The dark-feathered doves of Venice scattered in playful spirals,

somewhat frightened at the music, finally settled, like rain, on the

tables of the café. Then, taking flight again, they blackened the roof

of the palaces and once more swooped down like a mantle of metallic

luster on the groups of English tourists in green veils and round hats,

who called them in order to offer them grain.

Josephina, with childish eagerness, left her husband in order to buy a

cone full of grain, and spreading it out in her gloved hands she

gathered the wards of St. Mark around her; they rested on the flowers of

her head, fluttering like fantastic crests, they hopped on her

shoulders, or lined up on her outstretched arms, they clung desperately

to her slight hips, trying to walk around her waist, and others, more

daring, as if possessed of human mischievousness, scratched her breast,

reached out their beaks striving to caress her ruddy, half-opened, lips

through the veil. She laughed, trembling at the tickling of the animated

cloud that rubbed against her body. Her husband watched her, laughing

too, and certain that no one but she would understand him, he called to

her in Spanish.

"My, but you are beautiful! I wish I could paint your picture! If it

weren't for the people, I would kiss you."

Venice was the scene of her happiest days. She lived quietly while her

husband worked, taking odd corners of the city for his models. When he

left the house, her placid calm was not disturbed by any troublesome

thought. This was painting, she was sure,--and not the conditions of

affairs in Rome, where he would shut himself up with shameless women who

were not afraid to pose stark naked. She loved him with a renewed

passion, she petted him with constant caresses. It was then that her

daughter was born, their only child.

Majestic Doña Emilia could not remain in Madrid when she learned that

she was going to be a grandmother. Her poor Josephina, in a foreign

land, with no one to take care of her but her husband, who had some

talent according to what people said, but who seemed to her rather

ordinary! At her son-in-law's expense, she made the trip to Venice and

there she stayed for several months, fuming against the city, which she

had never visited in her diplomatic travels. The distinguished lady

considered that no cities were inhabitable except the capitals that have

a court. Pshaw! Venice! A shabby town that no one liked but writers of

romanzas and decorators of fans, and where there were nothing higher

than consuls. She liked Rome with its Pope and kings. Besides, it made

her seasick to ride in the gondolas and she complained constantly of the

rheumatism, blaming it to the dampness of the lagoons.

Renovales, who had feared for Josephina's life, believing that her weak,

delicate constitution could not stand the shock, broke out into cries of

joy when he received the little one in his arms and looked at the mother

with her head resting on the pillow as if she were dead. Her white face

was hardly outlined against the white of the linen. His first thought

was for her, for the pale features, distorted by the recent crisis,

which gradually were growing calmer with rest. Poor little girl! How she

had suffered! But as he tip-toed out of the bed room in order not to

disturb the heavy sleep that, after two cruel days, had overpowered the

sick woman, he gave himself up to his admiration for the bit of flesh

that lay in the huge flabby arms of the grandmother, wrapped in fine

linen. Ah, what a dear little thing! He looked at the livid little face,

the big head, thinly covered with hair, seeking for some suggestion of

himself in this surge of flesh that was in motion and still without

definite form. "Mamma, whom does she look like?"

Doña Emilia was surprised at his blindness. Whom; should she look like?

Like him, no one but him. She was large, enormous; she had seen few

babies as large as this one. It did not seem possible that her poor

daughter could live after giving birth to "that." They could not

complain that she was not healthy; she was as ruddy as a country baby.

"She's a Renovales; she's yours, wholly yours, Mariano. We belong to a

different class."

And Renovales, without noticing his mother's words, saw only that his

daughter was like him, overjoyed to see how robust she was, shouting his

pleasure at the health of which the grandmother spoke in a disappointed

tone.

In vain did he and Doña Emilia try to dissuade Josephina from nursing

the baby. The little woman, in spite of the weakness that kept her

motionless in bed, wept and cried almost as she had in the crises that

had so terrified Renovales.

"I won't have it," she said with that obstinacy that made her so

terrible.

"I won't have a strange woman's milk for my daughter. I will nurse her,

her mother."

And they had to give the baby to her.

When Josephina seemed recovered, her mother, feeling that her mission

was over, went home to Madrid. She was bored to death in that silent

city of Venice, night after night she thought she was dead, for she

could not hear a single sound from her bed. The calm, interrupted now

and then by the shouts of the gondoliers filled her with the same terror

that she felt in a cemetery. She had no friends, she did not "shine";

there was nobody in that dirty hole and nobody knew her. She was always

recalling her distinguished friends in Madrid where she thought she was

an indispensable personage. The modesty of her granddaughter's

christening left a deep impression in her mind in spite of the fact that

they gave her name to the child; an insignificant little party that

needed only two gondolas; she, who was the godmother, with the

godfather, an old Venetian painter, who was a friend of Renovales and,

besides, Renovales himself and two artists, a Frenchman and another

Spaniard. The Patriarch of Venice did not officiate at the baptism, not

even a bishop. And she knew so many of them at home. A mere priest, who

was in a shameful hurry, had been sufficient to christen the

granddaughter of the famous diplomat, in a little church, as the sun was

setting. She went away repeating once more that Josephina was killing

herself, that it was perfect folly for her to nurse the baby in her

delicate condition, regretting that she did not follow the example of

her mother who had always intrusted her children to nurses.

Josephina cried bitterly when her mother went, but Renovales said

"good-by" with ill-concealed joy. _Bon voyage_! He simply could not

endure the woman, always complaining that she was being neglected when

she saw how her son-in-law was working to make her daughter happy. The

only thing he agreed with her in was in scolding Josephina tenderly for

her obstinacy in nursing the baby. Poor little _Maja Desnuda_! Her form

had lost its bud-like daintiness in the full flower of motherhood.

She appeared more robust, but the stoutness was accompanied by an anemic

weakness. Her husband, seeing how she was losing her daintiness, loved

her with more tender compassion. Poor little girl! How good she was! She

was sacrificing herself for her daughter.

When the baby was a year old, the great crisis in Renovales' life

occurred. Desirous of taking a "bath in art," of knowing what was going

on outside of the dungeon in which he was imprisoned, painting at so

much a piece, he left Josephina in Venice and made a short trip to Paris

to see its famous Salon. He came back transfigured, with a new fever for

work and a determination to transform his existence which filled his

wife with astonishment and fear. He was going to break with his

_impresario_, he would no longer debase himself with that false

painting, even if he had to beg for his living. Great things were being

done in the world, and he felt that he had the courage to be an

innovator, following the steps of those modern painters who made such a

profound impression on him.

Now he hated old Italy, where artists went to study under the protection

of ignorant governments.

In reality what they found there was a market of tempting commissions

where they soon grew accustomed to taking orders, to the luxurious,

indifferent life of easy profit. He wanted to move to Paris. But

Josephina, who listened to Renovales' fancies in silence, unable to

understand them for the most part, modified this determination by her

advice. She too wanted to leave Venice. The city seemed gloomy in the

winter with its ceaseless rains that left the bridges slippery and the

marble alleys impassable. Since they were determined to break up camp,

why not go back to Madrid? Mamma was sick, she complained in all her

letters at living so far from her daughter. Josephina wanted to see her,

she had a presentiment that her mother was going to die. Renovales

thought it over; he too wanted to go back to Spain. He felt homesick;

he thought of the great stir he would cause there, teaching his new

methods amid the general routine. The desire of shocking the

Academicians, who had accepted him before because he had renounced his

ideals, tempted him.

They went back to Madrid with little Milita, as they called her for

short, abbreviating the diminutive of Emilia. Renovales brought with him

as his whole capital some few thousand lire, that represented

Josephina's savings and the product of his sale of part of the furniture

that decorated the poorly furnished halls of the Foscarini palace.

At first it was hard. Doña Emilia died a few months after they reached

Madrid. Her funeral did not come up to the dreams the illustrious widow

had always fashioned. Hardly a score of her countless relatives were

present. Poor old lady, if she had known how her hopes were destined to

be disappointed! Renovales was almost glad of the event. With it, the

only tie that bound them to society was broken. He and Josephina lived

in a fifth story flat on the Calle de Alcalá, near the Plaza de Toros,

with a large terrace that the artist converted into a studio. Their life

was modest, secluded, humble, without friends or functions. She spent

the day taking care of her daughter and the house, without help except a

dull, poorly-paid maid. Oftentimes when she seemed most active, she fell

into a sudden languor, complaining of strange, new ailments.

