"Besides, your mother knows everything. She's discovered what you've been up to, these nights past. She knows you haven't been in your room. You're going to break that woman's heart!"

And with paternal severity he went on to speak of dona Bernarda's despair, of the danger to the future of the House, of the obligations they were under to don Matias, of the solemn promise given, of that poor girl waiting to be married!

Rafael walked along in silence and like an automaton. That old man's chatter brought down around his head, like a swarm of pestering mosquitoes, all the provoking, irritating obligations of his life. He felt like a man rudely awakened by a tactless servant in the middle of a sweet dream. His lips were still tingling with Leonora's kisses! His whole body was aglow with her gentle warmth! And here was this old curmudgeon coming along with a sermon on "duty," "family," "what they would say"—as if love amounted to nothing in this life! It was a plot against his happiness, and he felt stirred to the depths with a sense of outrage and revolt.

They had reached the entrance to the Brull mansion. Rafael was fumbling about for the key-hole with his key.

"Well," growled the old man. "What have you got to say to all this? What do you propose to do? Answer me! Haven't you got a tongue in your head?"

"I," replied the young man energetically—"will do as I please."

Don Andres jumped as though he had been stung. My, how this Rafael had changed!... Never before had he seen that gleam of aggressiveness, arrogance, belligerency in the eye of the boy!

"Rafael, is that the way you answer me,—a man who has known you since you were born? Is that the tone of voice you use toward one who loves you as your own father loved you?"

"I'm of age, if you don't mind my saying so!" Rafael replied. "I'm not going to put up any longer with this comedy of being a somebody on the street and a baby in my own house. Henceforth just keep your advice to yourself until I ask for it. Good day, sir!"

As he went up the stairs he saw his mother on the first landing, in the semi-darkness of the closed house, illumined only by the light that entered through the window gratings. She stood there, erect, frowning, tempestuous, like a statue of Avenging Justice.

But Rafael did not waver. He went straight on up the stairs, fearless and without a tremor, like a proprietor who had been away from home for some time and strides arrogantly back Into a house that is all his own.



VI

"You're right, don Andres. Rafael is not my son. He has changed. That wanton woman has made another man of him. Worse, a thousand times worse, than his father! Crazy over the huzzy! Capable of trampling on me if I should step between him and her. You complain of his lack of respect to you! Well, what about me?... You wouldn't have thought it possible! The other morning, when he came into the house, he treated me just as he treated you. Only a few words, but plain enough! He'll do just as he pleases, or—what amounts to the same thing—he'll keep up his affair with that woman until he wearies of her, or else blows up in one grand debauch, like his father.... My God! And that's what I've suffered for all these years. That's what I get for sacrificing myself, day in day out, trying to make somebody out of him!"

The austere dona Bernarda, dethroned by her son's resolute rebelliousness, wept as she said this. In her tears of a mother's grief there was something also of the chagrin of the authoritarian on finding in her own home a will rebellious to hers and stronger than hers.

Between sobs she told don Andres how her son had been carrying on since his declaration of independence. He was no longer cautious about spending the night away from home. He was coming in now in broad daylight; and, afternoons, with his meals "still in his mouth" as she said, he would take the road to the Blue House, on the run almost, as if he could not get to perdition soon enough. The dead hand of his father was upon him!

All you had to do was look at him. His face discolored, yellow, pale; his skin drawn tight over his cheekbones; and—the only sign of life—the fire that gleamed in his eyes like a spark of wild joy! Oh, a curse was on the family! They were all alike ...!

The mother did her best to conceal the truth from Remedios. Poor girl! She was going about crestfallen and in deep dejection, unable to explain Rafael's sudden withdrawal.

The matter had to be kept secret; and that was what held dona Bernarda's rage within bounds during her rapid, heated exchanges with her son.

Perhaps everything would come out all right in the end—something unforeseen would turn up to undo the evil spell that had been cast over Rafael. And in this hope she used every effort to keep Remedios and her father from learning what had happened. She feigned contentment in their presence, and invented a thousand pretexts—studies, work, even illness—to justify her son's neglect of his "fiancee." At the same time, the disconsolate mother feared the people around her—the gossip of a small town, bored with itself, ever on the alert, hunting for something interesting to talk about and get scandalized about.

The news of Rafael's affair spread like wildfire meanwhile, considerably magnified as it passed from mouth to mouth. People told hair-raising tales of that expedition down the river, of walks through the orange groves, of nights spent at dona Pepa's house, Rafael entering in the dark, in his stocking feet, like a thief; of silhouettes of the lovers outlined in suggestive poses against the bedroom curtain; of their appearing in windows their arms about each other's waists, looking at the stars—everything sworn to by voluntary spies, who could say "I saw it with my own eyes"—persons who had spent whole nights, on the river-bank, behind some fence, in some clump of bushes, to surprise the deputy on his way to or from his assignations.

In the cafes or at the Casino, the men openly envied Rafael, commenting with eyes a-glitter on his good fortune. That fellow had been born under a lucky star! But later at home they would add their stern voices to the chorus of indignant women. What a scandal! A deputy, a public man, a "personage" who ought to set an example for others! That was a disgrace to the constituency! And when the murmur of general protest reached the ears of dona Bernarda, she lifted her hands to heaven in despair. Where would it all end! Where would it all end! That son of hers was bent on ruining himself!

Don Matias, the rustic millionaire, said nothing; and, in the presence of dona Bernarda, at least, pretended to know nothing. His interest in a marriage connection with the Brull family counselled prudence. He, too, hoped that it would all blow over, prove to be the blind infatuation of a young man. Feeling himself a father, more or less, to the boy, he thought of giving Rafael just a bit of advice when he came upon him in the street one day. But he desisted after a word or two. A proud glance of the youth completely floored him, making him feel like the poor orange-grower of former days, who had cringed before the majestic, grandiose don Ramon!

Rafael was intrenched in haughty silence. He needed no advice. But alas! When at night he reached his beloved's house—it seemed to be redolent with the very perfume of her, as if the furniture, the curtains, the very walls about her had absorbed the essence of her spirit—he felt the strain of that insistent gossip, of the persecution of an entire city that had fixed its eyes upon his love.

Two against a multitude! With the serene immodesty of the ancient idylls, they had abandoned themselves to passion in a stupid, narrow environment, where sprightly gossip was the most appreciated of the moral talents!

Leonora grew sad. She smiled as usual; she flattered him with the same worship, as if he were an idol; she was playful and gay; but in moments of distraction, when she did not notice that he was watching, Rafael would surprise a cast of bitterness about her lips—and a sinister light in her eyes, the reflection of painful thoughts.

She referred with acrid mirth one night to what people were saying about them. Everything was found out sooner or later in that city! The gossip had gotten even to the Blue House! Her kitchen woman had hinted that she had better not walk so much along the river front—she might catch malaria. On the market place the sole topic of conversation was that night trip down the Jucar ... the deputy, sweating his life out over the oars, and she waking half the country up with her strange songs!... And she laughed, but with a hard, harsh laugh of affected gaiety that showed the nervousness underneath, though without a word of complaint.

Rafael remorsefully reflected that she had foreseen all that in first repelling his advances. He admired her resignation. She would have been justified in rebuking him for the harm he had done her. As it was, she was not even telling him all she knew! Ah, the wretches! To harass an innocent woman so! She had loved him, given herself to him, bestowed on him the royal gift of her person. And the deputy began to hate his city, for repaying in insult and scandal the wondrous happiness she had conferred on its "chief"!

On another night Leonora received him with a smile that frightened him. She was affecting a mood of hectic cheerfulness, trying to drown her worries by sheer force, overwhelming her lover with a flood of light, frivolous chatter; but suddenly, at the limit of her endurance, she gave way, and in the middle of a caress, burst into tears and sank to a divan, sobbing as if her heart would break.

"Why what's the matter? What has happened ...?"

For a time she could not answer, her voice was too choked with weeping. At last, however, between sobs, burying her tear-stained face on Rafael's shoulder, she began to speak, completely crushed, fainting from virtual prostration.

She could stand it no longer! The torture was becoming unbearable. It was useless for her to pretend. She knew as well as he what people were saying in the city. They were spied upon continuously. On the roads, in the orchard, along the river, there were people constantly on the watch for something new to report. That passion of hers, so sweet, so youthful, so sincere, was a butt of public laughter, a theme for idle tongues, who flayed her as if she were a common street-woman, because she had been good to him, because she had not been cruel enough to watch a young man writhe in the torment of passion, indifferently.... But though this persecution from a scandalized public was bad enough, she did not mind it. Why should she care what those stupid people said? But, alas, there were others—the people around Rafael, his friends, his family, ... his mother!

Leonora sat silent for a moment, as if waiting to see the effect of that last word; unless, indeed, she were hesitating, out of delicacy, to include her lover's family in her complaint. The young man shrank with a terrible presentiment. Dona Bernarda was not the woman to stand by idle and resigned in the face of opposition, even from him!

