous and had often beaten her. Thus his tragic death, far from causing her any grief, had come to her as an agreeable surprise. It had quieted her, rested her, freed her.
If the punishment of Zureda and his confinement in prison walls wounded her deeply, it was not on account of her broken love for the engineer. No, rather was it because this disaster had disturbed the easy, comfortable rhythm of her life and because the exile of her husband had meant misery for her, poverty, the irremediable overthrow of her whole future.
After the crisis which had wrecked her home, Rafaela—hardly noticing it, herself—had grown stupid, old and of defective memory. The many violent and dramatic shocks she had borne in so short a time had annihilated her mediocre spirit. She suffered no remorse and had no very clear idea as to whether her past conduct had been good or bad. It was as if her conscience had sunk away into unthinking stupor. The only thing that still remained in her, unchanged, was the maternal instinct of living and working for little Manolo, so that he, too, might live.
True enough, on certain days the wretched woman drank deeply the cup of gall, as certain memories returned. Now and then there came to her a poisoned vision of black recollections that rose about her, stifling her. This usually happened down at the river-bank, while she was washing, at times of mental abstraction caused by her monotonous and purely mechanical toil. Then her eyes would fill with tears, which slowly rolled down her cheeks and fell upon her hands, now reddened by hard labor and the cold caress of the water. The other washwomen, all about her, observed her grief, and fell to whispering:
"See how she's crying?"
"Poor thing!"
"Poor? Well—it was her own doing. Fate is just. It gives everybody what they deserve. Why didn't she look out who she was marrying?"
From time to time away down at the end of the valley, shut in behind an undulating line of blue hills, a train passed by. Its strident whistle, enlarged and flung about hither and yon by echoes, broke the silence of the plain. Some few of the younger washwomen usually sat up on their heels, then, and followed withtheir eyes the precipitate on-rushing of the train. You could behold a dreaming sadness in their eyes, a vision of far-off, unseen cities. But Rafaela never raised her head to look at the train. The shrieking whistle tore at her ears with the vibration of a familiar voice. She kept on washing, while her tear-wet eyes seemed to be peering at the mysteries of forgetfulness in the passing water.
Despite the great physical and moral decline of the poor woman, she did not fail to waken thoughts and hopes in a certain man. To her aspired a fellow named Benjamin, by trade a shoemaker. He was already turning fifty years, was a widower and had two sons in the army.
This Benjamin's affairs went along only so-so, because not all the people of the village could afford to wear shoes, and those who could afford them did not feel any great need of wearing fine or new ones. Rafaela washed and mended his clothes, and ironed a shirt for him, every saint's-day. He paid her little, but regularly, for these services; and gradually friendship grew up between them. This mutual liking, which was at first impersonaland calm, finally grew in the shoemaker's heart till it became the fire of love.
"If you were only willing," Señor Benjamin often said to Rafaela, "we could come to an understanding. You're all alone. So am I. Well, why not live together?"
She smiled, with that disillusion which comes to a soul that life has bit by bit ravaged of all its dreams.
"You're crazy to talk that way, Benjamin," she would answer.
"Why?"
"Oh, because."
"Come now, explain that! Why am I crazy?"
Rafaela did not want to annoy the man, because she would thus lose a customer, and so she gave him an evasive answer:
"Why, I'm already old."
"Not for me!"
"I'm ugly!"
"That's a matter of taste. You suitmeto a T."
"Thanks. But, what would people say? And suppose we had any children, Benjamin! What would they think of us?"
"Oh, there's a thousand ways to cover it allup. You just take a shine to me, and I'll fix everything else."
Rafaela promised to think it over; and every night when she came home from work, Benjamin jokingly asked her, from his door:
"Well, neighbor, how about it?"
"I'm still thinking it over," she answered, with a laugh.
"It seems to be pretty hard for you to decide."
"It surely is!"
"Yes, but are you going to get it settled?"
"How doIknow, Benjamin? Sometimes I think one thing, and sometimes another. Time will tell!"
But the soul of Rafaela lay dead. Nothing could revive her illusions. The shoemaker, after many efforts, had to give her up. And always after that, when he saw her pass along, he would heave a sigh in an absurd, romantic manner.
On the first of every month, Rafaela always wrote a four-page letter to Zureda, containing all the petty details of her quiet, humdrum life. It was by means of these letters, written on commercial cap, that the prisoner learned the rapid physical growth of little Manolo. Bythe time the boy had reached twelve years he had become rebellious, quarrelsome and idle. He was still in the pot-hook class, at school. Stone-throwing was one of his favorite habits. One day he injured another boy of his age so severely that the constable gathered him in, and nothing but the fatherly intervention of the priest saved him from a night in the lock-up.
Rafaela always ended up the paragraphs thus, in which she described the fierce wildness of the boy:
"I tell you plainly, I can't manage him."
This seemed a confession of weariness, that outlined both a threat and a prophecy.
The prisoner wrote her, in one of his letters:
"The last jail pardon, that you may have read about in the papers, let out many of my companions. I had no such luck. But, anyhow, they cut five years off my time. So there are only six years more between us."
Regularly the letters came and went between Rafaela and the prisoner at Ceuta. Two years more drew to their close.
But evil fortune had not yet grown weary of stamping its heel on Amadeo Zureda's honest shoulders.
"Please forgive me, dear Rafaela," the prisoner wrote again, after a while, "the new sorrow I must cause you. But by the life of our son I swear I could not avoid the misfortune which most expectedly is going to prolong our separation, for I don't know how long.
"As you may guess, there are few saints among the rough crowd here, that are scraped up from all the prisons in Spain. Though I have to live among them, I don't consider them my equals. For that reason I try to keep away from them, and have nothing to do with their rough mirth or noisy quarrels. Well, it happened that the end of last week a smart-Aleck of a fellow came in, an Andalusian. He had been given twelve years for killing one man and badly injuring another. As soon as this fellow saw me, he took me for a boob he could make sport of, and lost no chance of poking fun at me. I kept quiet, and—so as not to get into any mix-up with him—turned my back on him.
"Yesterday, at dinner, he tried to pick a quarrel. Some of the other prisoners laughed and set him on to me.
"'Look here, Amadeo,' said he. 'What are you in for?'
"I answered, looking him square in the eyes:
"'For having killed a man.'
"'And what did you kill him for?' he insisted.
"I said nothing, and then he added something very coarse and ugly that I won't repeat. It's enough for you to know your name was mixed up in it. That's why your name was the last word his mouth ever uttered. I drew my knife—you know that in spite of all the care they take, and all their searches, we all go armed—and cried:
"'Look out for yourself, now, because I'm going to kill you!'