Mariano hardly ever worked at home; he painted out of doors. He despised

the conventional light of the studio, the closeness of its atmosphere.

He wandered through the suburbs of Madrid and the neighboring provinces

in search of rough, simple types, whose faces seemed to bear the stamp

of the ancient Spanish soul. He climbed the Guadarrama in the midst of

winter, standing alone in the snowy fields like an Arctic explorer, to

transfer to his canvas the century-old pines, twisted and black under

their caps of frozen sleet.

When the Exhibition took place, Renovales' name became famous in a

flash. He did not present a huge picture with a key, as he had at his

first triumph. They were small canvases, studies prompted by a chance

meeting; bits of nature, men and landscapes reproduced with an

astonishing, brutal truth that shocked the public.

The sober fathers of painting writhed as if they had received a slap in

the face, before those sketches that seemed to flame among the other

dead, leaden pictures. They admitted that Renovales was a painter, but

he lacked imagination, invention, his only merit was his ability to

transfer to the canvas what his eyes saw. The younger men flocked to the

standard of the new master; there were endless disputes, impassioned

arguments, deadly hatred, and over this battle Renovales', name

flitted, appearing almost daily in the newspapers, till he was almost as

celebrated as a bull-fighter or an orator in the Congress.

The struggle lasted for six years, giving rise to a storm of insults and

applause every time that Renovales exhibited one of his works, and

meanwhile the master, discussed as he was, lived in poverty, forced to

paint water-colors in the old style which he secretly sent to his dealer

in Rome. But all combats have their end. The public finally accepted as

unquestionable a name that they saw every day; his enemies, weakened by

the unconscious effect of public opinion, grew tired, and the master

like all innovators, as soon as the first success of the scandal was

over, began to limit his daring, pruning and softening his original

brutality. The dreaded painter became fashionable. The easy,

instantaneous success he had won at the beginning of his career was

renewed, but more solidly and more definitely, like a conquest made by

rough, hard paths when there is a struggle at every step.

Money, the fickle page, came back to him, holding the train of glory. He

sold pictures at prices unheard of in Spain and they grew fabulously as

they were repeated by his admirers. Some American millionaires,

surprised that a Spanish painter should be mentioned abroad and that the

principal reviews in Europe should reproduce his works, bought canvases

as objects of great luxury. The master, embittered by the poverty of his

years of struggle, suddenly felt a longing for money, an overpowering

greed that his friends had never known in him. His wife seemed to grow

more sickly every day; her daughter was growing up and he wanted his

Milita to have the education and the luxuries of a princess. They now

had a respectable house of their own, but he wanted something better for

them. His business instinct, which everyone recognized in him when he

was not blinded by some artistic prejudice, strove to make his brush an

instrument of great profits.

Pictures were bound to disappear, according to the master. Modern rooms,

small and soberly decorated, were not fitted for the large canvases that

ornamented the walls of drawing rooms in the old days. Besides, the

reception rooms of the present, like the rooms in a doll's house, were

good merely for pretty pictures marked by stereotyped mannerisms. Scenes

taken from nature were out of place in this background. The only way to

make money then was to paint portraits and Renovales forgot his

distinction as an innovator in order to win at any cost fame as a

portrait painter of society people. He painted members of the royal

family in all sorts of postures, not omitting any of their important

occupations; on foot, and on horseback, with a general's plumes or a

gray hunting jacket, killing pigeons or riding in an automobile. He

portrayed the beauties of the oldest families, concealing imperceptibly,

with clever dissimulation, the ravages of time, giving firmness to the

flabby flesh with his brush, holding up the heavy eyelids and cheeks

that sagged with fatigue and the poison of rouge. After successes at

court, the rich considered a portrait by Renovales as an indispensable

decoration for their drawing rooms. They sought him because his

signature cost thousands of dollars; to possess a canvas by him was an

evidence of opulence, quite as necessary as an automobile of the best

make.

Renovales was as rich as a painter can be. It was at that time that he

built what envious people called his "pantheon"; a magnificent mansion

behind the iron grating of the Retiro.

He had a violent desire to build a home after his own heart and image,

like those mollusks that build a shell with the substance of their

bodies so that it may serve both as a dwelling and a defense. There

awakened in him that longing for show, for pompous, swaggering, amusing

originality that lies dormant in the mind of every artist. At first he

planned a reproduction of Rubens' palace in Antwerp, open _loggie_ for

studios, leafy gardens covered with flowers at all seasons, and in the

paths, gazelles, giraffes, birds of bright plumage, like flying flowers,

and other exotic animals which this great painter used as models in his

desire to copy Nature in all its magnificence.

But he was forced to give up this dream, on account of the nature of the

building sites in Madrid, a few thousand feet of barren, chalky soil,

bounded by a wretched fence and as dry as only Castile can be. Since

this Rubenesque ostentation was not possible, he took refuge in

Classicism and in a little garden he erected a sort of Greek temple that

should serve at once as a dwelling and a studio. On the triangular

pediment rose three tripods like torch-holders, that gave the house the

appearance of a commemorative tomb. But in order that those who stopped

outside the grating might make no mistake, the master had garlands of

laurel, palettes surrounded with crowns, carved on the stone façade, and

in the midst of this display of simple modesty a short inscription in

gold letters of average size--"Renovales." Exactly like a store. Inside,

in two studios where no one ever painted and which led to the real

working studio, the finished pictures were exhibited on easels covered

with antique textures, and callers gazed with wonder at the collection

of properties fit for a theater,--suits of armor, tapestries, old

standards hanging from the ceiling, show-cases full of ancient

knick-knacks, deep couches with canopies of oriental stuffs supported by

lances, century old coffers and open secretaries shining with the pale

gold of their rows of drawers.

These studios where no one studied were like the luxurious line of

waiting rooms in the house of a doctor who charges twenty dollars for a

consultation, or like the anterooms, furnished in dark leather with

venerable pictures, of a famous lawyer, who never opens his mouth

without carrying off a large portion of his client's fortune. People who

waited in these two studios spacious as the nave of a church, with the

silent majesty which comes with the lapse of years, were brought to the

necessary frame of mind to make them submit to the enormous prices the

master demanded.

Renovales had "made good" and he could rest calmly, as his admirers

said. And still the master was gloomy; his nature, embittered by his

years of silent suffering, broke out in violent fits of temper.

The slightest attack by some insignificant enemy was enough to send him

into a rage. His pupils thought it was due to the fact that he was

getting old. His struggles had so aged him that with his heavy beard and

his round shoulders he looked ten years older than he was.

In this white temple, on the pediment of which his name shone in letters

of glorious gold, he was not so happy as in the modest houses in Italy

or the little garret near the Plaza de Toros. All that was left of the

Josephina of the first months of his married life was a distant shadow.

The "_Maja Desnuda_" of the happy nights in Rome and Venice was nothing

but a memory. On her return to Spain the false stoutness of motherhood

had disappeared.

She grew thin, as if some hidden fire were devouring her; the flesh that

had covered her body with graceful curves melted away in the flames that

burned within her. The sharp angles and dark hollows of her skeleton

began to show beneath her pale, flabby flesh. Poor _"Maja Desnuda"!_

Her husband pitied her, attributing her decline to the struggles and

cares she had suffered when they first returned to Madrid.

For her sake, he was eager to conquer, to become rich, that he might

provide her with the comforts he had dreamed of. Her illness seemed to

be mental; it was neurasthenia, melancholia. The poor woman had suffered

without doubt at being condemned to a pauper's existence, in Madrid,

where she had once lived in comparative splendor, this time in a

wretched house, struggling with poverty, forced to perform the most

menial tasks. She complained of strange pains, her legs lost their

strength, she sank into a chair where she would stay motionless for

hours at a time, weeping without knowing why. Her digestion was poor;

for weeks her stomach refused all nourishment. At night she would toss

about in bed, unable to sleep and at daybreak she was up flitting about

the house with a feverish activity, turning things upside down, finding

fault with the servant, with her husband, with herself, until suddenly

she would collapse from the height of her excitement and begin to cry.