"I see ... mother!" he said in a stifled voice. "She has been up to something. Tell me what it is. Don't be afraid. To me you are dearer than anything else in the world."

"Well ... there is auntie ..." Leonora resumed; and Rafael remembered that dona Pepa, remarking his assiduous visits to the Blue House, had thought her niece might be contemplating marriage. In the afternoon, Leonora explained, she had had a scene with her aunt. Dona Pepa had gone into town to confession, and on coming out of church had met dona Bernarda. Poor old woman! Her abject terror on returning home betrayed the intense emotion Rafael's mother had succeeded in wakening in her. Leonora, her niece, her idol, lay in the dust, stripped of that blind, enthusiastic, affectionate trust her aunt had always had for her. All the gossip, all the echoes of Leonora's adventurous life, that had—heretofore but feebly—come to her ears, the old lady had never believed, regarding them as the work of envy. But now they had been repeated to her by dona Bernarda, by a lady "in good standing," a good Christian, a person incapable of falsehood. And then after rehearsing that scandalous biography, Rafael's mother had come to the shocking effrontery with which her niece and Rafael were rousing the whole city; flaunting their wrong-doing in the face of the public; and turning her home, the respectable, irreproachable home of dona Pepa, into a den of vice, a brothel!

And the poor woman had wept like a child in her niece's presence, adjuring her to "abandon the wicked path of transgression," shuddering with horror at the great responsibility she, dona Pepa, had unwittingly assumed before God. All her life she had labored and prayed and fasted to keep her soul clean. She had thought herself almost in a state of grace, only to awaken suddenly and find herself in the very midst of sin through no fault of her own—all on account of her niece, who had converted her holy, her pure, her pious home into an ante-chamber of hell! And it was the poor woman's superstitious terror, the conviction of damnation that had seized on dona Pepa's simple soul, that wounded Leonora most deeply.

"They've robbed me of all I had in the world," she murmured desperately, "of the affection of the only dear one left after my father died. I am not the child of former days to auntie; that is apparent from the way she looks at me, the way she shuns me, avoiding all contact with me.... And just because of you, because I love you, because I was not cruel to you! Oh, that night! How I shall suffer for it!... How clearly I foresaw how it would all end!"

Rafael was humiliated, crushed, filled with shame and remorse at the suffering that had fallen upon this woman, because she had given herself to him. What was he to do? The time had come to prove himself the strong, the resourceful man, able to protect the beloved woman in her moment of danger. But where should he strike first to defend her?...

Leonora lifted her head from her lover's shoulder, and withdrew from his embrace. She wiped away her tears and rose to her feet with the determination of irrevocable resolution.

"I have made up my mind. It hurts me very much to say what I am going to say; but I can't help it. It will do you no good to say 'no'—I cannot stay under this roof another day. Everything is over between my aunt and me. Poor old woman! The dream I cherished was to care for her lovingly, tenderly till she died in my arms, be to her what I failed to be to father.... But they have opened her eyes. To her I am nothing but a sinner now and my presence upsets everything for her.... I must go away. I've already told Beppa to pack my things.... Rafael, my love, this is our last night together.... To-morrow ... and you will never see me again."

The youth recoiled as if someone had struck him in the breast.

"Going? Going ...? And you can say that coolly, simply, just like that? You are leaving me ... this way ... just when we are happiest ...?"

But soon he had himself in hand again. This surely could be nothing more than a passing impulse, a notion arrived at in a flash of anger. Of course she did not really mean to go! She must think things over, see things clearly. That was a crazy idea! Desert her Rafaelito? Absurd! Impossible!

Leonora smiled sadly. She had expected him to talk that way. She, too, had suffered much, ever so much, before deciding to do it! It made her shudder to think that within two days she would be off again, alone, wandering through Europe, caught up again in that wild, tumultuous life of art and love, after tasting the full sweetness of the most powerful passion she had ever known—of what she believed was her "first love." It was like putting to sea in a tempest with destination unknown. She loved him, adored him, worshipped him, more than ever now that she was about to lose him.

"Well, why are you going?" the young man asked. "If you love me, why are you forsaking me?"

"Just because I love you, Rafael.... Because I want you to be happy."

For her to remain would mean ruin for him: a long battle with his mother, who was an implacable, a merciless foe. Dona Bernarda might be killed, but never conquered! Oh, no! How horrible! Leonora knew what filial cruelty was! How had she treated her father? She must not now come between a son and a mother! Was she, perhaps, a creature accursed, born forever to corrupt with her very name the sacredest, purest relations on earth?

"No, you must be good, my heart. I must go away. We can't go on loving each other here. I'll write to you, I'll let you know all I'm doing.... You'll hear from me every day, if I have to write from the North Pole! But you must stay! Don't drive your mother to despair! Shut your eyes to the poor woman's injustice! For after all, she is doing it all out of her immense love for you.... Do you imagine I am glad to be leaving you—the greatest happiness I have ever known?"

And she threw her arms about Rafael, kissing him over and over again, caressing his bowed, pensive head, within which a tempest of conflicting ideas and resolutions was boiling.

So those bonds which he had come to believe eternal were to be broken? So he was to lose so easily that beauty which the world had admired, the possession of which had made him feel himself the first among men? She talked of a love from a distance, of a love persisting through years of separation, travel, all the hazards of a wandering life; she promised to write to him every day!... Write to him ... from the arms of another man, perhaps! No! He would never give up such a treasure; never!

"You shall not go," he answered at last decisively. "A love like ours is not ended so easily. Your flight would be a disgrace to me—it would look as if I had affronted you in some way, as if you were tired of me."

Deep in his soul he felt eager to make some chivalrous gesture. She was going away because she had loved him! He should stay behind, sad and resigned like a maid abandoned by a lover, and with the sense of having harmed her on his conscience! Ira de dios! He, as a man, could not stand by with folded arms accepting the abnegation of a woman, to stick tied to his mother's apron-strings in boobified contentment. Even girls ran away from home and parents sometimes, in the grip of a powerful love; and he, a man, a man "in the public eye" also—was he to let a beautiful girl like Leonora go away sorrowful and in tears, so that he could keep the respect of a city that bored him and the affection of a mother who had never really loved him? Besides, what sort of a love was it that stepped aside in a cowardly, listless way like that, when a woman was at stake, a woman for whom far richer, far more powerful men than he, men bound to life by attractions that he had never dreamed of in his countrified existence, had died or gone to ruin?...

"You shall not go," he repeated, with sullen obstinacy. "I won't give up my happiness so easily. And if you insist on going, we will go together."

Leonora rose to her feet all quivering. She had been expecting that; her heart had told her it was coming. Flee together! Have her appear like an adventuress, drawing Rafael on, tearing him from his mother's arms after crazing him with love? Oh, no! Thanks! She had a conscience! She did not care to burden it with the execration of a whole city. Rafael must consider the matter calmly, face the situation bravely. She must go away alone. Afterwards, later on, she would see. They might chance to meet again; perhaps in Madrid, when the Cortes reassembled! He would be there, and alone; she could find a place at the Real, singing for nothing if that should prove necessary.

But Rafael writhed angrily at her resistance. He could not live without her! A single night without seeing her would mean despair. He would end as Macchia ended! He would shoot himself!

And he seemed to mean it. His eyes were fixed on the floor as if he were staring at his own corpse, lying there on the pavement, motionless, covered with blood, a revolver in its stiffened hand.

"Oh, no! How horrible! Rafael, my Rafael!" Leonora groaned, clasping him around the neck, hanging upon him in terror.

Her lover continued to protest. He was free. Had he been a married man; if, in his flight, he were leaving a wife behind to cry betrayal, or children calling for his help in vain, it would all be a different matter. She could properly feel the repugnance of a kind heart unwilling that love should mean a shattered home! But whom was he abandoning? A mother, who, in a short time, would find consolation in the thought that he was well and happy, a mother jealous of any rivalry in her son's affection, and to that jealousy willing to sacrifice his very happiness! Any harm an elopement would bring would by no means be irreparable. No, they must go away together, parade their love through the whole world!

But Leonora, lowering her head again, repeated feebly:

"No, my mind is made up. I must go alone. I haven't the strength to face a mother's hatred."

Rafael flushed indignantly:

"Why not say outright that you don't love me. You're tired of me, and of this environment. The hankering for your old life has come over you again; your old world is calling!"

The actress fixed her great, luminous, tear-stained eyes upon him. And they were filled with tenderness and pity.

"Tired of you!... When I have never felt such desperation as tonight! You say I want my old life back. You don't realize that to leave here seems like entering a den of torture.... Oh, dear heart, you'll never know how much I love you."

"Well, then ...?"