"Then we fought, and it was a good fight, too, because he was a brave man. But his courage was of no use to him. He died on the spot.
"Forgive me, dearest Rafaela of my soul, and make our boy forgive me, too. This makes my situation much worse, because now I shall have another trial and I don't know what sentence I'll get. I realize it was very bad of me to kill this man, but if I hadn'tdone it he would have killed me, which would have been much worse for all of us."
Several months after, Zureda wrote again:
"I have been having my trial. Luckily all the witnesses testified in my behalf, and this, added to the good opinion the prison authorities have of me, has greatly improved my position. The indictment was terrible, but I'm not worrying much about that. To-morrow I shall know my sentence."
All the letters of Amadeo Zureda were like this, peaceful and noble, seemingly dictated by the most resigned stoicism. He never let anything find its way into them which might remind Rafaela of her fault. In these pages, filled with a strong, even writing, there was neither reproach, dejection, nor despairing impatience. They seemed to be the admirable reflection of an iron will which had been taught by misfortune—the most excellent mother of all knowledge—to understand the dour secret of hoping and of waiting.
THE very same day when Amadeo Zureda got out of jail, he received from Rafaela a letter which began thus:
"Little Manolo was twenty years old, yesterday."
The one-time engineer left the boat from Africa at Valencia, passed the night at an inn not far from the railroad station, and early next morning took the train which was to carry him to Ecks. After so many years of imprisonment, the old convict felt that nervous restlessness, that lack of self-confidence, that cruel fear of destiny which men ill-adapted to their environment are accustomed to feel every time life presents itself to them under a new aspect. Defeat at last makes men cowardly and pessimistic. They recall everything they have suffered and the uselessness of all their struggles, and they think: "This, that I am now beginning, will turn out badly for me too, like all the rest."
Amadeo Zureda had altered greatly. His white mustache formed a sad contrast with his wrinkled face, tanned by the African sun. The expression of an infinite pain seemed to deepen the peaceful gaze of his black eyes. The vertical wrinkle in his brow had deepened until it seemed a scar. His body, once strong and erect, had grown thin; and as he walked he bent somewhat forward.
The rattling uproar of the train and the swift succession of panoramas now unrolling before his eyes recalled to the memory of Zureda the joys of those other and better times when he had been an engineer—joys now largely blotted out by the distance of long-gone years. He remembered Pedro, the Andalusian fireman, and those two engines, "Sweetie" and "Nigger," on which he had worked so long. An inner voice seemed asking him: "What can have become of all this?"
He also thought about his house. He mentally built up again its façade, beheld its balconies and evoked the appearance of each room. His memory, clouded by the grim and brutalizing life of the prison, had never dipped so profoundly into the past, nor had it ever brushed away the dust from his old memoriesand so clearly reconstructed them. He thought about his son, about Rafaela and Manolo Berlanga, seeming to behold their faces and even their clothing just as they had been long ago; and he felt surprised that revocation of the silversmith's face should produce no pain in him. At that moment and in spite of the irreparable injury which had been done him, he felt no hatred of Berlanga. All the rancor which until then had possessed him seemed to sink down peacefully into an unknown and ineffable emotion of pity and forgetfulness. The poor convict once more examined his conscience, and felt astonished that he could no longer find any poison there. May it not be, after all, that liberty reforms a man?
At Játiva a man got into the car, a man already old, whose face seemed to the former engineer to bear some traces of a friendly appearance. The new-comer also, on his side, looked at Zureda as if he remembered him. Thus both of them little by little silently drew together. In the end they studied each other with warm interest, as if sure of having sometime known each other before. Amadeo was the first to speak.
"It seems to me," said he, "that we have already seen each other somewhere, years ago."
"That was just what I was thinking, myself," answered the other.
"The fact is," went on the engineer, "I'm sure we must have talked to each other, many times."
"Yes, yes!"
"We must have been friends, sometime."
"Probably."
And they continued looking at each other, enwrapped by the same thought. Zureda asked:
"Have you ever lived in Madrid?"
"Yes, ten or twelve years."
"Where?"
"Near the Estación del Norte, where I was an employee."
"Say no more!" exclaimed Zureda. "I worked for the same company, myself. I was an engineer."
"On what line?"
"Madrid to Bilbao."
Slowly and silently memories began to rise and group themselves together in the enormous, black forgetfulness of those twenty years. Amadeo Zureda took out his tobacco-box and offered tobacco to his companion. Whatever seemed to have been lacking toawaken memory, in the other's appearance or in his voice, was now instantly supplied as the engineer saw him take the fine-cut, roll a cigarette, light it and afterward thrust it into the left corner of his mouth. The memories of the old convict were flooded with light.
"Enough of this!" cried he. "You are Don Adolfo Moreno!"
"That's right, I'm the man!"
"You were a conductor on the Asturias line when I worked on the one running to Bilbao. Don't you remember me? Amadeo Zureda?"
"Yes, indeed!"
The two men embraced each other.
"Why, I used to say 'thee' and 'thou' to you!" cried Don Adolfo.
"Yes, yes, I remember that, too. I remember everything, now. We were good friends once, eh? Well, time seems to have made some pretty big changes in both of us."
When the joy of the first moments of meeting had been somewhat allayed, the former conductor and the old engineer grew sad as they recalled the many bitter experiences life had dealt them.
"I've already heard of your misfortune," said Don Adolfo, "and I was mighty sorry tohear about it. Sometimes a youthful moment of madness, that lasts only a minute, will cost a man his whole future. Why did you do it?"
Stolidly Zureda answered:
"Oh, it was a quarrel over cards."
"Yes, that's so; they told me about it."
Amadeo breathed easy. The conductor knew nothing; and it seemed probable that many others should be as ignorant as he about what had driven him to kill Manolo. Don Adolfo asked:
"Where have you been?"
"At Ceuta."
"A long time?"
"Twenty years and some months."
"The deuce! You've just come from down there?"
"Yes, sir."
"It's evident to me," continued Don Adolfo, "you've suffered a great deal more than I have; but you mustn't think I have been lucky, either. Life is a wild animal that drags down every one who tries to grapple with it, and yet people keep right on struggling. I'm a widower. My poor wife has been dust for nearly fifteen years. The eldest of my three daughters got married, and both the othersdied. Now I'm on a pension and live at Ecks with a sister-in-law, the widow of my brother Juan. I don't think you remember him."