These domestic trials broke the painter's spirit, but he bore them

patiently. Now a gentle sympathy was added to his former love, when he

saw her so weak, without any remnant of her former charm except her

eyes, sunk in their bluish sockets, bright with the mysterious fire of

fever. Poor little girl! Her struggles brought her to such a pass. Her

weakness filled Renovales with a sort of remorse. Her lot was that of

the soldier who sacrifices himself for his general's glory. He had

conquered, but he left behind him the woman he loved, fallen in the

struggle because she was the weaker.

He admired, too, her maternal self-sacrifice. The baby, Milita, who

attracted attention because of her whiteness and ruddiness, had the

strength that her mother lacked. The greediness of this strong,

enslaving creature had absorbed all of the mother's life.

When the artist was rich and installed his family in the new house, he

thought that Josephina was going to get well. The doctors were confident

of a rapid improvement. The first day that they walked through the

parlors and studios of the new house, taking note of the furniture and

the valuables, old and new, with a glance of satisfaction, Renovales put

him arm around the waist of the weak little doll, bending his head over

her, caressing her forehead with his bearded lips.

Everything was hers, the house and its sumptuous decorations, hers too

was the money that was left and that he would continue to make. She was

the owner, the absolute mistress, she could spend all she wanted to, he

would stand for everything. She could wear stylish clothes, have

carriages, make her former friends green with envy, be proud of being

the wife of a famous painter, much more proud than others who had landed

a ducal crown by marriage. Was she satisfied?

She said "Yes," nodding her assent weakly, and she even stood on tiptoe

to kiss the lips that seemed to caress her through a cloud of hair, but

her expression was sad and her listless movements were like a withered

flower's, as if there was no joy on earth that could lift her out of

this dejection.

After a few days, when the first impress of the change in her mode of

life was over, the old outbreaks that had so often disturbed their

former dwelling began again in the luxurious palace.

Renovales found her in the dining-room with her head in her hands,

crying, but unwilling to explain the cause of her tears. When he tried

to take her in his arms, caressing her like a child, the little woman

became as agitated as if she had received an insult.

"Let me go!" she cried with a hostile look. "Don't touch me. Go away!"

At other times he looked all over the house for her in vain, questioning

Milita who, accustomed to her mother's outbreaks and made selfish by her

girlish strength, paid little attention to her and kept on playing with

her dolls.

"I don't know, papa; she's probably crying up stairs," she would answer

naively.

And in some corner of the upper story, in the bedroom, beside the bed or

among the clothes in the wardrobe, the husband would find her, sitting

on the floor with her chin in her hands, her eyes fixed on the wall as

if she were looking at something invisible and mysterious that only she

could see. She was not crying, her eyes were dry and enlarged with an

expression of terror, and her husband tried in vain to attract her

attention. She remained motionless, cold, indifferent to his caresses,

as if he were a stranger, as if there were a hopeless gap between them.

"I want to die," she said in a serious, tense tone. "I am of no use in

the world; I want to rest."

The deadly resignation would change a moment later into furious

antagonism. Renovales could never tell how the quarrel began. The most

insignificant word on his part, the expression of his face, silence

even, was all that was needed to bring on the storm. Josephina began to

speak with a taunting accent that made her words cut like cold steel.

She found fault with the painter for what he did and what he did not do,

for his most trifling habits, for what he painted, and presently,

extending the radius of her insults to include the whole world, she

broke out into denunciations of the distinguished people who formed her

husband's clientele and brought him such profits. He might be satisfied

with painting the portraits of those people, disreputable society men

and women. Her mother, who was in close touch with that society, had

told her many stories about them. The women she knew still better;

almost all of them had been her companions at boarding-school or her

friends. They had married to make sport of their husbands; they all had

a past, they were worse than the women who walked the streets at night.

This house with all its façade of laurels and its gold letters was a

brothel. One of these fine days she would come into the studio and throw

them into the street to have their pictures painted somewhere else.

"For God's sake, Josephina," Renovales murmured with a troubled voice,

"don't talk like that. Don't think of such outrageous things. I don't

see how you can talk that way. Milita will hear us."

Now that her nervous anger was exhausted, Josephina would burst into

tears and Renovales would have to leave the table and take her to bed,

where she lay, crying out for the hundredth time that she wanted to die.

This life was even more intolerable because he was faithful to his wife,

because his love, mingled with habit and routine, kept him firmly

devoted to her.

At the end of the afternoon, several of his friends used to gather in

his studio, among them the jolly Cotoner who had moved to Madrid. When

the twilight crept in through the huge window and made them all prone to

friendly confidences, Renovales always made the same statement.

"As a boy I had my good times just like anyone else, but since I was

married I have never had anything to do with any woman except my own

wife. I am proud to say so."

And the big man drew himself up to his full height and stroked his

beard, as proud of his faithfulness to his wife as other men are of

their good fortune in love.

When they talked about beautiful women in his presence, or looked at

portraits of great foreign beauties, the master did not conceal his

approval.

"Very beautiful! Very pretty to paint!"

His enthusiasm over beauty never went beyond the limits of art. There

was only one woman in the world for him, his wife; the others were

models.

He, who carried in his mind a perfect orgy of flesh, who worshiped the

nude with religious fervor, reserved all his manly homage for his wife

who grew constantly more sickly, more gloomy, and waited with the

patience of a lover for a moment of calm, a ray of sunlight among the

incessant storms.

The doctors, who admitted their inability to cure the nervous disorder

that was consuming the wife, had hopes of a sudden change and

recommended to the husband that he should be extremely kind to her. This

only increased his patient gentleness. They attributed the nervous

trouble to the birth and nursing of the child, that had broken her weak

health; they suspected, too, the existence of some unknown cause that

kept the sick woman in constant excitement.

Renovales, who studied his wife closely in his eagerness to recover

peace in his house, soon discovered the true cause of her illness.

Milita was growing up; already she was a woman. She was fourteen years

old and wore long skirts, and her healthy beauty was beginning to

attract the glances of men.

"One of these days they'll carry her off," said the master laughing.

And his wife, when she heard him talking about marriage, making

conjectures on his future son-in-law, closed her eyes and said in a

tense voice, that revealed her insuperable obstinacy:

"She shall marry anyone she wants to,--except a painter. I would rather

see her dead than that."

It was then Renovales divined his wife's true illness. It was jealousy,

a terrific, deadly, ruinous jealousy; it was the sadness of realizing

that she was sickly. She was certain of her husband; she knew his

declarations of faithfulness to her. But when the painter spoke of his

artistic interests in her presence, he did not hide his worship of

beauty, his religious cult of form. Even if he was silent, she

penetrated his thoughts; she read in him that fervor which dated from

his youth and had grown greater as the years went by. When she looked at

the statues of sovereign nakedness that decorated the studios, when she

glanced through the albums of pictures where the light of flesh shone

brightly amid the shadows of the engraving, she compared them mentally

with her own form emaciated by illness.

Renovales' eyes that seemed to worship every beauty of form were the

same eyes that saw her in all her ugliness. That man could never love

her. His faithfulness was pity, perhaps habit, unconscious virtue. She

could not believe that it was love. This illusion might be possible with

another man, but he was an artist. By day he worshiped beauty; at night

he was brought face to face with ugliness, with physical wretchedness.

She was constantly tormented by jealousy, that embittered her mind and

consumed her life, a jealousy that was inconsolable for the very reason

that it had no real foundation.

The consciousness of her ugliness brought with it a sadness, an

insatiable envy of everyone, a desire to die but to kill the world

first, that she might drag it down with her in her fall.

Her husband's caresses irritated her like an insult. Maybe he thought he

loved her, maybe his advances were in good faith, but she read his

thoughts and she found there her irresistible enemy, the rival that

overshadowed her with her beauty. And there was no remedy for this. She

was married to a man who, as long as he lived, would be faithful to his

religion of beauty. How well she remembered the days when she had

refused to allow her husband to paint her youthful body! If youth and

beauty would but come back to her, she would recklessly cast off all her

veils, would stand in the middle of the studio as arrogantly as a

bacchante, crying,

"Paint! Satisfy yourself with my flesh, and whenever you think of your

eternal beloved, whom you call Beauty, fancy that you see her with my

face, that she has my body!"