And to tell everything, to spare no detail of the danger he would face after separation, Rafael spoke of the life he would lead alone with his mother in that dull, unspeakable city. Leonora was assuming that affection played some part in his mother's indignant opposition. Well, dona Bernarda did love him—agreed: he was her only son; but ambition was the decisive thing in her schemes, her passion for the aggrandizement of the House—the controlling motive of her whole life. She was openly, frankly, using him as security in an alliance she was planning with a great fortune. She wanted to marry him to money: and if Leonora were to go, if he were left alone, forsaken, then despair—and time, which can do all things—would break his will; and eventually he would succumb, like a victim at the altar, who, in his terror and abasement, does not sense the real significance of the sacrifice forced upon him.

The words reached a jealous spot in Leonora's heart. All the scattered rumors that had come to her ears in former days now echoed in her memory. She knew that Rafael was telling the truth. The man she loved, given away by his mother—to another woman!... Lost forever if she lost him now!... And her eyes opened wide with horror and revulsion.

"And I refuse, Leonora, do you understand? I refuse!" continued her lover with unaffected resolution. "I belong to you, you are the only woman I love. I shall follow you all over the world, even against your wishes, to be your servant, see you, speak to you, and there are not millions enough in the world to stop me!"

"Oh, my darling! My darling! You love me, you love me—as I love you!"

And in a frenzy of passion she fell impetuously, madly upon him, clutching him in her arms like a fury. In her caresses Rafael felt an intensity that almost frightened him. The room seemed to be whirling about him. Trembling, limp and weak, he sank to the divan, overwhelmed, pounded to pieces, it seemed, by that vehement adoration, that caught him up and carried him away like a tumultuous avalanche. His senses left him in that trembling confusion, and he closed his eyes.

When he opened them, the room was dark. Around his neck he could feel a gentle arm that was tenderly sustaining him, and Leonora was whispering in his ear.

Agreed! They would go together: to continue their love duct in some charming place, where nobody knew them, where envy and vulgarity would not disturb. Leonora knew every nook in the world. She would have none of Nice and the other cities of the Blue Coast, pretty places, coquettish, bepowdered and rouged like women fresh from their dressing tables! Besides there would be too many people there. Venice was better. They would thread the narrow, solitary silent canals there, stretched out in a gondola, kissing each other between smiles, pitying the poor unfortunate mortals crossing the bridges over them, unaware of how great a love was gliding beneath their feet!

But no, Venice is a sad place after all: when it rains, it rains and rains! Naples rather; Naples! Viva Napoli! And Leonora clapped her hands in glee! Live in perpetual sunshine, freedom, freedom, freedom to love openly, as nakedly as the lazzaroni walk about the streets! She owned a house in Naples,—at Posilipo, that is—a villino, in pink stucco, a dainty little place with fig trees, nopals and parasol pines, that ran in a grove down a steep promontory to the sea I They would fish in the bay there—it was as smooth and blue as a looking-glass! And afternoons he would row her out to sea, and she would sing, looking at the waters ablaze with the sunset, at the plume of smoke curling up from Vesuvius, at the immense white city with its endless rows of windows flaming like plaques of gold in the afterglow. Like gipsies they would wander through the countless towns dotting the shores of the miraculous Bay; kissing on the open sea among the fisherboats, to the accompaniment of passionate Neapolitan boat-songs; spending whole nights in the open air, lying in each other's arms on the sands, hearing the pearly laughter of mandolins in the distance, just as that night on the island, they had heard the nightingale! "Oh, Rafael, my god, my king! How wonderful!"

When day dawned, they were still sitting there weaving fanciful plans for the future, arranging all the details of their elopement. She would leave Alcira as soon as possible. He would join her two days later, when all suspicion had been quieted, when everybody would imagine she was far, far away. Where would they meet? At first they thought of Marseilles, but that was a long way off! Then they thought of Barcelona. But that, too, meant hours of travel, when hours, minutes, counted for so much. It seemed utterly incredible that they could live two days without each other! No, the sooner they met again the better! And, bargaining with time like peasants in a market, at last they chose the nearest city possible, Valencia.

For love—true love—is fond of brazenness!



VII

They had just finished lunch among the trunks and boxes that occupied a great part of Leonora's room in the Hotel de Roma in Valencia.

For the first time they were at a table in familiar intimacy, with no other witness than Beppa, who was quite accustomed to every sort of surprise in her mistress's adventurous career. The faithful maid was examining Rafael with a respectful kindliness, as if he were a new idol that must share the unswerving devotion she showed for Leonora.

This was the first moment of tranquillity and happiness the young man had tasted for some days. The old hotel, with its spacious rooms, its high ceilings, its darkened corridors, its monastic silence, seemed to him a veritable abode of delight, a grateful place of refuge where for once he would be free of the gossip and the strife that had been oppressing him like a belt of steel. Besides, he could already feel the exotic charm that lingers around harbors and great railroad terminals. Everything about the place, from the macaroni of the lunch, and the Chianti in its straw-covered, heavy-paunched bottle, to the musical, incorrect Spanish of the hotel-proprietors—fleshy, massive men with huge mustaches in Victor Emmanuel style—spoke of flight, of delightful seclusion in that land so glowingly described by Leonora.

She had made an appointment with him in that hotel, a favorite haunt of artists. Somewhat off the main thoroughfares, the "Roma" occupies one whole side of a sleepy, peaceful, aristocratic square with no noise save the shouting of cab-drivers and the beating of horses' hoofs.

Rafael had arrived on the first morning train—and with no baggage; like a schoolboy playing truant, running off with just the clothes he had on his back. The two days since Leonora left Alcira had been days of torture to him. The singer's flight was the talk of the town. People were scandalized at the amount of luggage she had. Counted over in the imagination of that imaginative city, it eventually came to fill all the carts in the province.

The man who knew the business to the bottom was Cupido, the barber, who had dispatched the trunks and cases for her. He knew where the dangerous woman was bound, and he kept it so secret that everybody found it out before the train started. She was going back to Italy! He himself had checked and labelled the baggage to the Customs' House at the frontier—cases as big as a house, man! Trunks he could have lain down comfortable in, with his two "Chinamen" to boot! And the women, as they listened to his tale, applauded the departure with undissimulated pleasure. They had been liberated from a great danger. Joy go with her!

Rafael kept quite to himself. He was vexed at the curiosity of people, at the scoffing sympathy of his friends who condoled with him that his happiness was ending. For two days he remained indoors, followed by his mother's inquiring glances. Dona Bernarda felt more at ease now that the evil influence of the "chorus girl" promised to be over; but none the less she did not lose her frown. With a woman's instinct, she still scented the presence of danger.

The young man could hardly wait for the time to come. It seemed unbearable for him to be there at home while "she" was away off somewhere, alone, shut up in a hotel, waiting just as impatiently as he was for the moment of reunion.

What a sunrise it had been that day when he set out! Rafael burned with shame as he crept like a burglar in his stockings and on tip-toe, through the room where his mother received the orchard-folk and adjusted all accounts pertaining to the tilling of the land. He groped his way along guided by the light that came in through the chinks in the closed windows. His mother was sleeping in a room close by; he could hear her breathe—the labored respiration of a deep sleep that spelled recovery from the insomnia of the days of his love trysts. He could still feel the criminal shudder that rippled through him at a slight rattle of the keys, which had been left with the confidence of unlimited authority in the lock of an old chest where dona Bernarda kept her savings. With tremulous hands he had collected all the money she had put away in the small boxes there. A thief, a thief! But, after all, he was taking only what belonged to him. He had never asked for his share of his father's estate. Leonora was rich. With admirable delicacy she had refused to talk of money during their preparations for the journey; but he would refuse to live on her! He did not care to be like Salvatti, who had exploited the singer in her youth! That thought it had been which gave him strength to take the money finally and steal out of the house. But even on the train he felt uneasy; and su senoria, the deputy, shivered with an instinctive thrill of fear, every time a tricorne of the Civil Guard appeared at a railroad station. What would his mother say when she got up and found the money gone?

As he entered the hotel his self-confidence returned and his spirits revived. He felt as if he were entering port after a storm. He found Leonora in bed, her hair spread over the pillow in waves of gold, her eyes closed, and a smile on her lips, as if he had surprised her in the middle of a dream, where she had been tasting her memories of love. They ordered lunch in the room early, intending to set out on their journey at once. Circumspection, prudence, until they should be once beyond the Spanish border! They would leave that evening on the Barcelona mail for the frontier. And calmly, tranquilly, like a married couple discussing details of house-keeping in the calm of a quiet home, they ran over the list of things they would need on the train.

Rafael had nothing. He had fled like a fugitive from a fire, with the first clothes he laid hands on as he bounded out of bed. He needed many indispensable articles, and he thought of going out to buy them—a matter of a moment.

"But are you really going out?" asked Leonora with a certain anguish, as if her feminine instinct sensed a danger. "Are you going to leave me alone?..."

"Only a moment. I won't keep you waiting long."

They took leave of each other in the corridor with the noisy, nonchalant joy of passion, indifferent to the chamber-maids who were walking to and fro at the other end of the passageway.

"Good-bye, Rafael.... Another hug; just one more."

