The Dead Command Part 10

"Very well," said Jaime with visible discouragement. "But, lacking your a.s.sistance, I must seek another solution for my troubles, and I have one in view. You are now the head of my family, and it is right for me to seek your advice. I am considering a marriage which can save me; an alliance with a rich woman, but one who does not belong to our cla.s.s; one of low origin. What ought I to do?"

He expected in his aunt a movement of surprise, of curiosity. Perhaps the announcement of his marriage would soften her. It was almost certain that, terrified at this great danger to the honor of her house and of her blood, she would smooth the way for him by conceding a.s.sistance, but the one to be surprised, to be dismayed, was Jaime as he saw the pale lips of the old woman part in a cold smile.

"I have heard," she said. "I was told all about it this morning in Santa Eulalia as I was coming away from ma.s.s. You were at Valldemosa yesterday. You are going to marry--you are going to marry--a Chueta!"

It cost her an effort to p.r.o.nounce the word; she shuddered as she spoke it. After this a long silence reigned, one of those tragic and absolute silences which follow great catastrophes, as if the house had just tumbled down, and the echo of the last toppled wall had died away.

"And what do you think of it?" Jaime ventured to ask timidly.

"Do as you wish," said the Popess with frigidity. "You remember that we have lived many years without seeing each other, and we can go on in the same way for the rest of our lives. Do as you please. Henceforward you and I will be like people of different blood; we think along different lines; we cannot understand each other."

"So I ought not to marry?" he insisted.

"Ask yourself that question. For many years the Febrers have wandered on such crooked paths that nothing they do surprises me."

Jaime detected in his aunt's eyes and noted in her voice a repressed joy, a reveling in vengeance, the satisfaction of seeing her enemies fall into what she considered a dishonor, and this irritated him.

"But if I marry," he said, imitating Dona Juana's frigid manner, "will you come to my wedding?"

This put an end to the tranquillity of the Popess, who drew herself up haughtily. The romantic books of her youth rushed through her mind; she spoke like an injured queen at the end of a chapter of a historic novel.

"Caballero! I am a Genovart on my father's side. My mother was a Febrer, but one family is as good as the other. I renounce the blood that is to be mixed with a vile people, Christ killers, and I remain true to my own, to that of my father which will end with me pure and honorable!"

She pointed toward the door with arrogant mien, bringing the interview to a close, but soon she seemed to realize how abrupt and theatrical her protest had been, and she lowered her eyes; she grew more human, a.s.suming an air of Christian meekness.

"Good-bye, Jaime; may the Lord enlighten you!"

"Good-bye, Aunt."

Impelled by custom he extended his hand, but she drew hers back, concealing it behind her. Febrer smiled as he recalled certain tales told by the gossips. It was not scorn nor hatred. The Popess had made a vow that as long as she lived she would touch the hand of no man except those of the priests.

When he found himself again on the street, he began to curse mentally, looking at the swelling balconies of the rococo mansion. Rattlesnake!

How she rejoiced at his marriage! When it had become a fact she would pretend indignation and scandal before her coterie; perhaps she would get sick so that all the islanders would sympathize with her, and yet, her joy would be great, the joy of a vengeance nourished for many years, on seeing a Febrer, the son of the man she hated, submerged in what she considered the most ignominious of dishonors. Urged on by the certainty of ruin, he must give her this joy by carrying into effect his union with the daughter of Valls! Ah, poverty!

He wandered along the solitary streets near the Almudaina and the Cathedral until past midday. At last hunger instinctively turned his steps homeward. He ate in silence, without knowing what was put before him, not even seeing Mammy, who, worried and restless since the previous day, was eager to start a conversation in order to learn more news.