It was a terrible misfortune to be the wife of an artist. She would

never marry her daughter to a painter; she would rather see her dead.

Men who carry with them the demon of form, cannot live in peace and

happiness except with a companion who is eternally young, eternally

fair.

Her husband's fidelity made her desperate. That chaste artist was always

musing over the memory of naked beauties, fancying pictures he did not

dare to paint for fear of her. With her sick woman's penetration, she

seemed to read this longing in her husband's face. She would have

preferred certain infidelity, to see him in love with another woman, mad

with passion. He might return from such a wandering outside the bonds of

matrimony, wearied and humble, begging her forgiveness; but from the

other, he would never return.

When Renovates discovered the cause of her sadness, he tenderly

undertook to cure his wife's mental disorder. He avoided speaking of his

artistic interests in her presence; he discovered terrible defects in

the fair ladies who sought him as a portrait painter; he praised

Josephina's spiritual beauty; he painted pictures of her, putting her

features on the canvas, but beautifying them with, subtle skill.

She smiled, with that eternal condescension that a woman has for the

most stupendous, most shameful deceits, as long as they flatter her.

"It's you," said Renovales, "your face, your charm, your air of

distinction. I really don't think I have made you as beautiful as you

are."

She continued to smile, but soon her look grew hard, her lips tightened

and the shadow spread little by little across her face.

She fixed her eyes on the painter's as if she were scrutinizing his

thoughts.

It was a lie. Her husband was flattering her; he thought he loved her,

but only his flesh was faithful. The invincible enemy, the eternal

beloved, was mistress of his mind.

Tortured by this mental unfaithfulness and by the rage which her

helplessness produced, she would gradually fall into one of the nervous

storms that broke out in a shower of tears and a thunder of insults and

recriminations.

Renovales' life was a hell at the very time when he possessed the glory

and wealth which he had dreamed of so many years, building on them his

hope of happiness.

IV

It was three o'clock in the afternoon when the painter went home after

his luncheon with the Hungarian.

As he entered the dining-room, before going to the studio, he saw two

women with their hats and veils on who looked as if they were getting

ready to go out. One of them, as tall as the painter, threw her arms

around his neck.

"Papa, dear, we waited for you until nearly two o'clock. Did you have a

good luncheon?"

And she kissed him noisily, rubbing her fresh, rosy cheeks against the

master's gray beard.

Renovales smiled good naturedly under this shower of caresses. Ah, his

Milita! She was the only joy in that gloomy, showy house. It was she who

sweetened that atmosphere of tedious strife which seemed to emanate from

the sick woman. He looked at his daughter with an air of comic

gallantry.

"Very pretty; yes, I swear you are very pretty to-day. You are a perfect

Rubens, my dear, a brunette Rubens. And where are we going to show off?"

He looked with a father's pride at that strong, rosy body, in which the

transition to womanhood was marked by a sort of passing delicacy--the

result of her rapid growth--and a dark circle around her eyes. Her soft,

mysterious glance was that of a woman who is beginning to understand the

meaning of life. She dressed with a sort of exotic elegance; her clothes

had a masculine appearance; her mannish collar and tie were in keeping

with the rigid energy of her movements, with her wide-soled English

boots, and the violent swing of her legs that opened her skirts like a

compass when she walked, more intent on speed and a heavy step than on a

graceful carriage. The master admired her healthy beauty. What a

splendid specimen! The race would not die out with her. She was like

him, wholly like him; if he had been a woman, he would have been like

his Milita.

She kept on talking, without taking her arms from her father's

shoulders, with her eyes, tremulous like molten gold, fixed on the

master.

She was going for her daily walk with "Miss," a two hours' tramp through

the Castellana and the Retiro, without stopping a moment to sit down,

taking a peripatetic lesson in English on the way. For the first time

Renovates turned around to speak to "Miss," a stout woman with a red,

wrinkled face who, when she smiled, showed a set of teeth that shone

like yellow dominoes. In the studio Renovales and his friends often

laughed at "Miss's" appearance and eccentricities, at her red wig that

was placed on her head as carelessly as a hat, at her terrible false

teeth, at her bonnets that she made herself out of chance bits of ribbon

and discarded ornaments, of her chronic lack of appetite, that forced

her to live on beer, which kept her in a continual state of confusion,

which was revealed in her exaggerated curtsies. Soft and heavy from

drink, she was alarmed at the approach of the hour of the walk, a daily

torment for her, as she tried painfully to keep up with Milita's long

strides. Seeing the painter looking at her, she turned even redder and

made three profound curtsies.

"Oh, Mr. Renovales, oh, sir!"

And she did not call him "Lord," because the master greeting her with a

nod, forgot her presence and began to talk again with his daughter.

Milita was eager to hear about her father's luncheon with Tekli. And so

he had had some Chianti? Selfish man! When he knew how much she liked

it! He ought to have let them know sooner that he would not be home.

Fortunately Cotoner was at the house and mamma had made him stay, so

that they would not have to lunch alone. Their old friend had gone to

the kitchen and prepared one of those dishes he had learned to make in

the days when he was a landscape-painter. Milita observed that all

landscape-painters knew something about cooking. Their outdoor life, the

necessities of their wandering existence among country inns and huts,

defying poverty, gave them a liking for this art.

They had had a very pleasant luncheon; mamma had laughed at Cotoner's

jokes, who was always in good humor, but during the dessert, when

Soldevilla, Renovales' favorite pupil, came, she had felt indisposed and

had disappeared to hide her eyes swimming with tears and her breast that

heaved with sobs.

"She's probably upstairs," said the girl with a sort of indifference,

accustomed to these outbreaks. "Good-by, papa, dear, a kiss. Cotoner and

Soldevilla are waiting for you in the studio. Another kiss. Let me bite

you."

And after fixing her little teeth gently in one of the master's cheeks,

she ran out, followed by Miss, who was already puffing in anticipation

at the thought of the tiresome walk.

Renovales remained motionless as if he hesitated to shake off the

atmosphere of affection in which his daughter enveloped him. Milita was

his, wholly his. She loved her mother, but her affection was cold in

comparison with the ardent passion she felt for him--that vague,

instinctive preference girls feel for their fathers and which is, as it

were, a forecast of the worship the man they love will later inspire in

them.

For a moment he thought of looking for Josephina to console her, but

after a brief reflection, he gave up the idea. It probably was nothing;

his daughter was not disturbed; a sudden fit such as she usually had. If

he went upstairs he would run the risk of an unpleasant scene that would

spoil the afternoon, rob him of his desire to work and banish the

youthful light-heartedness that filled him after his luncheon with

Tekli.

He turned his steps towards the last studio, the only one that deserved

the name, for it was there he worked, and he saw Cotoner sitting in a

huge armchair, the seat of which sagged under his corpulent frame, with

his elbows resting on the oaken arms, his waistcoat unbuttoned to

relieve his well-filled paunch, his head sunk between his shoulders, his

face red and sweating, his eyes half closed with the sweet joy of

digestion in that comfortable atmosphere heated by a huge stove.

Cotoner was getting old; his mustache was white and his head was bald,

but his face was as rosy and shining as a child's. He breathed the

placidness of a respectable old bachelor whose only love is for good

living and who appreciates the digestive sleepiness of the

boaconstrictor as the greatest of happiness.

He was tired of living in Rome. Commissions were scarce. The Popes lived

longer than the Biblical patriarchs. The chromo portraits of the Pontiff

had simply forced him out of business. Besides, he was old and the young

painters who came to Rome did not know him; they were poor fellows who

looked on him as a clown, and never laid aside their seriousness except

to make sport of him. His time had passed. The echoes of Mariano's

triumphs at home had come to his ears, had determined him to move to

Madrid. Life was the same everywhere. He had friends in Madrid, too. And

here he had continued the life he had led in Rome, without any effort,

feeling a kind of longing for glory in that narrow personality which

had made him a mere day-laborer in art, as if his relations with

Renovales imposed on him the duty of seeking a place near his in the

world of painting.