Little by little, and with many beatings about the bush, because confidence is a timid quality which soon takes flight from those scourged by misfortune, the ex-convict told his plans. He hoped to establish himself at Ecks, with his wife. He had brought about two thousand pesetas from prison, with which he hoped to buy a little house and a bit of good land.
"I don't know beans about farming," he added, "but that's like everything else. You learn by doing. Moreover, my son, who has grown up in the town, will help me a great deal."
Don Adolfo wrinkled his brow with a grave and reflective expression, like a man who is remembering something.
"From what you say," he exclaimed, "I think I know who your wife is."
The old engineer felt shame. The bleeding image of his misfortune was hard to wipe from his memory. The mention of his wife had freshened it. He answered;
"You probably do know her. The village must be very small."
"Very small, indeed. What's your wife's name?"
"Rafaela."
"Yes, yes," answered Don Adolfo. "Rafaela's the woman. I know her well. As for Manolo, your son, I know him too."
Amadeo Zureda trembled. He felt afraid, and cold. For a few moments he remained silent, without knowing what to say. Don Adolfo continued with rough frankness:
"Your Manolo is a pretty tough nut, and he gives his poor mother a mighty hard time. She's a saint, that woman. I think he even beats her. Well, I won't tell you any more."
Pale and trembling, putting down a great desire to weep which had just come over him, Amadeo asked:
"Is it possible? Can he be as bad as that?"
"I tell you he's a dandy!" repeated Don Adolfo. "If he died, the devil would think a good while before taking him. He's a drunkard and a gambler, always chasing women and fighting. He's the limit!" After a moment he added: "Really, he don't seem like a son of yours, at all."
Amadeo Zureda made no answer. Looking out of the car window, he tried to distract himself with the landscape. The old conductor's words had crushed him. He had been ignorant of all this, for Rafaela in her letters had said nothing about it. He was astonished at realizing how evil destiny was attacking him, denying him that rest which every hard-working man, no matter how poor, is at last entitled to.
Retracing the hateful pathway of his memories, he reached the source of all his misfortunes. Twenty years before, when Señor Tomás had told him of the relations between Rafaela and Manolo, he too had declared: "They say he beats her."
What connection might there be between these statements, which seemed to weave a nexus of hate between the son and the dead lover? Once more the words of the old conductor sounded in his ears, and prophetically took hold upon his soul:
"Manolo does not appear to be your son."
Without having read Darwin, Amadeo Zureda instinctively sought explanation and consolation in the laws of heredity, for the pain now consuming him. Never had he, even whena young fellow, been given to drink or cards. He had not been fond of the women, nor had he been a meddler and bully. And how had such degradations been able to engraft themselves into the blood of his son?
Don Adolfo and Zureda got out at the station of Ecks. Afternoon was drawing to its close. On the platform there were only six or seven persons. The former conductor waved his hand to a woman and to a young man, drawing near. He cried:
"There are your folks!"
This time seeing Rafaela, Amadeo did not hesitate. It was she indeed, despite her protuberant abdomen, her sad fat face, and her white hair. It was she!
"Rafaela!" cried he. He would have known her among a thousand other women. They fell into each other's arms, weeping with that enormous joy and pain felt by all who part in youth and meet again in old age, with the whole of life behind them. After the greeting with his wife was at an end, the engineer embraced Manolo.
"What a fine fellow you are!" he stammered, when the beating of his heart, growing a little more calm, let him speak.
Don Adolfo said good-by.
"I'm in a hurry. We'll see each other to-morrow!" He saluted, and walked away.
Amadeo Zureda, with Rafaela at his right and Manolo at his left, quitted the station.
"Is the town very far away?" asked he.
"Hardly two kilometers," she answered.
"All right then, let's walk."
Slowly they made their way down the road that stretched, winding, between two vast reaches of brown, plowed land. Far in the distance, lighted by the dying sun, the little hamlet was visible; that miserable collection of huts about which Zureda had thought so many times, dreaming that there he should find the sweet refuge of peaceful forgetfulness and of redemption.
AFTER Amadeo came to Ecks, Rafaela went no longer to the river. The former engineer was unwilling that his wife should toil. They had enough for all to live on for a while, with what he had made in prison. They spoke not of the past. You might almost have thought they had forgotten it. Why remember? Zureda had forgiven everything. Rafaela, moreover, was no longer the same. The gay happiness of her eyes had gone dead; the waving blackness of her hair and the girlish quickness of her body had vanished. There was a melancholy abandonment, heavy with remorse, in her sad and flabby face, in the humility of her look, in the slow, round fatness of her whole body.
The ex-convict followed the advice of Don Adolfo and gave up all idea of devoting himself to farming. In the best street of the village, near the church, he set up a general repair-shop where he took in both wood and ironwork. There he shod a mule, mended a cart or put a new coulter to a plow, with equal facility.
He had not been established long when his modest little business began to pick up and be a real money-maker. Very soon his customers increased. The disquieting story of his imprisonment seemed forgotten. Everybody liked him, for he was good, affable and pleasant, in a melancholy way. He paid his little debts promptly, and worked hard.
Zureda felt life once more grow calm. Slowly his future, which till then had looked stormy, commenced to appear a land of hospitality, comfortable and good. The threat of to-morrow, which makes so many men uneasy, had ceased to be a problem for him. His future was already founded, laid out, foreseen. The fifteen or twenty years that still might remain to him, he hoped to pass in the loving accumulation of a little fortune to leave his Rafaela.
He got up with the sun and worked industriously all day, driven by this ambition. In the evening he took a dog that Don Adolfo had given him, and went wandering in the outskirts of the village. One of his favorite walks was out to the cemetery. He often pushedopen the old gate, which never was quite closed, and in the burial-ground sat himself down upon a broken mill-stone which happened to be there. Seated thus, he liked to smoke a cigarette.
Many crosses were blackening with age, in the tall grass that covered the earth. The old man often called up memories of the time when he had been an engineer. He remembered the prison, too, and his tired will seemed to tremble. Peacefully he looked about him. Here, sometime, would be his bed. What rest, what silence! And he breathed deep, enthralled by the rare and calming joy of willingness to die. Here inside the old wall of mud bricks, reddened by the setting sun—here in this garden of forgetfulness—how well one ought to sleep!
Only one trouble disturbed and embittered the peaceful decline of Amadeo Zureda. This trouble was his son, Manolo. Through an excess of fatherly love, doubtless mistaken, he had the year before got Manolo exempted from military service. The boy's wild, vicious character was fanatically rebellious against all discipline. In vain Zureda sought to teach him a trade. Threats and entreaties, as wellas all kinds of wise advice, were shattered against the invincibly gypsy-like will of the young fellow.