After luncheon he stepped out upon a small gallery with a crumbling bal.u.s.trade crowned by three Roman busts which looked into the garden. At his feet spread the foliage of the figs, the varnished leaves of the magnolias, the green b.a.l.l.s on the orange trees. Before him the trunks of the palms shut off the blue of s.p.a.ce, and, farther away, the sharp-pointed merlons of the wall extended to the sea, the luminous, immense sea, trembling with life as if the barkentines with their wind-filled sails were tickling its greenish surface. At his right lay the port crowded with masts and surrounded with yellow chimneys; beyond, striding into the waters of the bay, the dark ma.s.s of the pines of Bellver, and on the summit the circular castle like a bull-ring, with its Torre de Homenaje apart, isolated, with no other link than a graceful bridge. Below lay the modern red houses of Terreno, and beyond, at the end of the cape, the ancient Puerto Pi with its signal towers and the batteries of Don Carlos.

Across the bay, losing itself in the sea, amid the fog floating upon the horizon, was a dark green cape with reddish rocks, gloomy and desolate.

Against the blue sky the Cathedral lifted its b.u.t.tresses and arcades like a s.h.i.+p of stone bereft of masts, flung by angry waves between the city and the sh.o.r.e. Behind the temple the ancient alcazar, the Almudaina, flaunted its red, Moorish, almost windowless towers. In the bishop's palace the gla.s.s panes in the miradors shone like flames of reddened steel, as if reflected from a conflagration. Between this palace and the sea wall, in a deep, gra.s.s-grown fosse along whose walls crept windswept garlands of rosebushes, lay some cannons, a few of them very ancient and mounted upon wheels; others more modern, which had awaited for years the call to action, were scattered over the ground.

The great iron guns were oxidized, as were the gun-carriages; the long-range cannons, painted red, and sunken in the herbage, resembled exhaust pipes of a steam engine. Neglect and the rust of disuse were aging these modern pieces. The traditional, monotonous atmosphere which, according to Febrer, enveloped the island, seemed to weigh upon these instruments of war, old and out-of-date almost before they were fas.h.i.+oned, and before ever having spoken.

Insensible to the joyousness of the sun, heedless of the luminous palpitation of the blue expanse, deaf to the chirping of the birds fluttering at his feet, Jaime was overcome by intense sadness, by overwhelming depression.

Why struggle with the past? How rid himself of the chain? At birth everyone found the place and the gesture for everything in the course of his existence already defined; it was useless even to wish to change one's situation.

Often in his early youth, on looking down from a height upon the city with its smiling environs, he had felt obsessed by gloomy thoughts. In the suns.h.i.+ne-flooded streets, under shelter of the roofs, swarmed an ant-like humanity, dominated by necessities and ideas of the moment which they considered all important, believing with consuming egotism in a superior and omnipotent being watching and directing their goings and comings, as insignificant as the infusoria in a drop of water. Beyond the town Jaime's imagination pictured cypress tops thrust above sombre walls, the white structures of a compactly built city, mult.i.tudes of tiny windows like the mouths of ovens, and marble slabs which seemed to cover the entrances to caves. How many were the inhabitants of the city of the living, in their plazas and on their broad streets? Sixty thousand--eighty thousand. Ah! In that other city but a short distance away, crowded, silent, packed into their little white houses beneath the gloomy cypresses, the invisible inhabitants numbered four hundred thousand--six hundred thousand, perhaps a million!

In Madrid, the same thought had flashed through his brain one afternoon while he was strolling with two women through the outskirts of the town.

The crests of the hills near the river were occupied by silent villages, among whose white edifices rose pointed groups of cypress; and on the opposite side of the great city also existed other bivouacs of silence and oblivion. The city was surrounded by a closely drawn cordon of fortresses of the departed. Half a million living beings swarmed through the streets, imagining themselves alone in the mastery and direction of their existences, never heeding the four--six--eight millions of their kind, close beside them, but invisible.

The same thought had come to him in Paris, where four millions of stirring citizens dwelt, surrounded by twenty or thirty millions of whilom inhabitants now asleep. The same melancholy reflections had haunted him in all the great cities.

The living were nowhere alone; the dead ever surrounded them, and as the dead were more, infinitely more, they weighed upon the living with the heaviness of time and of numbers.