He had gone back to landscapes, never winning any greater success than

the simple admirations of wash-women and brickmakers who gathered around

his easel in the suburbs of Madrid, whispering to each other that the

gentleman who wore on his lapel the variegated button of his numerous

Papal Orders, must be a famous old "buck," one of the great painters the

papers talked about. Renovales had secured for him two honorable

mentions at the Exhibitions and after this victory, shared with all the

young chaps who were just beginning, Cotoner settled down in the rut, to

rest forever, counting that the mission of his life was fulfilled.

Life in Madrid was no more difficult for him than in Rome. He slept at

the house of a priest whom he had known in Italy, and had accompanied on

his tours as Papal representative. This chaplain, who was employed in

the office of the Rota, considered it a great honor to entertain the

artist, recalling his friendly relations with the cardinals and

believing that he was in correspondence with the Pope himself.

They had agreed on a sum which he was to pay for his lodging, but the

priest did not seem to be in any hurry for payment; he would soon give

him a commission for a painting for some nuns for whom he was confessor.

The eating problem offered still less difficulty for Cotoner. He had the

days of the week divided among various rich families noted for their

piety, whom he had met in Rome during the great Spanish pilgrimages.

They were wealthy miners from Bilbao, gentlemen farmers from Andalusia,

old marchionesses who thought about God a great deal, but continued to

live their comfortable life to which they gave a serious tone by the

respectable color of devotion.

The painter felt closely attached to this little group; they were

serious, religious and they ate well. Everyone called him "good

Cotoner." The ladies smiled with gratitude when he presented them with a

rosary or some other article of devotion brought from Rome. If they

expressed the desire of obtaining some dispensation from the Vatican, he

would offer to write to "his friend the cardinal." The husbands, glad to

entertain an artist so cheaply, consulted him about the plan for a new

chapel or the designs for an altar, and on their saint's day they would

receive with a condescending mien some present from Cotoner--a "little

daub," a landscape painted on a piece of wood, that often needed an

explanation before they could understand what it was meant for.

At dinners he was a constant source of amusement for these people of

solid principles and measured words, with his stories of the strange

doings of the "Monsignori" or the "Eminences" he used to know in Rome.

They listened to these jokes with a sort of unction, however dubious

they were, seeing that they came from such respectable personages.

When the round of invitations was interrupted by illness or absence, and

Cotoner lacked a place to dine, he stayed at Renovales' house without

waiting for an invitation. The master wanted him to live with them, but

he did not accept. He was very fond of the family; Milita played with

him as if he were an old dog, Josephina felt a sort of affection for

him, because his presence reminded her of the good old days in Rome. But

Cotoner, in spite of this, seemed to be somewhat reluctant, divining the

storms that darkened the master's life. He preferred his free existence,

to which he adapted himself with the ease of a parasite. After dinner

was over, he would listen to the weighty discussions between learned

priests and serious old church-goers, nodding his approval, and an hour

later he would be jesting impiously in some café or other with painters,

actors and journalists. He knew everybody; he only needed to speak to an

artist twice and he would call him by his first name and swear that he

loved and admired him from the bottom of his heart. When Renovales came

into the studio, he shook off his drowsiness and stretched out his short

legs so that he could touch the floor and get out of the chair.

"Did they tell you, Mariano? A magnificent dish! I made them an

Andalusian pot-pourri! They were tickled to death over it!"

He was enthusiastic over his culinary achievement as if all his merits

were summed up in this skill. Afterwards, while Renovales was handing

his coat and hat to the servant who followed him, Cotoner with the

curiosity of an intimate friend who wants to know all the details of his

idol's life, questioned him about his luncheon with the foreigner.

Renovales lay down on a divan deep as a niche, between two bookcases and

lined with piles of cushions. As they spoke of Tekli, they recalled

friends in Rome, painters of different nationalities who twenty years

before had walked with their heads high, following the star of hope as

if they were hypnotized. Renovales, in his pride in his strength,

incapable of hypocritical modesty, declared that he was the only one who

had succeeded. Poor Tekli was a professor; his copy of Velásquez

amounted to nothing more than the work of a patient cart horse in art.

"Do you think so?" asked Cotoner doubtfully. "Is his work so poor?"

His selfishness kept him from saying a word against anyone; he had no

faith in criticism, he believed blindly in praise; thereby preserving

his reputation as a good fellow, which gave him the entree everywhere

and made his life easy. The figure of the Hungarian was fixed in his

memory and made him think of a series of luncheons before he left

Madrid.

"Good afternoon, master."

It was Soldevilla who came out from behind a screen with his hands

clasped behind his back under the tail of his short sack coat, his head

in the air, tortured by the excessive height of his stiff, shining

collar, throwing out his chest so as to show off better his velvet

waistcoat. His thinness and his small stature were made up for by the

length of his blond mustache that curled around his pink little nose as

if it were trying to reach the straight, scraggly bangs on his forehead.

This Soldevilla was Renovales' favorite pupil--"his weakness" Cotoner

called him. The master had fought a great battle to win him the

fellowship at Rome; afterward he had given him the prize at several

exhibitions.

He looked on him almost as a son, attracted perhaps by the contrast

between his own rough strength and the weakness of that artistic dandy,

always proper, always amiable, who consulted this master about

everything, even if afterwards he did not pay much attention to his

advice. When he criticized his fellow painters, he did it with a

venomous suavity, with a feminine finesse. Renovales laughed at his

appearance and his habits and Cotoner joined in. He was like china,

always shining; you could not find the least speck of dust on him; you

were sure he slept in a cupboard. These present-day painters! The two

old artists recalled the disorder of their youth, their Bohemian

carelessness, with long beards and huge hats, all their odd

extravagances to distinguish them from the rest of men, forming a world

by themselves. They felt out of humor with these painters of the last

batch--proper, prudent, incapable of doing anything absurd, copying the

fashions of the idle and presenting the appearance of State

functionaries, clerks, who wielded the brush.

His greeting over, Soldevilla fairly overwhelmed the master with his

effusive praise. He had been admiring the portrait of the Countess of

Alberca.

"A perfect marvel, master. The best thing you have painted, and it's

only half done, too."

This praise aroused Renovales. He got up, shoved aside the screen and

pulled out an easel that held a large canvas, until it was opposite the

light that came in through the wide window.

On a gray background stood a woman dressed in white, with that majesty

of beauty that is accustomed to admiration. The aigrette of feathers and

diamonds seemed to tremble on her tawny yellow curls, the curve of her

breasts was outlined through the lace of her low-necked gown, her gloves

reached above her elbows, in one of her hands she held a costly fan, in

the other, a dark cloak, lined with flame-colored satin, that slipped

from her bare shoulders, on the point of falling. The lower part of the

figure was merely outlined in charcoal on the white canvas. The head,

almost finished, seemed to look at the three men with its proud eyes,

cold, but with a false coldness that bespoke a hidden passion within, a

dead volcano that might come to life at any moment.

She was a tall, stately woman, with a charming, well-proportioned

figure, who seemed to keep the freshness of youth, thanks to the

healthy, comfortable life she led. The corners of her eyes were narrowed

with a tired fold.

Cotoner looked at her from his seat with chaste calmness, commenting

tranquilly on her beauty, feeling above temptation.

"It's she, you've caught her, Mariano. She has been a great woman."

Renovales appeared offended at this comment.

"She is," he said with a sort of hostility. "She is still."

Cotoner could not argue with his idol and he hastened to correct

himself.

"She is a charming woman, very attractive, yes sir, and very stylish.

They say she is talented and cannot bear to let men who worship her

suffer. She has certainly enjoyed life."

Renovales began to bristle again, as if these words cut him.

"Nonsense! lies, calumnies!" he said angrily. "Inventions of some young

fellows who spread these disgraceful reports because they were

rejected."

Cotoner began to explain away what he had said. He did not know

anything, he had heard it. The ladies at whose houses he dined spoke ill

of the Alberca woman, but perhaps it was merely woman's gossip. There

was a moment of silence and Renovales, as if he wanted to change the

subject of conversation, turned to Soldevilla.

"And you, aren't you painting any longer? I always find you here in

working hours."

He smiled somewhat knowingly as he said this, while the youth blushed

and tried to make excuses. He was working hard, but every day he felt

the need of dropping into his master's studio for a minute before he

went to his own.