And as, with the taste of the last kiss still fresh on his lips, he reached the square, he saw a bejewelled hand still waving to him from a balcony.

Anxious to get back as soon as possible, the young man walked hurriedly along, elbowing his way among the cab-drivers swarming in front of the great Palacio de Dos Aguas, closed, silent, slumbering, like the two giants that guarded its portals, displaying in the golden downpour of sunlight the overdecorated yet graceful sumptuousness of its roccoco facade.

"Rafael! Rafael!..."

The deputy turned around at the sound of his name, and blanched as if he had seen a ghost. It was don Andres, calling to him.

"Rafael! Rafael!"

"You?... Here?"

"I came by the Madrid express. For two hours I've been hunting for you in all the hotels of Valencia. I knew you were here.... But come, we have a great deal to talk over. This is not just the place to do it."

And the old Mentor glowered hatefully at the Hotel de Roma, as if he wanted to annihilate the huge edifice with everybody in it.

They walked off, slowly, without knowing just where they were going, turning corners, passing several times through the same streets, their nerves tense and quivering, ready to shout at the top of their lungs, yet using every effort to speak softly, so as not to attract attention from the passers-by who were rubbing against them on the narrow side-walks.

Don Andres, naturally, was the first to speak:

"You approve of what you've done?"

And seeing that Rafael, like a coward, was trying to pretend innocent astonishment, asking "what" he had done, observing that he had come to Valencia on a matter of business, the old man broke into a rage.

"Now, see here, don't you go lying to me: either we're men or we're not men. If you think you've acted properly, you ought to stand up for it and say so. Don't imagine you're going to pull the wool over my eyes and then run off with that woman to God knows where. I've found you and I'm not going to let you go. I want you to know the truth. Your mother is sick abed; she tipped me off and I caught the first train to get here. The whole house is upside down! At first it was thought a robbery had been committed. By this time the whole city must be agog about you. Come now!... What do you say to that? Do you want to kill your mother? Well, you're going about it right! Good God! And this is what they call a 'boy of talent,' a 'young man of promise'! How much better it would have been if you were a dunce like me or your father—but a dunce at least who knows how to get a woman if he has to, without making a public ass of himself!"

Then he went into detail. Rafael's mother had gone to the old chest to get some money for one of her laborers. Her cry of horror and alarm had thrown the whole house into an uproar. Don Andres had been hastily summoned. Suspicions against the servants, a "third degree" for the whole lot, all of them protesting and weeping, in outrage! Until finally dona Bernarda sank to a chair in a swoon, whispering into her adviser's ear:

"Rafael is not in the house. He has gone ... perhaps never to return. I am sure of it—he took the money!"

While the others were getting the sobbing mother to bed, and sending for the doctor, don Andres had made for the station to catch the express. He could tell from the way people looked at him that everybody knew what had been going on. Gossip had already connected the excitement in the Brull mansion with Rafael's taking the early train! He had been seen by several persons, in spite of his precautions.

"Well, is the Hon. don Rafael Brull, member from Alcira, satisfied with his morning's work? Don't you think the laugh your enemies have raised deserves an encore!"

For all his bitter sarcasm the old man spoke in a faltering voice, and seemed on the verge of tears. The labor of his entire life, the great victories won with don Ramon, that political power which had been so carefully built up and sustained over decades, was about to crumble to ruins; all because of a light-headed, erratic boy who had handed to the first skirt who came along everything that belonged to him and everything that belonged to his friends as well.

Rafael had gone into the interview in an aggressive mood, ready to answer with plain talk if that sodden idiot should go too far in his recriminations. But the sincere grief of the old man touched him deeply. Don Andres, who resembled Rafael's father as the cat resembles the tiger, could think of nothing but Brull politics; and he was almost sobbing as he saw the danger which the prestige of the Brull House was running.

With bowed head, crushed by the realization of the scene that had followed his flight, Rafael did not notice where they were going. But soon he became conscious of the perfume of flowers. They were crossing a garden; and as he looked up he saw the figure of Valencia's conqueror on his sinewy charger glistening in the sun.

They walked on. The old man began in wailing accents to describe the situation which the Brull House was facing. That money, which perhaps Rafael still had in his pocket—more than thirty thousand pesetas—represented the final desperate efforts of his mother to rescue the family fortune, which had been endangered by don Ramon's prodigal habits. The money was his, and don Andres had nothing to say in that regard. Rafael was at liberty to squander it, scatter it to the four winds of heaven; but don Andres wasn't talking to a child, he was talking to a man with a heart: so he begged him, as his childhood preceptor, as his oldest friend, to consider the sacrifices his mother had been making—the privations she had imposed upon herself, going without new clothes, quarreling with her help over a centimo, despite all her airs as a grand lady, depriving herself of all the dainties and comforts that are so pleasant to old age—all that her son, her senor hijo, might waste it in gay living on a woman! Thirty thousand! And don Andres mentioned the sum with bated breath! It had taken so much trouble to hoard it! Come, man! The sight of such things was enough to make a fellow cry like a baby!...

And suppose his father, don Ramon, were to rise from the grave? Suppose he could see how his Rafael were destroying at a single stroke what it had cost him so many years to build up, just because of a woman!...

They were now crossing a bridge. Below, against the background of white gravel in the river-bed the red and blue uniforms of a group of soldiers could be seen; and the drums were beating, sounding in the distance like the humming of a huge bee-hive—worthy accompaniment, Rafael reflected, to the old man's evocation of the youth's father. Rafael thought he could almost see in front of him the massive body, the flourishing mustache, the proud, arrogant brow of don Ramon, a born fighter, an adventurer destined from the cradle to lead men and impose his will upon inferiors.

What would that heroic master of men have said of this? Don Ramon would give a lot of money to a woman—granted—but he wouldn't have swapped all the beauties on earth put together for a single vote!

But his son, the boy on whom he had grounded his fondest hopes—the redeemer destined to raise the House of Brull to its loftiest glory—the future "personage" in Madrid, the fondled heir-apparent, who had found his pathway already cleared for him at birth—was throwing all his father's labors through the window, the way you toss overboard something it has cost you nothing to earn! It was easy to see that Rafael had never known what hard times were—those days of the Revolution, when the Brulls were out of power and held their own just because don Ramon was a bad man with a gun—desperate election campaigns, when you marched to victory over somebody's dead body, bold cross-country rides on election night, never knowing when you would meet the roder in ambush—the outlaw sharpshooter who had vowed to kill don Ramon; then endless prosecutions for intimidation and violence, which had given dona Bernarda and her husband months and months of anxiety, lest a catastrophe from one moment to the next bring prison and forfeiture of all their property! All that his father had gone through, for his boy's sake; to carve out a pedestal for Rafael, pass on to him a District that would be his own, blazing a path over which he might go to no visible limit of glory! And he was just throwing it all away, relinquishing forever a position that had been built up at the cost of years and years of labor and peril! That is what he would be doing, unless that very night he returned home, refuting by his presence there the rumors his scandalized adherents were circulating.

Rafael shook his head. The mention of his father had touched him, and he was convinced by the old man's arguments; but none the less he was determined to resist. No, and again no; his die was cast: he would continue on his way.

They were now under the trees of the Alameda. The carriages were rolling by, forming an immense wheel in the center of the avenue. The harnesses of the horses and the lamps of the drivers' boxes gleamed in the sunlight. Women's hats and the white lace shawls of children could be seen through the coach windows as they passed.

Don Andres became impatient with the youth's stubbornness. He pointed to all those happy, peaceful-looking families out for their afternoon drive—wealth, comfort, public esteem, abundance, freedom from struggle and toil! Cristo, boy! Was that so bad, after all? Well, that was just the life he could have if he would be good and not turn his back on his plain duty—rich, influential, respected, growing old with a circle of nice children about him. What more could a decent person ask for in this world?

All that bohemian nonsense about pure love, love free from law and restraint, love that scoffs at society and its customs, sufficient unto itself and despising public opinion, that was just bosh, the humbug of poets, musicians and dancers—a set of outcasts like that woman who was taking him away, cutting him off forever from all the ties that bound him to family and country!

The old man seemed to take courage from Rafael's silence. He judged the moment opportune for launching the final attack upon the boy's infatuation.

"And then, what a woman! I have been young, like you, Rafael. It's true I didn't know a stylish woman like this one, but, bah! they're all alike. I have had my weaknesses; but I tell you I wouldn't have lifted a finger for this actress of yours! Any one of the girls we have down home is worth two of her. Clothes, yes, talk, yes, powder and rouge inches deep!... I'm not saying she's bad to look at—not that; what I say is... well, it doesn't take much to turn your head—you're satisfied with the leavings of half the men in Europe...."

And he came to Leonora's past, the lurid, much exaggerated legend of her journey through life—lovers by the dozens; statues and paintings of her in the nude; the eyes of all Europe centered on her beauty; the public property of a continent! "That was virtue to go crazy about, come now! Quite worth leaving house and home for, no doubt of that!"