"If you don't want to support me," Manolo often used to say, "let me go. Kick me out. I'll get by, on my own hook."
Often and often Manolo vanished from the little town. He stayed away for days at a time, engaged in mysterious adventures. People coming in from neighboring villages reported him as given over to gaming. One night he showed up with a serious wound in the groin, a deep knife-stab.
"Who did that to you?" demanded Zureda.
The youth answered:
"Nobody's business.Iknow who it is. Sometime or other he'll get his, all right!"
To save himself from police investigation, Zureda said nothing about it. For some weeks, Manolo kept quiet. But early one morning a couple of rural guards found the body of a man on the river-bank. His body was covered with stabs. All investigations to find the murderer were fruitless. The crime remained unavenged. Only Amadeo—who just a bit after the discovery of the body had discovered Manolo washing a blood-stained handkerchiefin a water-jar—was certain that his son had done this murder.
Once more the sinister words of Don Adolfo recurred to his mind, bruising him, maddening him, seeming to bore into his very brain:
"He does not seem to be your son, at all!"
Amadeo pondered this, and decided it was true. The boy did not seem his. Manolo's outlaw way of living did not stop here. Taking advantage of his mother's love and of the quiet disposition of Amadeo, almost every day he showed the very greatest need of money.
"I've got to have a hundred pesetas," he would say. "I've justgotto have them! If you people don't come across, well, all right! I'll get them, some way. But perhaps you'll be sorry then, you didn't give them to me!"
He was mad for enjoyment. When his mother tried to warn and advise him, saying: "Why don't you work, you young wretch? Don't you see how your father does?"—he would retort:
"I don't callthatliving, to work! I'd rather go hang myself, than live the way the old man lives!"
You would have thought Rafaela was hisslave, by the lack of decency and respect he showed her. When he called her, he would hardly condescend to look at her at all. He spoke little to his father, and what he said was rough and harsh. The worst boy in the world could not have acted with more insolence. His wild spirit, lusting pleasure, seemed to burn with an instinctive flame of hate.
One night when Amadeo came home from the Casino where he and Don Adolfo, with the druggist and a few other such-like worthies, were wont to meet every Saturday, he found the door of his shop ajar. This astonished him. He raised his voice and began to call:
"Manolo! You, Manolo!"
Rafaela answered him, from the back room of the house:
"He's not here."
"Do you know whether he's going to come back soon? I want to know, before locking up."
A short silence followed. After a bit, Rafaela answered:
"You'd better lock up, anyhow."
There seemed to be something like a sob of grief in the voice of the poor woman. The old engineer, alarmed by a presentiment of something terrible, strode through the shop and went on into the house. Rafaela was sitting in front of the stove, in the kitchen, her hands humbly crossed on her lap, her eyes full of tears, her white hair rumpled up, as if some parricide hand had furiously seized her head. Zureda took hold of his wife by the shoulders and forced her to get up.
"What—what's happened?" he stammered.
Rafaela's nose was all bloody, her forehead was bruised and her hands bore lacerations.
"What's the matter with you?" repeated the engineer.
Old and dull as were his eyes, now they blazed up again with that red lightning of death which, twenty years before, had sent him to prison. Rafaela was terrified, and tried to lie out of it.
"It's nothing, Amadeo," she stammered. "Nothing, I tell you. Let me tell you! I—I fell—that's the living truth!"
But Zureda shook the truth out of her with threats, almost with violence.
"Manolo's been beating you, eh? He has, hasn't he?"
She began to sob, still trying to deny it, not wanting to accuse her heart's darling. Theold engineer repeated, trembling with rage:
"He beat you, eh? What?"
Rafaela took a long time to answer. She was afraid to speak, but finally she confessed everything.
"Yes, yes, he did. Oh—it's terrible!"
"What did he beat you for?"
"Because he wanted money."
"God! The swine!"
The rage and pain of the old convict burst out in a leonine roar, that filled the kitchen.
"He told you that?" demanded Amadeo. "Said he wanted money?"
"Yes."
"How much?"
"Twenty-five pesetas. I refused as long as I could. But what could I do? Oh, if you'd seen him then, you wouldn't have known him. I was awfully scared—thought he was going to kill me——"
As she said this, she covered her eyes with her hands. She seemed to be shutting out from them, together with the ugly vision of what had just happened, some other sight—the sight of something horrible, something long-past, something quite the same.
Zureda, afraid of showing the tumultuousrage in his heart, said nothing more. The most ominous memories crowded his mind. A long, long time ago, before he had gone to jail, Don Tomás in the course of an unforgettable conversation had told him that Manolo Berlanga maltreated Rafaela. And all these years afterward, when he was once more a free man, Don Adolfo had said the same thing about young Manolo. Remembering this strange agreement of opinions, Amadeo Zureda felt a bitter and inextinguishable hate against the whole race of the silversmith—a race accursed, it seemed, which had come into the world only to hurt and wound him in his dearest affections.
Next morning the old man, who had hardly slept more than an hour or two, woke early.
"What time is it?" asked he.
Rafaela had already risen. She answered:
"Almost six."
"Has Manolo come back?"
"Not yet."
The old engineer got out of bed, dressed as usual and went down to his shop. Rafaela kept watch on him. The apparent calm of the old man looked suspicious. Noon came, and Manolo did not return for dinner. Nightdrew on, nor did he come back to sleep. Zureda and his wife went to bed early. A few days drifted along.
Sunday morning, Zureda was sitting at the door of his shop. It was just eleven. Women, some with mantillas, others with but a simple kerchief knotted about their heads, were going to mass. High up in the Gothic steeple, the bells were swinging, gay and clangorous. A neighbor, passing, said to the old engineer:
"Well, Manolo's showed up."
"When?" asked Zureda, phlegmatically.
"Last night."
"Where did you see him?"
"At Honorio's inn."
"A great one, that boy is! He's certainly some fine lad! Never came nearme!"
The day drew on, without anything happening. Cautiously the engineer guarded against telling Rafaela that their son had returned. A little while before supper, giving her the excuse that Don Adolfo was waiting for him at the Casino, Zureda left the house and made his way to the inn where Manolo was wont to meet his rough friends. There he found him, indeed, gaming with cards.
"I've got something to say to you," said he.