It was a habit he had formed when he was a beginner, in that period, the

best in his life, when he studied beside the great painter in a studio

far less sumptuous than this.

"And Milita? Did you see her?" continued Renovales with a good-natured

smile that had not lost its playfulness. "Didn't she 'kid' you, for

wearing that dazzling new tie?"

Soldevilla smiled too. He had been in the dining-room with Doña

Josephina and Milita and the latter had made fun of him as usual. But

she did not mean anything; the master knew that Milita and he treated

each other like brother and sister.

More than once when she was a little tot and he a lad, he had acted as

her horse, trotting around the old studio with the little scamp on his

back, pulling his hair and pounding him with her tiny fists.

"She's very cute," interrupted Cotoner. "She is the most attractive, the

best girl I know."

"And the unequaled López de Sosa?" asked the master, once more in a

playful tone. "Didn't that 'chauffeur' that drives us crazy with his

automobiles come to-day?"

Soldevilla's smile disappeared. He grew pale and his eyes flashed

spitefully. No, he had not seen the gentleman. According to the ladies,

he was busy repairing an automobile that had broken down on the Pardo

road. And as if the recollection of this friend of the family was trying

for him and he wished to avoid any further allusions to him, he said

"good-by" to the master. He was going to work; he must take advantage of

the two hours of sunlight that were left. But before he went out he

stopped to say another word in praise of the portrait of the countess.

The two friends remained alone for a long while in silence. Renovales,

buried in the shadow of that niche of Persian stuffs with which his

divan was canopied, gazed at the picture.

"Is she going to come to-day?" asked Cotoner, pointing to the canvas.

Renovales shrugged his shoulders. To-day or the next day; it was

impossible to do any serious work with that woman.

He expected her that afternoon; but he would not feel surprised if she

failed to keep her appointment. For nearly a month he had been unable to

get in two days in succession. She was always engaged; she was president

of societies for the education and emancipation of woman; she was

constantly planning festivals and raffles; the activity of a tired woman

of society, the fluttering of a wild bird that made her want to be

everywhere at the same time, without the will to withdraw when once she

was started in the current of feminine excitement. Suddenly the painter

whose eyes were fixed on the portrait gave a cry of enthusiasm.

"What a woman, Pepe! What a woman to paint!"

His eyes seemed to lay bare the beauty that stood on the canvas in all

its aristocratic grandeur. They strove to penetrate the mystery of that

covering of lace and silk, to see the color and the lines of the form

that was hardly revealed through the gown. This mental reconstruction

was helped by the bare shoulders and the curve of her breasts that

seemed to tremble at the edge of her dress, separated by a line of soft

shadow.

"That's just what I told your wife," said the Bohemian naively. "If you

paint beautiful women, like the countess, it is merely for the sake of

painting them and not that you would think of seeing in them anything

more than a model."

"Aha! So my wife has been talking to you about that!"

Cotoner hastened to set his mind at ease, fearing his digestion might be

disturbed. A mere trifle, nervousness on the part of poor Josephina, who

saw the dark side of everything in her illness.

She had referred during the luncheon to the Alberca woman and her

portrait. She did not seem to be very fond of her, in spite of the fact

that she had been her companion in boarding-school. She felt as other

women did; the countess was an enemy, who inspired them with fear. But

he had calmed her and finally succeeded in making her smile faintly.

There was no use in talking about that any longer.

But Renovales did not share his friend's optimism. He was well aware of

his wife's state of mind; he understood now the motive that had made her

flee from the table, to take refuge upstairs and to weep and long for

death. She hated Concha as she did all the women who entered his studio.

But this impression of sadness did not last very long in the painter; he

was used to his wife's susceptibility. Besides, the consciousness of his

faithfulness calmed him. His conscience was clean, and Josephina might

believe what she would. It would only be one more injustice and he was

resigned to endure his slavery without complaint.

In order to forget his trouble, he began to talk about painting. The

recollection of his conversation with Tekli enlivened him, for Tekli had

been traveling all over Europe and was well acquainted with what the

most famous masters were thinking and painting.

"I'm getting old, Cotoner. Did you think I didn't know it? No, don't

protest. I know that I am not old; forty-three years. I mean that I have

lost my gait and cannot get started. It's a long time since I have done

anything new; I always strike the same note. You know that some people,

envious of my reputation are always throwing that defect in my face,

like a vile insult."

And the painter, with the selfishness of great artists who always think

that they are neglected and the world begrudges them their glory,

complained at the slavery that was imposed upon him by his good fortune.

Making money! What a calamity for art! If the world were governed by

his common sense, artists with talent would be supported by the State,

which would generously provide for all their needs and whims. There

would be no need of bothering about making a living. "Paint what you

want to, and as you please." Then great things would be done and art

would advance with giant strides, not constrained to debase itself by

flattering public vulgarity and the ignorance of the rich. But now, to

be a celebrated painter it was necessary to make money and this could

not be done except by portraits, opening a shop, painting the first one

that appeared, without the right of choice. Accursed painting! In

writing, poverty was a merit. It stood for truth and honesty. But the

painter must be rich, his talent was judged by his profits. The fame of

his pictures was connected with the idea of thousands of dollars. When

people talked about his work they always said, "He's making such and

such a sum of money," and to keep up this wealth, the indispensable

companion of his glory, he had to paint by the job, cringing before the

vulgar throng that pays.

Renovales walked excitedly around the portrait. Sometimes this laborer's

work was tolerable, when he was painting beautiful women and men whose

faces had the light of intelligence. But the vulgar politicians, the

rich men that looked like porters, the stout dames with dead faces that

he had to paint! When he let his love for truth overcome him and copied

the model as he saw it, he won another enemy, who paid the bill

grumblingly and went away to tell everyone that Renovales was not so

great as people thought. To avoid this he lied in his painting, having

recourse to the methods employed by other mediocre artists and this base

procedure tormented his conscience, as if he were robbing his inferiors

who deserved respect for the very reason that they were less endowed for

artistic production than he.

"Besides, that is not painting, the whole of painting. We think we are

artists because we can reproduce a face, and the face is only a part of

the body. We tremble with fear at the thought of the nude. We have

forgotten it. We speak of it with respect and fear, as we would of

something religious, worthy of worship, but something we never see close

at hand. A large part of our talent is the talent of a dry-goods clerk.

Cloth, nothing but cloth; garments. The body must be carefully wrapped

up or we flee from it as from a danger."

He ceased his nervous walking to and fro and stopped in front of the

picture, fixing his gaze on it.

"Imagine, Pepe," he said in an undertone, looking first instinctively

toward the door, with that eternal fear of being heard by his wife in

the midst of his artistic raptures. "Imagine, if that woman would

undress; if I could paint her as she certainly is."

Cotoner burst into laughter with a look like a knavish friar.

"Wonderful, Mariano, a masterpiece. But she won't. I'm sure she would

refuse to undress, though I admit she isn't always particular."

Renovales shook his fists in protest.

"And why won't they? What a rut! What vulgarity!"

In his artistic selfishness he fancied that the world had been created

without any other purpose than supporting painters, the rest of humanity

was made to serve them as models, and he was shocked at this

incomprehensible modesty. Ah, where could they find now the beauties of

Greece, the calm models of sculptors, the pale Venetian ladies painted

by Titian, the graceful Flemish women of Rubens, and the dainty,

sprightly beauties of Goya? Beauty was eclipsed forever behind the veils

of hypocrisy and false modesty. Women had one lover to-day, another

to-morrow and still they blushed at recalling the woman of other times,

far more pure than they, who did not hesitate to reveal to the public

admiration the perfect work of God, the chastity of the nude.

Renovales lay down on the divan again, and in the twilight he talked

confidentially with Cotoner in a subdued voice, sometimes looking toward

the door as if he feared being overheard.