The old man winced under the flash of anger that blazed in Rafael's eyes. They had just crossed another bridge, and were entering the city again. Don Andres, wretched coward that he was, sidled away to be within reach of the customs' office if the fist he could already see cleaving the air should come his way.

Rafael, in fact, stopped in his tracks, glaring. But in a second or two he went on his way again, dejected, with bowed head, ignoring the presence of the old man. Don Andres resumed his place at the boy's side.

The cursed old fox! He had stuck the knife in the right place! Leonora's past! Her favors distributed with mad lavishness over the four corners of the globe! An army of men of every nation owning her for a moment with the appeal of luxury or the enchantment of art! A palace today and a hotel tomorrow! Her lips repeating in all the languages of Babel the very words of love that had fired him as if he had been the first to hear them! He was going to lose everything for that—that refuse, as don Andres said—a public scandal, a ruined reputation; and a murdered mother perhaps,—for that! Oh, that devil of a don Andres! How cunningly he had slashed him, and then plunged his fingers into the bleeding gash to make the wound deeper! The old man's plain common-sense had shattered his dream. That man had been the rustic, cunning Sancho at the side of the quixotic don Ramon; and he was playing the same role with Rafael!

Leonora's story came back to the boy in one flash—the frank confession she had made during the days of their mere friendship, when she had told him everything to prevent his continuing to desire her. However much she might adore him, he would be nothing after all but a successor to a Russian count, and a German musician; the latest, simply among those countless ephemeral lovers, whom she had barely mentioned but who must none the less have left some trace in her memory. The last item in a long inventory! The most recent arrival, coming several years late, and content to nibble at the soggy over-ripe fruit which they had known when it was fresh and firm. Her kisses that so deeply disturbed him! What were they but the intoxicating, unhealthful perfume of a whole career of corruptness and licentiousness, the concentrated essence of a world madly dashing at her seductive beauty, as a bird of night breaks its head against the globe of a lighthouse? Give up everything for that! The two of them traveling about the world, free, and proud of their passion!... And out in that world he would encounter many of his predecessors; and they would look at him with curious, ironic eyes, knowing of her all that he would know, able to repeat all the panting phrases she would speak to him in the exaggerations of her insatiable passion! The strange thing about it was that all this had not occurred to him sooner. Blind with happiness, he had never thought an instant of his real place in that woman's life!

How long had they been walking through the streets of Valencia?... His legs were sagging under him! He was faint with weariness. He could hardly see. The gables of the houses were still tipped with sunlight, yet he seemed to be groping about in a deep night.

"I'm thirsty, don Andres. Let's go in somewhere."

The old man headed him toward the Cafe de Espana, his favorite resort. He selected the table in the center of the big square salon under the four clocks supported by the angel of Fame. The walls were covered with great mirrors that opened up fantastic perspectives in the dingy room where the gilded ornaments were blackened by the smoke and a crepuscular light filtered in through the lofty skylight as into a sombre crypt.

Rafael drank, without realizing just what his glass contained—a poison, it felt like, that froze his heart. Don Andres sat looking at the writing articles on the marble table: a letter-case of wrinkled oil-cloth, and a grimy ink-well. He began to rap upon them with the holder of the public pen—rusty and with the points bent—an instrument of torture well fitted for a hand committed to despair!

"We have just an hour to catch our train! Come, Rafael, be a man! There's still time! Come, let's get out of this mess we're in!"

And he held out the pen, though he had not said a word about writing to anybody.

"I can't, don Andres. I'm a gentleman. I've given my word; and I will not go back upon it, come what may!"

The old man smiled ironically.

"Very well, be as much of a gentleman as you please. She deserves it! But when you break with her, when she leaves you, or you leave her, don't come back to Alcira. Your mother won't be there to welcome you! I shall be—I don't know where; and those who made you deputy will look upon you as a thief who robbed and killed his mother.... Oh, get mad if you want to—beat me up even; people at the other tables are already looking at us.... Why not top the whole business off with a saloon brawl? But just the same, everything I've been saying to you is gospel truth!..."

In the meantime Leonora was growing impatient in her hotel room. Three hours had gone by. To relieve her nervousness she sat down behind the green curtain at the window watching pedestrians crossing the square.

How like a small piazza of old Florence this place was, with its stately aristocratic residences, shrouded in imposing gloom; it's grass-grown, cobblestone pavements hot from the sun; its sleepy solitude: an occasional woman, or a priest, or a tourist,—and you could hear their footsteps even when they were far away! Here was a curious corner of the Palacio de Dos Agnas—panels of jasper stucco with a leaf design on the mouldings! That talking came from the drivers gathered in the hotel door—the innkeeper and the servants were setting the chairs out on the sidewalk as if they were back at home—in a small Italian town! Behind the roof opposite, the sunlight was gradually fading, growing paler and softer every moment.

She looked at her watch. Six o'clock! Where on earth could that Rafael have gone? They were going to lose the train. In order to waste no time, she ordered Beppa to have everything in readiness for departure. She packed her toilet articles; then closed her trunks, casting an inquiring glance over the room with the uneasiness of a hasty leave-taking. On an armchair near the window she laid her traveling coat, then her hand-bag, and her hat and veil. They would have to run the moment Rafael came in. He would probably be very tired and nervous from returning so late.

But Rafael did not come!... She felt an impulse to go out and look for him; but where? She had not been in Valencia since she was a child. She had forgotten the streets. Then she might actually pass Rafael on the way without knowing it, and wander aimlessly about while he would be waiting for her at the hotel. No. It would be better to stay there!

It was now dusk and the hotel-room was virtually dark. She went to the window again, trembling with impatience, filled with all the gloom of the violet light that was falling from the sky with a few red streaks from the sunset. They would surely lose the train now! They would have to wait until the next day. That was a disappointment! They might have trouble in getting away!

She whirled nervously about as she heard someone calling from the corridor.

"Madame, madame, a letter for you!"

A letter for her!... She snatched it feverishly from the bell-boy's hand, while Beppa, seated on a trunk, looked on vacantly, without expression.

She began to tremble violently. The thought of Hans Keller, the ungrateful artist, suddenly rose in her memory. She looked for a candle on the chiffonier. There was none. Finally she went to the balcony and tried to read the letter in the little light there was.

It was his handwriting on the envelope—but tortuous, labored, as if it were the product of a painful effort. She felt all her blood rush back upon her heart. Madly she tore the letter open, and read with the haste of a person anxious to drain the cup of bitterness at a single draught, skipping a line here and a line there, taking in only the significant words.

"My mother very ill.... I must go home for a day or two ... my duty as a son ... we'll soon meet again." And then all the cowardly, conventional excuses that chivalry has created to soften the harshness of desertion—the promise to join her again as soon as possible; passionate protestations that she was the only woman in the world he loved.

Her first thought was to go back to Alcira at once, walk there if necessary, find the scamp somewhere, throw the letter into his face, beat him, claw him to pieces!

"Ah, the wretch! The infamous, cowardly, unspeakable wretch!" she cried.

Beppa had found a candle. She lighted it. And there her mistress was—staggering, deathly pale, her eyes wide open, her lips white with anguish! Leonora began to walk up and down the apartment, taut and strained, as if her feet were not moving at all, as if she were being thrust about by an invisible hand.

"Beppa," she groaned finally, "he has gone. He is deserting me."

The maid did not care about the desertion particularly. She had been through that before. She was thinking about Leonora, waiting for the impending crisis, studying the anguished countenance of her mistress with her own placid, bovine eyes.

"The wretch!" Leonora hissed, pacing back and forth in the chamber. "What a fool, what a complete, unconscionable fool I have been! Giving myself to that man, believing in that man, trusting that man, giving up my peace of mind, the last relative I had in the world for that man!... And why would he not let me go off alone? He made me dream of an eternal springtime of love, and now he deserts me.... He has tricked me ... he is laughing at me ... and I can not hate him. Why did he insist on rousing me when I was there alone, quite peaceful, forgetting everything, sunk in a placid indulgent calm!... The cool fraud that he was!... But what do I care, after all?... It's all over. Come Beppa, cheer up! Hah-hah! Come, Beppa! We're off! We're off! We're going to sing again! Off over the whole globe. Good-bye to this rat-hole forever! I'm through educating children! Now for life again! And we'll drain them dry, the brutes! Kick them about like the selfish donkeys they are! Well, well! I can't believe I've been taken in this way! Isn't it a joke? The best joke you ever heard! Ha, ha, ha! And I thought I knew the world ...! Ha, ha! Ha, ha!..."

And her laugh was audible distinctly down in the square. It was a wild, shrill, metallic laughter, that seemed to be rending her flesh! The whole hotel was in commotion, while the actress, with foaming lips, fell to the floor and began to writhe in fury, overturning the furniture and bruising her body on the iron trimmings of her trunks.