The young man threw his cards on the table and got up. He was tall, slim and good-looking; and in the thin line of his lips and the penetrant gaze of his greenish eyes lay something bold, defiant.
The two men went out into the street, and, saying no word, walked to the outskirts of the town. When Amadeo thought they had come to a good place, he stopped and looked his son fair in the face.
"I've brought you out here," said he, "to tell you you're never coming back to my house. Understand me?"
Manolo nodded "Yes."
"I'm throwing you out," continued the old man. "Get that, too! I'm throwing you out, because I won't deal with a dog like you. I won't have one anywhere around! I tell you this not as father to son, but as one man to another, so you can come back at me if you want to. Understand? I'm ready for you! That's why I've brought you 'way out here."
As he spoke, slowly, his stern spirit caught fire. His cheeks grew pale, and in his jacket pockets his fists knotted. Manolo's savage blood began to boil, as well.
"Don't make me say anything, you!" he flung at his father.
He turned as if to walk away. His voice, his gesture, the scornful shrug of his shoulders, with which he seemed to underscore his words, all were those of a ruffian and a bully. Anybody would have said that the tough, swaggering silversmith lived again, in him. Zureda controlled his anger, and began once more:
"If you want to fight, you'll be a fool to wait till to-morrow. I'm ready for it, now."
"Crazy, you?" demanded the youth.
"No!"
"Well, you act it!"
"You're wrong. I know all aboutyou—I know you've been beating your mother. And you can't pay for a thing like that even with every drop of your blood. No, sir! Not even the last drop of pig's blood you've got in your body would pay for that!"
Amadeo Zureda was afraid of himself. He had begun to shiver. All the hate that, long ago, had flung him upon Berlanga, now had burst forth again in a fresh, strong, overwhelming torrent.
Suddenly Manolo stepped up to his father and seized him by the lapel.
"You going to shut up?" he snarled, in rage. "Or are you bound to drive me to it?"
Zureda's answer was a smash in the face. Then the two men fell upon each other, first with their fists, presently with knives. At that moment the old man saw in the face of the man he had believed his son, the same expression of hate that twenty years ago had distorted the features of Manolo Berlanga. Those eyes, that mouth all twisted into a grimace of ferocity, that slim and feline body now trembling with rage, all were like the silversmith's. The look of the father came back again in that of the son, as exactly as if both faces had been poured in the same mold.
And for the first time, after so long a time, the old engineer clearly understood everything.
Annihilated by the realization of this new disaster, no longer having any heart to defend himself, the wretched man let his arms fall. And just at this moment Manolo, beside himself with rage, plunged the fatal blade into his breast.
Now with his vengeance complete, the parricide took to flight.
Amadeo Zureda, dying, was carried to thehospital. There, that same night, Don Adolfo came to see him. The good neighbor's grief was terrible, even to the point of the grotesque.
"Is it true, what people are saying?" he asked, weeping. "Is it true?"
The wounded man had hardly strength enough to press his hand a very little.
"Good-by, Adolfo," he stammered. "Now I know what I—had to know. You told me, but I—couldn't believe it. But now I know you—were right. Manolo was not—my son——"
THE first, motley spirit of the city. He wanted to behold many things, to school himself, strengthen himself with all these new impressions. Above all he wanted to feel the life-currents of Madrid beating about his migratory feet.
A few minutes before he had been sitting up there in the "peanut gallery" of the Teatro Real. And from that vulgar place he had beheld the theater with its vast ranges of seats and its boxes all drenched under the blinding dazzle of hundreds of electric lights. The theater had looked to him like some rare and beautiful garden; or maybe it had been a kind of gigantic nosegay, where the sparkling diamonds on women's throats had seemed dew-drops caught on great silk petals, on glossy velvets, on white, bare shoulders.
So entirely absorbed had he been in this spectacle that he had hardly paid any attention at all to what the orchestra and the actors had been about. Every other emotion had been shut from his soul by these dazzling sight-impressions, that had never wearied him. The wonderful, human garden spread out below him had exhaled rare perfumes. A sensual and soporific kind of vapor had risen all about him—an incense blent of the odors of new-mown hay, of jasmine, musk and Parmesan violets, of daintily-bathed women's flesh, of wonderful lingerie. And he had studied all this luminous picture, resplendent as the climax of a brilliant play. Above all he had studied the women, with their sensuous bodies; their unashamed bosoms that had been the targets of analytical eagerness through many opera-glasses; their gay and laughing faces, whereof the beauty had been enhanced by the placid security of wealth. He had observed their deftly combed and curled little heads, their jewel-laden hands—hands that had waved big feather-fans to and fro over the gauzy stuff of their gowns.
Enrique wanted to see all this wonderful world at close range, so he went down to thefoyer. And there he stopped, just a bit ashamed of himself. For the first time he was beginning to realize that his out-of-date slouch hat, his skimpy black suit that made him look like a high-school boy, and his old boots that needed a shine were greatly out of place. He felt that his flowing necktie, which he had tried to knot up with student-like carelessness, was just as ugly as all the rest of him. Correctly dressed men were passing all about him, with elegant frock-coats that bore flowers in their buttonholes and with impeccable Tuxedos. Women were regally trailing grosgrain and watered-silk skirts over the soft, red carpet. It all seemed a majestic symphony of silks, brocades and splendid furs, of wonderful ankles glimpsed through the perverse mystery of open-work stockings, of fascinating adornments, of bracelets whose bangles tinkled their golden song on the ermine whiteness of soft arms.
Abashed, feeling himself wholly out of place, young Darlés self-consciously strolled over to look at a bust of Gayarre—a bronze bust that showed the man with short, up-tossed hair. Its energy made one think of Othello. Quite at once, a hand dropped familiarly onDarlés' shoulder. The young man turned.
"Don Manuel! You? What a surprise!"
Don Manuel was a man of middle height, thick-set and just a trifle bald. He looked about fifty. A heavy, curling red beard covered his full-blooded, fleshy, prosperous cheeks and chin. He wore evening-dress. His short, thick, epicurean nose supported gold-bowed spectacles.
"Well, my boy," he exclaimed. "You, here?"
Enrique blushed violently, without exactly understanding why, as he answered:
"Yes, I came to—to see——"
Hardly knowing what he was about, he took off his hat, with that respect we learn even as children, when confronted by our parents' friends. Now he stood there, holding the hat with both hands across his breast. Don Manuel, you know, was a deputy in the National Assembly. The great man made Enrique put his hat on, again.
"What are you doing in Madrid?" asked he.
"Studying."
"Law?"
"No, sir. Medicine."