For some time he had been dreaming of a masterpiece. He had it in his

imagination complete even to the least details. He saw it, closing his

eyes, just at it would be, if he ever succeeded in painting it. It was

Phryne, the famous beauty of Athens, appearing naked before the crowd of

pilgrims on the beach of Delphi. All the suffering humanity of Greece

walked on the shore of the sea toward the famous temple, seeking divine

intervention for the relief of their ills, cripples with distorted

limbs, repulsive lepers, men swollen with dropsy, pale, suffering women,

trembling old men, youths disfigured in hideous expressions, withered

arms like bare bones, shapeless elephant legs, all the phases of a

perverted Nature, the piteous, desperate expressions of human pain. When

they see on the beach Phryne, the glory of Greece, whose beauty was a

national pride, the pilgrims stop and gaze upon her, turning their backs

to the temple, that outlines its marble columns in the background of the

parched mountains; and the beautiful woman, filled with pity by this

procession of suffering, desires to brighten their sadness, to cast a

handful of health and beauty among their wretched furrows, and tears off

her veils, giving them the royal alms of her nakedness. The white,

radiant body is outlined on the dark blue of the sea. The wind scatters

her hair like golden serpents on her ivory shoulders; the waves that die

at her feet, toss upon her stars of foam that make her skin tremble with

the caress from her amber neck down to her rosy feet. The wet sand,

polished and bright as a mirror, reproduces the sovereign nakedness,

inverted and confused in serpentine lines that take on the shimmer of

the rainbow as they disappear. And the pilgrims, on their knees, in the

ecstasy of worship, stretch out their arms toward the mortal goddess,

believing that Beauty and eternal Health have come to meet them.

Renovales sat up and grasped Cotoner's arm as he described his future

picture, and his friend nodded his approval gravely, impressed by the

description.

"Very fine! Sublime, Mariano!"

But the master became dejected again after this flash of enthusiasm.

The task was very difficult. He would have to go and take up quarters on

the shore of the Mediterranean, on some secluded beach at Valencia or in

Catalonia; he would have to build a cabin on the very edge of the sand

where the water breaks with its bright reflections, and take woman after

woman there, a hundred if it was necessary, in order to study the

whiteness of their skin against the blue of the sea and sky, until he

found the divine body of the Phryne he had dreamed.

"Very difficult," murmured Renovales. "I tell you it is very difficult.

There are so many obstacles to struggle against."

Cotoner leaned forward with a confidential expression.

"And besides, there's the mistress," he said in a quiet voice, looking

at the door with a sort of fear. "I don't believe Josephina would be

very much pleased with this picture and its pack of models."

The master lowered his head.

"If you only knew, Pepe! If you could see the life I lead every day!"

"I know what it is," Cotoner hastened to say, "or rather, I can imagine.

Don't tell me anything."

And in his haste to avoid the sad confidences of his friend, there was a

great deal of selfishness, the desire not to disturb his peaceful calm

with other men's sorrows that excite only a distant interest.

Renovales spoke after a long silence. He often wondered whether an

artist ought to be married or single. Other men, of weak, hesitating

character needed the support of a comrade, the atmosphere of a family.

He recalled with relish the first few months of his married life; but

since then it had weighed on him like a chain. He did not deny the

existence of love; he needed the sweet company of a woman in order to

live, but with intermissions, without the endless imprisonment of common

life. Artists like himself ought to be free, he was sure of it.

"Oh, Pepe, if I had only stayed like you, master of my time and my work,

without having to think what my family will say if they see me painting

this or that, what great things I should have done!"

The old man, who had failed in all his tasks, was going to say something

when the door of the studio opened and Renovales' servant came in, a

little man with fat red cheeks and a high voice which, according to

Cotoner, sounded like the messenger of a monastery.

"The countess."

Cotoner jumped out of his armchair. Those models didn't like to see

people in the studio. How could he get out? Renovales helped him to find

his hat, coat and cane, which with his usual carelessness he had left in

different corners of the studio.

The master pushed him out of a door that led into the garden. Then, when

he was alone, he ran to an old Venetian mirror, and looked at himself

for a moment in its deep, bluish surface, smoothing his curly gray hair

with his fingers.

V

She came in with a great rustling of silks and laces, her least

step accompanied by the _frou-frou_ of her skirts, scattering various

perfumes, like the breath of an exotic garden.

"Good afternoon, _mon cher maître_."

As she looked at him through her tortoise-shell lorgnette, hanging from

a gold chain, the gray amber of her eyes took on an insolent stare

through the glasses, a strange expression, half caressing, half mocking.

He must pardon her for being so late. She was sorry for her lack of

attention, but she was the busiest woman in Madrid. The things she had

done since luncheon! Signing and examining papers with the secretary of

the "Women's League," a conference with the carpenter and the foreman

(two rough fellows who fairly devoured her with their eyes), who had

charge of putting up the booths for the great fair for the benefit of

destitute working women; a call on the president of the Cabinet, a

somewhat dissolute old gentleman, in spite of his gravity, who received

her with the airs of an old-fashioned gallant, kissing her hand, as they

used to in a minuet.

"We have lost the afternoon, haven't we, _maître?_ There's hardly sun

enough to work by now. Besides, I didn't bring my maid to help me."

She pointed with her lorgnette to the door of an alcove that served as a

dressing-room for the models and where she kept the evening gown and the

flame-colored cloak in which he was painting her.

Renovales, after looking furtively at the entrance of the studio,

assumed an arrogant air of swaggering gallantry, such as he used to have

in his youth in Rome, free and obstreperous.

"You needn't give up on that account. If you will let me, I'll act as

maid for you."

The countess began to laugh loudly, throwing back her head and

shoulders, showing her white throat that shook with merriment.

"Oh, what a good joke! And how daring the master is getting. You don't

know anything about such things, Renovales. All you can do is paint. You

are not in practice."

And in her accent of subtle irony, there was something like pity for the

artist, removed from mundane things, whose conjugal virtue everyone

knew. This seemed to offend him for he spoke to the countess very

sharply as he picked up the palette and prepared the colors. There was

no need of changing her dress; he would make use of what little daylight

remained to work on the head.

Concha took off her hat and then, before the same Venetian mirror in

which the painter had looked at himself, began to touch up her hair. Her

arms curved around her golden head, while Renovales contemplated the

grace of her back, seeing at the same time her face and breast in the

glass. She hummed as she arranged her hair, with her eyes fixed on their

own reflection, not letting anything distract her in this important

operation.

That brilliant, striking golden hair was probably bleached. The painter

was sure of it, but it did not seem less beautiful to him on that

account. The beauties of Venice in the olden times used to dye their

hair.

The countess sat down in an armchair, a short distance from the easel.

She felt tired and as long as he was not going to paint anything but her

face, he would not be so cruel as to make her stand, as he did on days

of real sittings. Renovales answered with monosyllables and shrugs of

his shoulders. That was all right--for what they were going to do. An

afternoon lost. He would limit himself to working on her hair and her

forehead. She might take it easy, looking anywhere she wanted to.

The master did not feel any desire to work either. A dull anger

disturbed him; he was irritated by the ironical accent of the countess

who saw in him a man different from other men, a strange being who was

incapable of acting like the insipid young men who formed her court and

many of whom, according to common gossip, were her lovers. A strange

woman, provoking and cold! He felt like falling on her, in his rage at

her offence, and beating her with the same scorn that he would a low

woman, to make her feel his manly superiority.

Of all the ladies whose pictures he had painted, none had disturbed his

artistic calm as she had. He felt attracted by her mad jesting, by her

almost childish levity, and at the same time he hated her for the

pitying air with which she treated him. For her he was a good fellow,

but very commonplace, who by some rare caprice of Nature possessed the

gift of painting well.

Renovales returned this scorn by insulting her mentally. That Countess

of Alberca was a fine one. No wonder people talked about her. Perhaps

when she appeared in his studio, always in a hurry and out of breath,

she came from a private interview with some one of those young bloods

that hung around her, attracted by her still fresh, alluring maturity.

But if Concha spoke to him with her easy freedom, telling him of the

sadness she said she felt and allowing herself to confide in him, as if

they were united by a long standing friendship, that was enough to make

the master change his thoughts immediately. She was a superior woman of

ideals, condemned to live in a depressing aristocratic atmosphere. All

the gossip about her was a calumny, a lie forged by envious people. She

ought to be the companion of a superior man, of an artist.