PART THREE

I

"Don Rafael, the gentlemen of the Committee on the Budget are waiting for you in the second section."

"I'll be there directly."

And the deputy bent low over his desk in the writing-room of the Congress, went on with his last letter, adding one more envelope to the heap of correspondence piled up at the end of the table, near his cane and his silk hat.

This was his daily grind, the boresome drudgery of every afternoon; and around him, with similar expressions of disgust on their faces, a large number of the country's representatives were busy at the same task. Rafael was answering petitions and queries, stifling the complaints and acknowledging the wild suggestions that came in from the District—the endless clamor of the voters at home, who never met the slightest annoyance in their various paths of life without at once running to their deputy, the way a pious worshipper appeals to the miracle-working saint.

He gathered up his letters, gave them to an usher to mail, and sauntering off with a counterfeit sprightliness that was more counterfeit as he grew fatter and fatter with the years, walked through to the central corridor, a prolongation of the lobby in front of the Salon de Conferencias.

The Honorable senor don Rafael Brull, member from Alcira, felt as much at ease as if he were in his own house when he entered that corridor,—a dark hole, thick with tobacco smoke, and peopled with black suits standing around in groups or laboriously elbowing their way through the crowds.

He had been there eight years; though he had almost lost count of the times he had been "duly elected" in the capricious ups and downs of Spanish politics, which give to Parliaments only a fleeting existence. The ushers, the personnel of the Secretariat, the guards and janitors, treated him with deferential intimacy, as a comrade on a somewhat higher level, but as much of a fixture as they were to the Spanish Congress. He was not one of those men who are miraculously washed into office on the crest of a reform wave, but never succeed in repeating the trick, and spend the rest of their lives idling on the sofas of the Conference Chamber, with wistful memories of lost greatness, waiting to enter Congress afternoons, to preserve their standing as ex-deputies, and forever hoping that their party will some day return to power, so that once again they may sit on the red benches. No, don Rafael Brull was a gentleman with a District all his own: he came with a clean, undisputed and indisputable certificate of election, whether his own party or the Opposition were in the saddle. For lack of other discoverable merit in him, his fellow-partisans would say: "Brull is one of the few who come here on honest returns." His name did not figure brilliantly in the Congressional record, but there was not an employee, not a journalist, not a member of the "ex-honorables" who, on noticing the word "Brull" on all the committees, did not at once exclaim: "Ah, yes! Brull ... of Alcira."

Eight years of "service to the country." Eight years of lodging-house life, while yonder lay a sumptuous home adorned with a luxuriousness that had cost his mother and his father-in-law half a fortune! Long seasons of separation from his wife and his children—and without amusements, to avoid spending money lest the folks at home suspect him of dereliction in public—and private—duty! What a dog's life his eight years as deputy had been! Indigestion from the countless gallons of sugared water drunk at the Congressional bar; callouses on his feet from endless promenades along the central corridor, absentmindedly knocking the varnish off the tiles of the wainscoating with the tip of his cane; an incalculable quantity of pesetas spent on carriages, through fault of his supporters, who sent him trotting every morning from one Ministry to the next, asking for the earth, and getting a grain of sand!

He had not as yet gotten anywhere in particular; but according to Chamber gossip he was a "serious" well-balanced young man, of few words, but good ones, and sure some day to be rewarded with a Portfolio. Content with the role of safety and sanity that had been assigned to him, he laughed very seldom, and dressed soberly, with not a dissonant color to brighten his black attire. He would listen patiently to things that did not concern him in the least, rather than venture a personal opinion with the chance of going wrong—satisfied with premature wrinkles, premature corpulency, and premature baldness, since nothing could be more respectable than a thoughtful face, a conspicuous paunch, and a pate that could shine with venerable brilliancy under the lamps of the Chamber. At thirty-four, he looked more like forty-five. When he spoke he would remove his spectacles with a gesture he had carefully imitated from the deceased leader of "the Party." He would never take the floor without prefacing his remarks with: "My understanding is ...," or "I have my own humble opinion on this matter...." And this was what don Rafael Brull had learned in eight years of parliamentary assiduity!

The new Conservative leader, seeing that he could always depend on Brull's vote and that Alcira elections cost "the Party" nothing, had a certain consideration for Rafael. He was a soldier always on hand for roll-call, whenever a new Parliament was formed. He would present himself with his certificate of election, whether his party, with all the insolence of victory, occupied the benches on the Right, or hungry and defiant, and reduced in numbers, was huddled on the Left, determined to find fault with everything the reigning Ministry did. Two sessions as part of the minority had won him a certain intimacy with the leader in that frank comradeship that Oppositions always have, since, from leader down to the most silent member, all the deputies "out of power" are on a level. Besides, in those two seasons of misfortune, to aid in the destructive tactics of his faction, he put little interpellations to the government, at the openings of the sessions when the crowds were small; and more than once he heard from the pale smiling lips of the chief: "Very good, Brull; that was to the point." And such congratulations were duly echoed in his home city, where rustic imagination did the rest.

In addition, a few parliamentary honors had come his way; the "Grand Cross" had been given him, as it is given to most deputies of a certain length of service—from membership, eventually, on committees charged with representing the legislative branch of the government at formal public functions. If an "Answer to the Message" was to be taken "to the Palace," he was one of those chosen for the purpose; and he trembled with emotion to think of what his mother, his wife, all the people down yonder at home would say if they could see him riding there in the sumptuous carriage of state, preceded by bright-liveried horsemen and saluted by trumpets blaring the royal march! He was also usually among the delegates who came out on the staircase of the Congress to welcome Their Majesties on the opening of a parliament. Finally, for one session, he was on "the Committee for the Interior," an appointment that raised his prestige a thousand percent among the ushers.

"That fellow Brull," they would say in the Chamber, "will be somebody the day his party returns to power."

Well, now "the Party" was in power again. During one of those ordered, calculated "changes of direction" to which Spain lives subject, because of its parliamentary system of party weights and party balances, the Conservatives captured the premiership; and Rafael went on the budget committee. There he would do something more than make interpellations when he opened his mouth to speak. In fact he had to win his spurs, justify his filling one of those posts which, according to report, his chief was holding for him.

The green deputies, the younger set constituting the new majority, elect and triumphant through grace of the Ministry of the Interior, respected him and deferred to what he said, much as students listen to a tutor who they know receives his orders from the master directly—the subordination of freshmen, as it were, to the sophomore who knows the rules.

Whenever a vote was being taken and the Opposition was excited over the chance of putting the government in the minority, the Premier would look about anxiously over the hall for Brull.

"See here, Brull, better bring your people in; we're going to have a close call."

And Brull, proud at being noticed thus, would dash out like a streak of lightning while the bells were ringing and the ushers were running about summoning the deputies to vote. He would make the rounds of the desks in the writing rooms, elbow his way into groups in the corridors; and filling with self-importance because of the authority conferred upon him, he would rudely shoo the ministerial flock off toward the Chamber, grumbling fogeywise and assuring them that "in his time," when he was serving his first term, there was "far better discipline." When the vote was all in and the victory won, he would sigh with satisfaction. He had saved the government! And perhaps the nation!

At times a residue of the sincerity and frankness of his character as a boy would rise to the surface in him. Then cruel doubts would assail his faith in himself. Weren't they all playing a stupid comedy there without the slightest wit or sense in it? Really was what they said and did there of the slightest importance to the country—to anybody?

Standing in the corridor, he would feel the nervous flutter of the journalists about him—those poor, intelligent, attractive, young fellows, who found it so hard to make a living. From the press-gallery they would sit and look down on the legislators the way birds in the treetops must look down on the wretchedness of the streets below, laughing at the nonsense those solemn baldpates were talking! Could a farce on the stage be more amusing?

To Rafael those "intellectuals" seemed to bring a breeze from out of doors into the close, sordid, vitiated air of the Chamber. They stood for the thought of the world outside—the idea fatherless, unsponsored, the aspiration of the great masses—a breath of fresh air in the sick-room of a chronic invalid forever dying, forever unburiable.

Their judgment always differed from that of the country's representatives. His Excellency senor don What's-his-Name was in their eyes, a mud-eel, and in their lingo a congrio; the illustrious orator What-do-you-call-him, who took up a sixteen-page sheet in the Congressional Record every time he spoke, was a percebe, a "barnacle on the keel of Progress"; every act of parliament struck them as a bit of balderdash, though, to hold their jobs, they praised it to the skies in their articles. And why was it that the country, in some mysterious way, would always think eventually what those boys thought, so long, and only so long, as they remained boys? Would they have to come down from their scats in the press-gallery to the red benches on the floor before the real will of the country would make itself felt?

Rafael Brull finally realized that national opinion was present on the floor, among his fellow members, also, but like a mummy in a sarcophagus: bound hand and foot in rhetoric and conventional utterance, spiced, embalmed with proprieties that made any outburst of sincerity, any explosion of real feeling, evidence of "bad taste!"