"That's a first-rate profession. What year are you in?"
"Freshman," answered Darlés, and smiled in a shamefaced sort of way. He knew his answers were short and clumsy, and the feeling of shabbiness oppressed him more than ever. Don Manuel glanced about him, with a kind of arrogant ease. Two or three times he murmured: "I'm waiting for somebody." Then he began to talk to the student again, asking him about his father and the political boss of the home town. Darlés kept on answering every question just the same way:
"No change, down there. Everything's all right."
And again the conversation was broken off by Don Manuel's expectant glancing about for the friend he was to meet.
The deputy asked, after a minute or two:
"You're living in a boarding-house, aren't you?"
"No, sir."
"Where, then?"
"In Calle Ballesta. I've rented a little inside room, on the fourth floor. It costs me thirteen pesetas a month, and I eat at a little tavern on the same street."
"I see you know how to rub along. You can save money, if you're willing to fight with landladies. After you've got thoroughly used to Madrid, nothing can make you ever go back home. Madrid is wonderful! With money, a clever man can have all kinds of amusement here."
Don Manuel added, using that confidential air with which fools and parvenus try to impress people they think beneath them:
"See here! You're not a boy, any more. And I—hang it all!—you can't call me old, yet. I don't see my friend showing up, anywhere, so we can have a little talk. I've got—I've got something bothering me. You understand?"
Enrique nodded.
"You know her? Alicia Pardo?"
"No, sir."
"She's very popular, in the gay set. A beauty! At the Casino we call her 'Little Goldie'."
His whole expression suddenly changed. His eyes began to gleam, with joyful gluttony. The congested redness of his cheeks grew deeper, and he turned round, stroking his beard and straightening up his top-hat withthe vanity of a fool who thinks people are admiring him.
The long, sharp trilling of electric bells announced that the second act was about to begin. Everybody began crowding back into the theater; and now, in the solitude of the foyer, the bust of Gayarre seemed higher. Don Manuel exclaimed:
"Come along with me. I'll introduce you to Alicia."
Don Manuel noticed the student's dismayed look, and added:
"That's all right about your not having a dress-suit on. You can stay in the rear of the box."
He started off with a firm step, trying to assume the ease and grace of youth. Enrique followed him without a word. He felt both happy and afraid.
They reached the outer box, that Don Manuel judged good enough for the young fellow. The deputy murmured:
"This is all right, isn't it? I'll see you later. You can see everything here."
Enrique made no answer. The play was already going on, and in the religious stillness of the theater the chorus of the piece was rising in triumphal harmony. It was one of those pleasant Italian operas, freighted for all of us with memories of youth. Darlés ventured to raise one of the heavy curtains just a little, that shut the outer box off from the inner one. A young woman was sitting there, with her back to him and her elbows on the railing of the box. She was all in white. He could see the tempting outlines of her firm hips, beneath the childish insufficiency of her girdle. Her shoulders were plump and of flawless perfection. On the snow of her bare neck her blonde hair, tinged with red, shadowed tawny reflections. Two splendid emeralds trembled, green as drops of absinthe, in the rosy lobes of her small, fine ears.
Don Manuel was beside her. Darlés noted that Alicia and the deputy had very little to say to each other. Suddenly she turned her head with an inquisitive air, graceful and fascinating; and the student received full in the eyes the shock of two large, green, luminous pupils—living emeralds, indeed. Her scrutiny of him was short, searching and curious; it changed to an expression of scorn.
Darlés flushed red and began to tremble. He let the curtain fall, and took refuge at therear of the outer box. His first impulse was to escape; but presently he changed his mind, for it seemed to him more than a little rude to take French leave. The student thought he was bored, but in reality he was afraid. In spite of his agitation, he waited. And bit by bit the magic spell of the opera took possession of him and freed him from embarrassment.
The piece now going on was one of those romantic, wholly lyric poems in which the actors are everything. The environment about them, the sense of objectivity, played no rôle. The 'cellos, sighing with lassitude and pity, lamented in gentle accord; the violins cut through the harmony with sharp cries of rebellion and gay arpeggios. And the voice of the tenor rose above that many-toned, protean, orchestrated poem with warm persuasion, wailing into inconsolable laments.
Enrique got up again, and once more timidly drew apart the curtains of the outer box. Nobody noticed him. Alicia still sat there with her back toward him, transfixed by the fairy magic of the opera. Her emotions seemed almost to transpire through the white skin of her back and shoulders. Enrique Darlés once morebegan to tremble. His ideas grew fantastic. When he had seen the young woman's eyes, they had appeared two emeralds; and now the emeralds twinkling beneath the blaze of her hair seemed to be looking at him like two pupils. But this absurdity soon faded from his mind. The orchestra was languorously beginning aritornelle; and all through the main motif independent musical phrases were strung like beads. These slid into chromatics, rising, beating up to lose themselves in one vast chord of agony supreme. And, in that huge lamentation, there mingled depths of disillusion, whispers of hope, desires and wearinesses, laughter and grimaces—the whole of life, indeed, seemed blent there, swift-passing, tragic, knotted in the bitterness of everything that ever has been and that still must be.
Enrique sat down again. Nameless suffering clutched his throat, so that he felt a profound desire for tears. Like a motion-picture film, both past and present flashed across his vision in swift flight. His poor, old father and the little chemist's shop at home appeared before him—the miserable shop that hardly eked out a penurious living for the old man. Then he saw himself, as soon as his studies should befinished, condemned to go back to that hateful, monotonous little town. There he would labor to pay back his parents everything they had given him; and there all his years of youth, all his love-illusions, all his artistic inspirations would soon fade. There he must bury all the finest of his soul. Then, no doubt, he would marry and have children; and then—well, life would stretch out into a long, straight line, unwavering, with never any depths or heights, lost in the monotony of a blank desert. What could be more terrible than to know just what we are destined to be in ten years, in twenty years, in thirty?
The poor student tugged at his hair, in desperation, and tears blurred his sight. How he would have loved to be rich, to have no family, to be the sport of the unforeseen! For is not the unforeseen pregnant with all the vicissitudes of poetry? He felt the blood of conquerors pulsing in his arteries, the energies of bold adventurers who dare brave perils and emprise, and leave their bones on far-off shores. This fighting strain, this crave for danger, filled him with boundless melancholy as he reflected that he must live on, on to old age, and do no differently than all other mendo, year by year. Destiny meant for him no more than this: to follow a costly, hard and tedious career merely that he might make a pittance, get a wife and find some hole or corner to live in—some poor, mean little house in a world of palaces, some commonplace love in a world throbbing with so many passions, some paltry dole in a world crowded with so many fortunes!