No; the dead did not depart, as the people thought. The dead remained motionless on the brink of life, spying upon the new generations, forcing upon them the authority of the past with a rude tug at the soul whenever they tried to step out of the beaten path.

What tyranny was theirs! What unlimited power! It was futile to turn away the eyes and to stifle memory; the dead are everywhere; they occupy the highways of the living, and they stride out to meet us and remind us of their benefactions, compelling us to a debasing grat.i.tude. What servitude! The house in which we live was constructed by the dead; religions were created by them; the laws which we obey the dead dictated. Our favorite dishes, our tastes, our pa.s.sions, came from them; the foods which nourish us, all are produced by earth broken up by hands which now are dust. Morality, customs, prejudices, honor--these are their work. Had they thought in some different way, the present organizations of men would not be as they are today. The things which are agreeable to our senses are so because thus the dead willed them; the disagreeable and useless are detested by the will of those who no longer exist; what is moral and what is immoral are sentences p.r.o.nounced centuries ago by them.

Those men who make an effort to say new things do nothing but repeat in different words the same thoughts that the dead had been expressing for centuries. That which we consider most spontaneous and personal in ourselves has been dictated to us by unseen masters lying in their earthen couches, who, in their turn, had learned the lesson from other ancestors. The gleam of our eyes is but the glow of the souls of our forefathers, as the lines in our faces reproduce and reflect the traces of generations long disappeared.

Febrer smiled sadly. We imagine that we think our own thoughts, while in the convolutions of our brain stirs a force which has lived in other organisms, like the sap of the grafted shoot which carries energy from old and dying trees to new offshoots. Much of the thought which we express spontaneously, as the latest novelty of our mind, is an idea of those others, encysted in our brain at birth, and which suddenly bursts its bondage. Our tastes, our caprices, our virtues and our defects, our affinities and our repulsions--all inherited, all a work of those who have disappeared but who survive in us.

With what terror Jaime thought of the power of the dead! They concealed themselves to make their tyranny less cruel, but they had not really perished; their souls were lying within the confines of our existence, just as their bodies formed an entrenched field roundabout the man-made towns. They scrutinized us with arbitrary eyes; they followed us, guiding us with invisible clutch at the slightest indication of deviating from the path; they banded together with diabolic determination to lead the flocks of men who rush after some new and extraordinary ideal, reestablis.h.i.+ng with violent reaction, the order of life, which they love, silent and placid, amid rustle of dried gra.s.ses and the flutter of b.u.t.terfly wings and the sweet peace of the cemetery, asleep in the sun.

The souls of the dead fill the world. The dead do not go away, they remain as masters. The dead command, and it is useless to resist.

The man of the great cities living a giddy life, knowing not who built his house, nor who makes his bread, seeing no other works of nature than the stunted trees adorning his streets, ignores these things. He does not even realize that his life is spent among millions and millions of his forefathers crowded together but a few steps away, spying upon him and directing him. He blindly obeys their tugging, without knowing where leads the cord fastened upon his soul. Poor automaton, he believes all his acts to be the product of his will, when they are nothing less than impositions of the omnipotent invisible horde.

Jaime, submerged in the monotonous existence of a tranquil island, thinking back upon his forefathers one by one, knowing the origin and history of all that surrounded him, objects of art, clothing, furniture, and the house itself which seemed possessed of a soul, could give account of this tyranny better than could others.

Yes; the dead command! The authority of the living, their startling novelties--illusion, deception, serving only to carry forward existence.