In reality everything was going well with the Ship of State. The nation had passed from action to talk, and from talk to passivity, and from passivity to resignation. The era of revolutions was gone forever. The infallible system of government had proved to be this mechanism of pre-arranged "crises" and amicable exchanges of patronage between Liberals and Conservatives, each member of the party in power and each member of the party out of power knowing just what he was to say and just what he was to get.

So, in that palace of over-ornate architecture, as pretentious and as showy as the mansion of a millionaire parvenu, Rafael was condemned to spend his lifetime, foregoing the blue sky and the flowering fields and orchards of Alcira that a family ambition might be realized.

Nothing noteworthy had occurred during those eight years. His life had been a muddy, monotonous stream, with neither brilliancy nor beauty in its waters, lazily meandering along, like the Jucar in winter. As he looked back over his career as a "personage," he could have summed it up in three words: he had married.

Remedios was his wife. Don Matias was his father-in-law. He was wealthy. He had control over a vast fortune, for he exercised despotic rule over his wife's peasant father, the most fervent of his admirers. His mother seemed to have put the last of her strength into the arrangement of that "marriage of convenience." She had fallen into a senile decrepitude that bordered on dotage. Her sole evidence of being alive was her habit of staying in church until the doors were closed and she could stay no longer. At home she did nothing but recite the rosary, mumbling away in some corner of the house, and taking no part in the noisy play of her grandchildren. Don Andres had died, leaving Rafael sole "boss" of "the Party." He had had three children. They had had their teeth, their measles, their whooping-cough. These episodes, with a few escapades of that brother of Remedios, who feared Rafael's paunch and bald head more than the wrath of don Matias, were the only distractions in a thoroughly dull existence.

Every year he bought a new piece of land. He felt a thrill of pride when from the top of San Salvador—that Hermitage, alas, of such desperate and unfading memory!—he looked down upon the vast patches of land with orange-trees in straight rows and fenced in by green walls, that all, all, belonged to him. The joy of ownership, the intoxication of property had gone to his head.

As he entered the old mansion, entirely made over now, he felt the same sense of well-being and power. The old chest in which his mother used to keep her money stood where it had always stood; but it was no longer devoted to savings hoarded slowly at the cost of untold sacrifice and privation to raise mortgages and temporize with creditors. Never again had he tip-toed up in the dark to rifle it. Now it was his own. And at harvest time it became literally crammed with the huge rolls of banknotes his father-in-law paid over in exchange for the oranges of the Brull orchards. And Rafael had a covetous eye on what don Matias had in the banks; for all that, too, would come to him when the old man died. Acquisitiveness—money and land—had become his one, his ruling passion. Monotony, meanwhile, had turned him into an accurate, methodical, meticulous machine; so that every night he would make out a schedule, hour for hour, of all that he would do on the following day. At the bottom of this passion for riches conjugal contagion probably lay. Eight years of unbroken familiarity had finally inoculated him with most of the obsessions and most of the predilections of his wife.

The shrinking, timorous little she-goat that used to gambol about with him in pursuit, the poor child who had been so wistful and downcast during the days of his wantonness, had now become a woman with all the imperious obstinacy, all the domineering superiority of the female of the species as it has evolved in the countries of the South. Cleanliness and frugality in Remedios took the form of unendurable tyranny. She scolded her husband if he brought the slightest speck of dust into the house on his shoes. She would turn the place upside down, flay all the servants alive, if ever a few drops of oil were spilled from a jar, or a crumb of bread were wasted on the table.

"A jewel for the home! And didn't I tell you so?" her father would whisper, satisfied with his daughter's obtrusive qualities.

Rafael, for his part, found them intolerable. He had tried to love his bride in the early months of their marriage. He made an honest effort to forget, and recall the playful, passionate impulses he had felt on those days when he had chased her around the orchards. But after a first fever of passion had passed, she had proved to be a cold, calculating child-bearer, hostile to expansiveness of love out of religious scruples, viewing it her duty to bring new offsprings into the world to perpetuate the House of Brull and to fill "grandaddy" don Matias with pride at sight of a nursery full of future "personages" destined to the heights of political greatness in the District and in the nation.

Rafael had one of those gentle, temperate, honest, households that, on the afternoon of their walk through Valencia, don Andres had pointed out to him as a radiant hope, if only he would turn his back on his mad adventure. He had a wife; and he had children; and he was rich. His father-in-law ordered shotguns for him from his correspondents in England. Every year a new horse was added to the stable, and don Matias would see to purchasing the best that could be found in the fairs of Andalusia. He hunted, took long horseback rides over the roads of the district, dispensed justice in the patio of the house, just as his father don Ramon had done. His three little ones, finding him somewhat strange after his long absences in Madrid and more at home with their grand-parents than with him, would group themselves with bowed, bashful heads around his knees, silently waiting for his paternal kiss. Everything attainable around him was within his reach for the asking; and yet—he was not happy.

From time to time the adventure of his youth would come back to his mind. The eight years that had passed seemed to have put a century between him and those ancient days. Leonora's face had slowly, slowly, faded in his memory, till all he could remember were her two green eyes, and her blond hair that crowned her with a crown of gold. Her aunt, the devout, ingenuous dona Pepa, had died some time since—leaving her property for the salvation of her soul. The orchard and the Blue House belonged now to Rafael's father-in-law, who had transferred to his own home the best of its equipment—all the furniture and decorations that Leonora had bought during her period of exile, while Rafael had been in Madrid and she had thought of living the rest of her life in Alcira.

Rafael carefully avoided revisiting the Blue House, out of regard for his wife's possible susceptibilities. As it was, the woman's silence sometimes weighed heavily upon him, a strange circumspection, which never permitted the slightest allusion to the past. In the coldness and the uncompromising scorn with which she abominated any poetic madness in love, an important part was doubtless played by the suppressed memory of her husband's adventure with the actress, which everybody had tried to conceal from her and which had deeply disturbed the preparations for her wedding.

When the deputy was alone in Madrid, as much at liberty as before his marriage, he could think of Leonora freely, without those restraints which seemed to disturb him back at home in the bosom of his family. What could have become of her? To what limits of mad frolic had she gone after that parting which even after years had passed, still brought a blush of shame to Rafael's cheeks? The Spanish papers paid very little attention to matters of foreign art. Only twice in their columns did he discover Leonora's stage name with an account of her new triumphs. She had sung in Paris in French, with as much success as a native artiste. The purity of her accent had surprised everyone. In Rome she had played the "lead" in an opera by a young Italian composer, and her coming had been announced by press agents as a great event. The opera had failed to please; not so the singer. Her audience had been moved to tears by her execution of a scene in the last act, where she wept for a lost love.

After that—silence, no news whatever! She had disappeared. A new love affair, Rafael supposed, a new outburst of that vehement passion which made her follow her chosen man like a slave. And Rafael felt a flash of jealousy at the thought, as if he had rights over the woman still, as if he had forgotten the cruelty with which he had bidden her farewell.

That, fundamentally, had been the cause of all the bitterness and remorse in his life. He understood now that Leonora had been his one genuine passion: the love that comes to people once in a lifetime. It had been within reach of his hand, and he had failed to grasp it, had frightened it away forever with a cowardly act of villany, a cruel farewell, the shame of which would go to the grave with him. Garlanded in the orange-blossoms of the orchard, Love had passed before him, singing the Hymn of wild Youth that knows neither scruples nor ambition. Love, true love had invited him to follow—and he had answered with a stab—in the back! That love would never return, as he well knew. That mysterious being with its smiles and with its frolics, goes forever when once it goes. It knows no bartering with destiny. It demands blind obedience and bids the lover take the woman who offers her hand, orchard-maid or prima donna as she may be. The man who hesitates is lost.

And Rafael felt that an endless night had closed around him! He found all his efforts to escape from his dullness and depression vain. He could not shake off the senility that was creeping over his spirit. Sadly he bowed to the conviction that another love like the first was impossible.

For two months he had been the lover of Cora, a popular girl of the private rooms of the Fornos, a tall, thin, strong Galician beauty—as strong, alas, as the other. Cora had spent a few months in Paris, and had returned thence with her hair bleached and a distinctly French manner of lifting her skirt as if she were strolling along the trottoir of the boulevards. She had a sweet way of mixing French words in her conversation, calling everybody mon cher and pretending expertness in the organization of a supper. At all events she shone like a great cocotte among her competitors, though her real asset was a line of risque stories, and a certain gift for low songs.

Rafael soon wearied of this affair. He did not like her manufactured beauty, nor her tiresome chatter that always turned on fashions. She was always wanting money for herself and for her friends. Rafael, as a wealthy miser, grew alarmed. Remorsefully he thought of his children's future, as if he were ruining them; and of what his economical Remedios would say of his considerably augmented expenditures. Well he knew that Remedios haggled for everything down to the last centimo, and that her one extravagance was an occasional new shawl for the local Virgin, and an annual fiesta for the Saint with a large orchestra and hundreds of candles! He broke off relations with the Galician boulevardiere, and found the rupture a sweet relief. It seemed to remove a sully from the memory of his youthful passion. Moreover, his Party had just returned to power and it was important to have no blemish on his standing as a "serious" person! He resumed his seat on the Right, and near the Blue Bench this time, as one of the senior deputies. The moment for work had come! Now, it was time to see whether he could not make a position for himself with one good boost!