Whipped by the music, the foolish grief of Enrique Darlés broke into sobs.
Now the second act was done, and Don Manuel and Alicia came into the outer box. The young woman's eyes—green, eloquent eyes—filled with astonishment.
"What?" she asked. "You're crying?"
Before the student could answer, she turned to her companion and said:
"What do you think about that, now? He's been crying!"
In shame, Enrique answered:
"I don't know. I—I'm upset. But—yes, maybe——"
She smiled, and asked:
"You've got a sweetheart, haven't you?"
"No, no, Señorita."
"Well then, why——?"
"It's all foolishness, I know, but every time I hear music—even bad music—it makes me sad."
"That's funny!Idon't feel that way!"
The red-faced, thick-set Don Manuel shrugged his square shoulders as much as to say it mattered nothing, and introduced them to each other. Enrique's feverish hand held for a moment the cool, soft hand—snow and velvet—of Little Goldie. Then all three sat down on the same divan, Alicia between the two men. Don Manuel drew out his cigar-case.
"Smoke?" asked he.
"No, thanks."
"Good boy!" exclaimed the deputy. "You haven't any vices, have you?"
"What?" asked Alicia. "You don't smoke?"
"No, Señorita."
"How funny you are! Well,Ido!"
Enrique blushed again, and looked down. He saw quite clearly that this little detail made the beggarliness of his clothes even more noticeable. Women always seem to like a man to smoke. Tobacco is their best perfume. The student felt furious at himself. To regain countenance before this girl he would gladlyhave consumed all the Egyptian or Turkish cigarettes in Don Manuel's case. But it was too late, now. Opportunity was gone; opportunity, that master-magic which endues everything with grace and worth.
The young woman's self-possession was quite English in its cool perfection as she lighted up and fell to smoking, with one leg crossed over the other. She leaned her shoulders against the dun-hued back of the divan. And now, all about her diabolical, reddish-gold hair, the cigarette-smoke mounted thinly on the quiet air, and wove blue veils. Darlés observed her, from the corner of his eye. Her face was aquiline, with wide nostrils, with a little blood-red, cruel mouth and a low forehead that gave the impression of hard, instinctive selfishness. Her big, greenish eyes peered out with boredom and command. Her whole expression was cold, keen, probing, pitiless.
A string of seed-pearls girdled her soft, rosy throat. Her fingers blazed with the fire of her rings. Her nails were sharp as claws. In the well-harmonized rhythms of her every attitude, in all her perfect modelings, in every nuance and detail of her—wonderful playthingfor men's dalliance—Enrique, untutored country boy though he was, discerned a supremely selfish ego. He realized this woman was one of those emotionless creatures of willfulness, wholly self-centered, who are incapable of sorrow.
Don Manuel's mood was brusque, with that brusquerie of a rich, healthy man who has a pretty woman in tow, as he exclaimed:
"Well now, Enrique, how do you like my Little Goldie? I bet you never saw anything like her, back home!" Triumphantly he added: "She doesn't cost much, either. When I first met her, I asked: 'What shall I give you?' She answered: 'A box at the Teatro Real.' Why, that's a bagatelle! Only a little more than thirteen hundred pesetas for fourteen plays. And here we are. I tell you the little lady doesn't ask much."
Darlés answered nothing. His emotions choked him—the novelty of this new world that till now he had not even known by hearsay; a topsy-turvy, unmoral world where, as in art, beauty formed the only criterion of worth; a world where women sold themselves for an opera-box.
All this time Alicia Pardo had been studying Enrique. The downright frankness of her look was alarming in its amusement. Enrique's extreme youth; the simplicity of his answers; the Apollo-like perfection of his features; the obsidian hue of his wavy hair which marked him as from the south of Spain; the black ardor of eyes, that in their eager curiosity contrasted with the boyish smoothness of his face; yes, even his proneness to blush, had all greatly interested her. Above all, Alicia found her attention wakened by the artistic spirit in him, which had wept at the sound of the music. Alicia had never seen men weep except through jealousy, or through some other even baser and more ignoble emotion. Therefore in the tears of this boy she discovered something wonderful and great.
And through her little head, all filled with curious whims, the idea drifted that it would be passing strange and sweet to let herself be loved by such a boy. Suddenly she exclaimed:
"What areyoudoing in Madrid?"
"I'm studying."
"Ah, indeed? A student, eh? I read a novel, a while ago, that I liked very much indeed. The hero was a student. Quite a coincidence, eh?"
Darlés nodded "Yes." The childish simplicity of the remark amazed him. Goldie went on:
"How old are you?"
"Twenty."
"Honest and true?"
"Fact! Why? Maybe I look older?"
"No, you don't. Younger, I think. I'm not quite nineteen, butIdo look older."
Don Manuel had opened a newspaper, and was reading the latest market quotations. Alicia felt a desire to know the boy's name. She asked him what it was.
"Enrique?" she repeated. "That's a pretty name. Very!"
Then she grew silent a while, remembering all the Enriques she had ever known—and there had been plenty of them. She recalled they'd all been nice. Thus, reviewing her life-history, she reached her childish years; quiet years of peace, lived in the Virgilian simplicity of the country. And she seemed to see in this boy, innocent, healthy and sun-browned, something of what she herself had been.
Quite beside himself with new emotions, ecstatic and open-mouthed, the student looked ather, too, like a man studying some unusually beautiful work of art.
Now many footfalls echoed in the corridors again and bells began to ring. A flood of spectators began to fill up the seats. The third act was going to begin. Alicia and Don Manuel got up.
"Going to stay?" the deputy asked Darlés.
"No, thanks."
"Why not?"
"Because—well, I've got to go to bed early. To-morrow I'm going to get up early."
He felt so sure that Alicia might be able to love him, and so overpowered by the happy embarrassment of this thought, that he wanted to be alone, to enjoy it more fully. Don Manuel added:
"Well, suit yourself. Any time you want to see me, don't go to my house. I'm never there. Better go to Alicia's. You'll find me there every evening, from six to eight."
They took leave of each other. Enrique turned his head, as he left the box, and his eyes met the girl's. Their look was a meeting of caresses, as if they had given each other a kiss and made a rendezvous. It was one of those terrible looks, capable of changing the wholecurrent of a man's life—a look such as a man will sometimes receive in his youth, only to find it hounding and pursuing him his whole life long.