Gazing on the sea, on whose horizon the smoke from a steamer traced a slender column, Febrer thought of the great trans-Atlantic liners, floating cities, speeding monsters, the pride of human industry, which can make the round of the world in a few short weeks. His remote ancestors in the Middle Ages who went to England in a s.h.i.+p no better than a fis.h.i.+ng smack, represented something more extraordinary, and the great captains of the present time with their swarming crews, had not achieved greater deeds than the knight commander Priamo with his handful of sailors. What deceptions, what illusions, we form concerning life, to conceal from ourselves the monotony of its shams. The brevity of its experiences was maddening. It mattered not whether one lived thirty years or three hundred. Men perfected the playthings which served their egoism and their well being, machines, means of locomotion; but aside from this, they lived the same. The pa.s.sions, the joys, and the sorrows were the same; the human animal did not change.

Jaime had believed himself a free man, with a soul which he called modern, his, all his; and now he discovered in it a confused medley of the souls of his ancestors. He could recognize them, because he had studied them, because they were in the next room, in the archives, like dried flowers preserved between the leaves of an old book. The majority of humans retained at the most a memory of their great grandfathers; families which had been unable to scrupulously preserve the history of their past through the centuries gave no heed to the ancestral life perpetuated in their souls, taking as inspirations of their own the cries which their ancestors uttered through them. Our flesh was flesh of those who no longer exist; our souls combined fragments of the souls of many dead men.

Jaime felt within him his austere grandfather, Don Horacio, and along with him the animosities of the Inquisitor-general, he of the appalling visiting card, and the souls of the famous knight commander and other ancestors. In the mind of the man of today still lingered something of that "perpetual governor" who considered the Jewish converts on the island as a separate and degraded race.

The dead command! Now he understood the inevitable repugnance, the arrogance he had felt as he came into contact with the obsequious and humble Don Benito. Those sentiments were unconquerable, and his aversion irremediable. It was imposed upon him by others stronger than himself.

The dead command, and they must be obeyed!

His pessimism caused him to reflect upon his present condition. All was lost! He was unfitted for the conduct of a small business, for the petty transactions and details which might suffice for one of meager wants. He would renounce the idea of that marriage which was his only salvation, and his creditors, as soon as they heard the news that this hope had vanished would fall upon him. He would find himself expelled from the house of his forefathers, pitied by everybody, with a pity that would sting more keenly than insult. He felt himself unequal to witness the final wreck of his house and of his name. What could he do? Where should he go?

He sat staring at the sea for a great part of the afternoon, watching the white sails until they hid themselves behind the cape, or vanished into the broad horizon of the bay.

Leaving the terrace without knowing how, Febrer found himself opening the door of the chapel, an old and forgotten door, which, as it creaked upon its rusty hinges, scattered dust and cobwebs. How long it had been since he had entered there! In the dense atmosphere of the closed room he thought he perceived a vague odor of essences, as from a bottle of perfume opened and long abandoned; an odor which brought back to his memory the solemn dames of the family whose portraits hung in the reception hall.

In the ray of light filtering through the tiny windows of the cupola millions of dust motes illuminated by the sun danced in an ascending spiral. The altar, with its antique carving, glowed faintly in the mellowed light with reflections of old gold. Upon it lay a duster and a pail, carelessly left since the last cleaning of the room, many years ago.

Two prayer stools of old blue velvet seemed to still retain the impression of lordly and delicate forms which no longer existed. Two prayer books with worn edges lay upon the rack before them, as if forgotten. Jaime recognized one of the books. It had belonged to his mother, poor lady, pale and sick, who divided her life between praying and the adoration of her son, for whom she dreamed an ill.u.s.trious future. The other, perhaps, had belonged to his grandmother, that Mexican lady of the days of romanticism, who still seemed to thrill the great house with the rustling of her white garments and the melody of her harp.

The apparition from the past, vague and dim, arising in the deserted chapel, the memory of those two ladies, the one all piety, the other all idealism, aristocratic and dreamy, drove Febrer to distraction. To think that soon the rude hands of the usurer would profane so much that was old and venerable! He could not stay to witness it! Good-bye! Good-bye!

At dusk he sought out Toni Clapes in the Borne. With the confidence which the contrabandist inspired in him he asked him for money.

"I don't know when I can return it. I am leaving Majorca. Everything is going to ruin, but I must not stay to see it."