They named him to the Committee on the Budget, and he took it upon himself to refute certain strictures presented by the Opposition to the Government program on Pardon and Justice. One friend he could count on was the minister: a respectable, solemn marquis who had once been an Absolutist, and who, wearied of platonisms, as he put it, had finally "recognized" the liberal regime, without amending his former ideas, however.

Rafael was as nervous as a schoolboy on the eve of his first examinations. At the library he studied everything that had been said on the subject by countless deputies in a century of Parliamentary government. His friends in the Conference Chamber—the legislative bohemia of "ex-honorables" and unsuccessful aspirants, who were loyal to him in gratitude for passes to the floor—were encouraging him and prophesying victory. They no longer approached him to begin: "When I was auditor ..." to indulge in a veritable intoxication on the fumes of their past glory; no longer did they ask him what don Francisco thought of this, that, or the other thing, to draw their own wild inferences from his replies and start rumors going based on "inside information." Now, quite frankly, they "advised" him, giving him hints in accordance with what they had said or meant to say during that discussion of the budget back in Gonzalez Brabo's time, to end by murmuring, with a smile that gave him the shudders: "Well, anyhow, we'll see! Good luck to you!"

And that flock of disgruntled spirits who sat around waiting for an election that would never come and ran like old war-horses at the scent of gun-powder to group themselves, as soon as a row started and the bell began to ring for order, in two factions on either side of the president's chair, could never have imagined that the young deputy, on many a night, broke off his study with a temptation to throw the thick tomes of records against the wall, yielding finally, with thrills of intense voluptuousness, to the thought of what might have become of him had he gone out into life on his own in the trail of a pair of green eyes whose golden lights he thought he could still see glittering in front of him between the lines of clumsy parliamentary prose, tempting him as they had tempted him of yore!



II

"Order of the day. Resumption of debate on ecclesiastical appropriations!"

The Chamber suddenly came to life with a wild movement of dispersion, something comparable to the stampede of a herd or the panic of an army. The deputies of quickest motory reactions were on their feet in an instant, followed by dozens and dozens of others, all making for the doors. Whole blocks of seats were emptied.

The Chamber had been packed from the opening of the Session. It was a day of intense excitement: a debate between the leader of the Right and a former comrade who was now in the Opposition. The jealousy between the two old cronies was resulting in a small-sized scandal. Mutual secrets of their ancient intimacy as colleagues were coming to light—many of the intrigues that had settled historic parliamentary contests for the premiership. The galleries were filled with spectators who had come to enjoy the fun. The deputies and ministers occupied every seat on either hand of the presidential chair. But now the incident was closed. Two hours of veiled insult and pungent gossip had passed all too soon. And the phrase "Ecclesiastical Appropriations" had served as a fire-alarm. Run—do not walk—to the nearest exit!

However, the name of the orator who was now being given the floor served to check the stampede somewhat, much as routs have been stopped by some great historic warcry. A few deputies hurried back to their benches. All eyes turned toward the extreme Left of the Chamber, where, a white head, rising above the red seats over a pair of spectacles and a gently ironical smile, was coming into view.

The old man was on his feet, at last. He was small, so frail of person, that he hardly overtopped the men still seated. All his vital energies had been concentrated in that huge, nobly proportioned head of his, pink at the top, with shocks of white hair combed back over it. His pale countenance had the warlike transparency of a sound, vigorous old age. To it a shining, luminous silvery beard added a majesty like that with which Sacred Art used to picture the Almighty.

The venerable orator folded his arms and waited for the noise in the Chamber to cease. When the last determined fugitives had disappeared through the exit doors, he began to speak. The journalists in the press-gallery craned their necks toward "the tribune," hushing for silence in order not to lose a word.

This man was the patriarch of the Chamber. He represented "the Revolution"—not only the old-fashioned, the political, revolution, but the modern, the social and economic revolution. He was the enemy of all present systems of government and society. His theories irritated everybody, like a new and incomprehensible music falling on slumbering ears. But he was listened to with respect, with the veneration inspired by his years and his unsullied career. His voice had the melodious feebleness of a muffled, silver bell; and his words rolled through the silence of the hall with a certain prophetic stateliness, as if the vision of a better world were passing before his eyes as he spoke, the revelation of a perfect society of the future, where there would be no oppression and no misery, the dream he had so often dreamed in the solitude of his study.

Rafael was sitting at the head of the committee bench, somewhat apart from his companions. They were giving him ample room, as bull-fighters do their matador. He had bundles of documents and volumes piled up at his seat, in case he should need to quote authorities in his reply to the venerable orator.

He was studying the old man admiringly and in silence. What a strong, sturdy spirit, as hard and cold and clear as ice! That veteran had doubtless had his passions like other men. At moments, through his calm impassive exterior, a romantic vehemence would seem to burn, a poetic ardor, that politics had smothered, but which smouldered on as volcanic fires lie dormant rumbling from time to time under the mantle of snow on a mountain peak. But he had known how to adjust his life to duty; and without belief in God, with the support of philosophy only, his virtue had been strong enough to disarm his most violent enemies.

And a weakling, a dawdler like himself, must reply to a hero like that!... Rafael began to be afraid; and to recover his spirits he swept the hall with his eyes. What the regular hangers-on of the sessions would have called a medium-sized house! A few deputies scattered about the benches! But the public galleries were filled with spectators, workingmen mostly, absolutely quiet, and all ears, as if they were drinking in every word of the old republican! In the reserved seats, just previously packed with curiosity-seekers interested in the set-to scheduled for the opening of the session, only a few foreign tourists were left. They were taking in everything—even the fantastic uniforms of the mace-bearers; and they were determined not to leave until they were put out. A few women of the so-called "parliament set," who came every afternoon when there was a squabble on the program, were munching caramels and staring in wonderment at the old man. There he was, the arch enemy of law and order! The man whose name it was bad form to mention at their afternoon teas! Who would have supposed he had such a kindly, harmless face? How easily, with what naturalness and grace, he wore his frock coat! Incredible!... In the diplomatic gallery a solitary lady! She was extravagantly attired in a huge picture hat with black plumes. Almost hidden behind her was a fair haired youth, his hair parted in the middle, his dress the height of correctness and foppery. Some rich tourist-woman probably! She was directly opposite Rafael's bench. He could see that her gloved hand rested on the railing, as she moved her fan to and fro with an almost discourteous noise. The rest of her body was lost in the darkness of the gallery. She bent back from time to time to whisper and laugh with her escort.

Somewhat reassured by the empty appearance of the house, Rafael scarcely paid any further attention to the orator. He had guessed all that the man would say, and he was satisfied. The outline of the long answer he had prepared would not in the least be affected.

The old man was inflexible and unchangeable. For thirty years he had been saying the same thing over and over again. Rafael had read that speech any number of times. The man had made a close study of national evils and abuses, and had formulated a complete and pitiless criticism of them in which the absurdities stood out by force of contrast. With the conviction that truth is forever the same and that there is nothing ever so novel as the truth, he had kept repeating his criticism year after year in a pure, concise, sonorous style that seemed to scatter the ripe perfume of the classics about the muggy Chamber.

He spoke in the name of the future Spain, of a Spain that would have no kings, because it would be governed by itself; that would pay no priests, because, respecting freedom of conscience, it would recognize all cults and give privileges to none. And with a simple, unaffected urbanity, as if he were constructing rhyming verses, he would pair statistics off, underscoring the absurd manner in which the nation was taking leave of a century of revolution during which all peoples had done things while Spain was lying stagnant.

More money, he pointed out, was spent on the maintenance of the Royal House than upon public education. Conclusion: the support of a single family in idleness was worth more than the awakening of an entire people to modern life! In Madrid, in the very capital, within sight of every one of his hearers, the schools remained in filthy hovels, while churches and convents rose overnight on the principal streets like magic palaces. During twenty-odd years of Restoration, more than fifty completely new, religious edifices, girding the capital with a belt of glittering structures, had been built. On the other hand, only a single modern school, at all comparable to the ordinary public schools of any town in England or Switzerland! The young men of the nation were feeble, unenthusiastic, selfish and—pious—in contrast with fathers, who had adored the generous ideals of liberty and democracy and had stood for action, revolt! The son was an old man at majority, his breast laden with medals, with no other intellectual stimulus than the debates of his religious fraternity, trusting his future and his thinking to the Jesuit introduced into the family by the mother, while the father smiled bitterly, realizing that he was a back-number, belonging to a different world, to a dying generation—though to a generation which had galvanized the nation for a moment with the spirit of revolutionary protest!