NEXT day, Alicia spent the evening before her fireplace, with a book. Don Manuel's visit to her had ended in a quarrel, and he had gone. A great nervousness possessed the girl; she wanted to cry, to yawn, to pull out her hair, to kick the little cabinets from behind whose crystal panes all kinds of little figurines, porcelain dolls and extravagant bibelots peeped out with roguish faces.
No one who has never been really bored can grasp the complete horror, the abysmal blackness, the silence like that of a bottomless pit or an endless tunnel, which lies in absolute boredom. Still, just as death is the beginning of life, so at times tedium can become a spring of vigorous action. Many men have sown wild oats in their youth till they have tired of them, and have in riper years become model husbands, applied themselves to business and died leaving millions. Boredom sometimes turns out works of art. Had not Heine and Byronbeen monumentally bored, they could never have risen to the heights of song.
Now, though Alicia Pardo was very young, she already suffered from this malady—the malady of quietude which rubs out boundary-lines and extinguishes contrasts. Never yet had she been in love. The selfishness of her lovers had in the end endowed her soul—itself little inclined to tenderness—with all the hardness of a diamond.
"I can't love any one," she often said. "I've made a regular man of myself."
Since the human mind cannot long remain unoccupied by real emotions, she had come to adore luxury. She was neither miserly nor greedy for money; but she did indeed love purple and fine linen, noisy hats and precious stones glimmering with sunlight. Her idea of life was to buy good furnishings, appear in new gowns, show herself off, waste everything without restraint. With her pretty hands, now craving money and now throwing it to the four winds, she made ducks and drakes of men's fortunes. She had many things and wanted more; and as one quickly tires of what one has, her property did not increase.
The young woman was in high dudgeon,that evening. She knew not what to do. Her money was running short, and that morning in a bazaar she had seen all kinds of pretty gewgaws. She had taken up a book to amuse herself, but had not been able to read much. Her irritation would not go away. Why couldn't she be infinitely rich? Already she was beginning to consider this poor life of ours a grotesque affair—this life in which so many men think themselves happy in the possession of the ten-millionth part of what they really want.
It was almost seven o'clock when Enrique Darlés arrived. As soon as Alicia saw the student, she heaved a sigh of contentment and threw the book into the fire.
"What are you doing, there?" cried Darlés, to whom every book was sacred.
"Nothing," she answered. "It's a stupid novel. We ought to do the same with everything that bores us."
Enrique sat down and asked:
"Don Manuel—?"
"He's been here a while, but he's gone. I mean, I sent him away. I tell you I'm unbearable, to-day. I'd like to fight with everybody. I don't know what I wouldn't give tofeel some new sensation—something real and strong. I'm in despair, I tell you! It's these nerves, these curséd nerves, that wake up everything ugly and vulgar in us. To-day is one of the black days when even the good luck of our friends makes us miserable."
She stopped and peered closely at Darlés. His close-shaven face, his southern eyes and wavy black hair made him look like some handsome, gentle boy.
"I'm strange," she continued. "I'm a chatter-box, ungrateful and never able to love anything very long. That's why you attracted my attention the first minute. You look like a man of strong passions. I like radical characters, good or bad. I like iron wills. Lukewarm temperaments, undecided and ready to fit into any situation, look to me like half-season clothes that are always disagreeable. In summer they're too warm and in winter too cold."
Darlés ventured to say with some timidity:
"What's the reason you're put out to-day?"
"I don't know."
"What?"
"It's true. Unless it might be——"
She stopped, inwardly searching her thoughts, then went on:
"It's because you're very young that my words astonish you. Sometime you'll be older, and then you'll understand the world better. You'll know the cause of all these little vexations that embitter life can't be found in concrete facts. We have to recognize such vexations as the total, the corollary of our whole history, of everything we've lived through. For example, we're sad now because we were sad before, or maybe gay. In to-day's tears you'll find the bitter-aloes of the tears of long ago; and there's the weariness of dead laughter there, too. Understand? Don't wonder, therefore, that you can't comprehend exactly why I'm in such a bad temper, to-day."
She grew quiet, sinking down into a brown study that drew a vertical line upon her pretty brow. Then she asked:
"Do you often go through Calle Mayor?"
"Yes. Why?"
"Do you remember the jeweler's shop on the right, on the even-numbered side, near the Puerta del Sol?"
The student nodded.
"Well, if you like jewels," continued Alicia, "take a look at that emerald necklace in the middle of the window. I just happened to see it, to-day, and it made such an impression on me that I haven't been able to get it out of my mind. It's magnificent, not only in size and in the wonderful luster of the stone, but also on account of its splendid clasp."
"Worth a lot, eh?"
"Fifteen thousand pesetas."
Darlés said nothing to this. But his brows lifted with admiration. Such figures filled his provincial simplicity with panic and confusion. By comparison with the miserable shallowness of his purse, they seemed enormous. Little Goldie continued:
"I told Don Manuel about it, but he's a clever fox. He's a sly one! There's no way in this world to rakehiminto spending any extra money. That's partly what we've just now been quarreling about. Believe me, it's men's own fault if we aren't more faithful to them."
Ignorant as he was of feminine psychology, Enrique understood that Alicia's black humor was on account of that emerald necklace she so deeply admired and so greatly wanted. Unsatisfied desires are like undigested foods. Atfirst they cause us a vague ill-ease, which soon increases until indigestion sets in. Following this same line of thought, is not disappointment or grief, in a way, the indigestion of a caprice? Ingenuously, without realizing the indiscretion of promising anything to women or children, Enrique exclaimed:
"If I were only rich—!"
The pause that followed was like that in a romance; one of those silences during which women decide to do any and everything. Then all at once, with the same bored gesture she had used when she had tossed the book into the fire, Alicia put one of her little hands into the bony, trembling hands of the student.
"Do you like my hands?" she queried.
"Enormously!"
"People say they're very big."
"Oh, no! Very small, indeed!"
With ravishment he examined the fine softness of her wrist, the wandering lines traced by the blue veins beneath the whiteness of the skin, the little dimples that adorned the back of her hand. That hand was an artist's, a dancer's. Its fingers were showily covered with rings. Alicia studied these rings. In their settings, the sapphires, the blood-red rubies, the topazes and diamonds filled with light blent into bouquets of tiny, never-fading flowers.
"Next time you go through Calle Mayor," directed the young woman, "take a good look at the necklace I've told you about. There are two necklaces in the window. One is of black pearls, the other of emeralds. I'm talking about the emerald one. You'll find it a little to the left, on a bust of white velvet."