The Torrent Part 26

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 friends.h.i.+p, 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 das.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sion!... 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 pa.s.sion! 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 gla.s.s 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 gra.s.s-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 pa.s.s 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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; pa.s.sionate 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 anguis.h.!.+ 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 fles.h.!.+ 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 tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs 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 pet.i.tions 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 wors.h.i.+pper 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 amus.e.m.e.nts, 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 quant.i.ty 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!