Renovales knew her history; he was proud of the friendly confidence she

had had in him. She was the only daughter of a distinguished gentleman,

a solemn jurist, and a violent Conservative, a minister in the most

reactionary cabinets of the reign of Isabel II. She had been educated at

the same school as Josephina, who in spite of the fact that Concha was

four years her senior, retained a vivid recollection of her lively

companion. "For mischief and deviltry you can't beat Conchita Salazar."

It was thus that Renovales heard her name for the first time. Then when

the artist and his wife had moved from Venice to Madrid, he learned that

she had changed her name to that of the Countess of Alberca by marrying

a man who might have been her father.

He was an old courtier who performed his duties as a grandee of Spain

with great conscientiousness, proud of his slavery to the royal family.

His ambition was to belong to all the honorable orders of Europe and as

soon as he was named to one of them, he had his picture painted, covered

with scarfs and crosses, wearing the uniform of one of the traditional

military Orders. His wife laughed to see him, so little, bald and

solemn, with high boots, a dangling sword, his breast covered with

trinkets, a white plumed helmet resting in his lap.

During the life of isolation and privation with which Renovales

struggled so courageously, the papers brought to the artist's wretched

house the echoes of the triumphs of the "fair Countess of Alberca." Her

name appeared in the first line of every account of an aristocratic

function. Besides, they called her "enlightened," and talked about her

literary culture, her classic education which she owed to her

"illustrious father," now dead. And with this public news there reached

the artist on the whispering wings of Madrid gossip other tales that

represented the Countess of Alberca as consoling herself merrily for the

mistake she had made in marrying an old man.

At Court, they had taken her name from the lists, as a result of this

reputation. Her husband took part at all the royal functions, for he did

not have a chance every day to show off his load of honorary hardware,

but she stayed at home, loathing these ceremonious affairs. Renovales

had often heard her declare, dressed luxuriously and wearing costly

jewels in her ears and on her breast, that she laughed at his set, that

she was on the inside, she was an anarchist! And he laughed as he heard

her, just as all men laughed at what they called the "ways" of the

Alberca woman.

When Renovales won success and, as a famous master, returned to those

drawing rooms through which he had passed in his youth, he felt the

attraction of the countess who in her character as a "woman of

intellect," insisted on gathering celebrated men about her. Josephina

did not accompany him in this return to society. She felt ill; contact

with the same people in the same places tired her; she lacked the

strength to undertake even the trips her doctors urged upon her.

The countess enrolled the painter in her following, appearing offended

when he failed to present himself at her house on the afternoons on

which she received her friends. What ingratitude to show to such a

fervent admirer! How she liked to exhibit him before her friends, as if

he were a new jewel! "The painter Renovales, the famous master."

At one of these afternoon receptions, the count spoke to Renovales with

the serious air of a man who is crushed beneath his worldly honors.

"Concha wants a portrait done by you, and I like to please her in every

way. You can say when to begin. She is afraid to propose it to you and

has commissioned me to do it. I know that your work is better than that

of other painters. Paint her well, so that she may be pleased."

And noticing that Renovales seemed rather offended at his patronizing

familiarity, he added as if he were doing him another favor.

"If you have success with Concha, you may paint my picture afterward. I

am only waiting for the Grand Chrysanthemum of Japan. At the Government

offices they tell me the titles will come one of these days."

Renovales began the countess's portrait. The task was prolonged by that

rattle-brained woman who always came late, alleging that she had been

busy. Many days the artist did not take a stroke with his brush; they

spent the time chatting. At other times the master listened in silence

while she with her ceaseless volubility made fun of her friends and

related their secret defects, their most intimate habits, their

mysterious amours, with a kind of relish, as if all women were her

enemies. In the midst of one of these confidential talks, she stopped

and said with a shy expression and an ironical accent:

"But I am probably shocking you, Mariano. You, who are a good husband, a

staunch family-man."

Renovales felt tempted to choke her. She was making fun of him; she

looked on him as a man different from the rest of men, a sort of monk of

painting. Eager to wound her, to return the blow, he interrupted once

brutally in the midst of her merciless gossip.

"Well, they talk about you, too, Concha. They say things that wouldn't

be very pleasing to the count."

He expected an outburst of anger, a protest, and all that resounded in

the silence of the studio was a merry, reckless laugh that lasted a

long time, stopping occasionally, only to begin again. Then she grew

pensive, with the gentle sadness of women who are "misunderstood." She

was very unhappy. She could tell him everything because he was a good

friend. She had married when she was still a child; a terrible mistake.

There was something else in the world besides the glare of fortune, the

splendor of luxury and that count's coronet, which had stirred her

school-girl's mind.

"We have the right to a little love, and if not love, to a little joy.

Don't you think so, Mariano?"

Of course he thought so. And he declared it in such a way, looking at

Concha with alarming eyes, that she finally laughed at his frankness and

threatened him with her finger.

"Take care, master. Don't forget that Josephina is my friend and if you

go astray, I'll tell her everything."

Renovales was irritated at her disposition, always restless and

capricious as a bird's, quite as likely to sit down beside him in warm

intimacy as to flit away with tormenting banter.

Sometimes she was aggressive, teasing the artist from her very first

words, as had just happened that afternoon.

They were silent for a long time--he, painting with an absent-minded

air, she watching the movement of the brush, buried in an armchair in

the sweet calm of rest.

But the Alberca woman was incapable of remaining silent long. Little by

little her usual chatter began, paying no attention to the painter's

silence, talking to relieve the convent-like stillness of the studio

with her words and laughter.

The painter heard the story of her labors as president of the "Women's

League," of the great things she meant to do in the holy undertaking for

the emancipation of the sex. And, in passing, led on by her desire of

ridiculing all women, she gaily made sport of her co-workers in the

great project; unknown literary women, school teachers, whose lives were

embittered by their ugliness, painters of flowers and doves, a throng of

poor women with extravagant hats and clothes that looked as though they

were hung on a bean-pole; feminine Bohemians, rebellious and rabid

against their lot, who were proud to have her as their leader and who

made it a point to call her "Countess" in sonorous tones at every other

word, in order to flatter themselves with the distinction of this

friendship. The Alberca woman was greatly amused at her following of

admirers; she laughed at their intolerance and their proposals.

"Yes, I know what it is," said Renovales breaking his long silence. "You

want to annihilate us, to reign over man, whom you hate."

The countess laughed at the recollection of the fierce feminism of some

of her acolytes. As most of them were homely, they hated feminine beauty

as a sign of weakness. They wanted the woman of the future to be without

hips, without breasts, straight, bony, muscular, fitted for all sorts of

manual labor, free from the slavery of love and reproduction. "Down with

feminine fat!"

"What a frightful idea! Don't you think so, Mariano?" she continued.

"Woman, straight in front and straight behind, with her hair cut short

and her hands hardened, competing with men in all sorts of struggles!

And they call that emancipation! I know what men are; if they saw us

looking like that, in a few days they would be beating us."

No, she was not one of them. She wanted to see a woman triumph, but by

increasing still more her charm and her fascination. If they took away

her beauty what would she have left? She wanted her to be man's equal in

intelligence, his superior by the magic of her beauty.

"I don't hate men, Mariano, I am very much a woman, and I like them.

What's the use of denying it?"

"I know it, Concha, I know it," said the painter, with a malicious

meaning.

"What do you know? Lies, gossip that people tell about me because I am

not a hypocrite and am not always wearing a gloomy expression."

And led on by that desire for sympathy that all women of questionable

reputation experience, she spoke once more of her unpleasant situation.

Renovales knew the count, a good man in spite of his hobbies, who

thought of nothing but his honorary trinkets. She did everything for

him, watched out for his comfort, but he was nothing to her. She lacked

the most important thing--heart-love.

As she spoke she looked up, with a longing idealism that would have made

anyone but Renovales smile.

"In this situation," she said slowly, looking into space, "it isn't

strange that a woman seeks happiness where she can find it. But I am

very unhappy, Mariano; I don't know what love is. I have never loved."

Ah, she would have been happy, if she had married a man who was her

superior. To be the companion of a great artist, of a scholar, would

have meant happiness for her. The men who gathered around her in her

drawing-rooms were younger and stronger than the poor count, but

mentally they were even weaker than he. There was no such thing as

virtue in the world, she admitted that; she did not dare to lie to a

friend like the painter. She had had her diversions, her whims, just as

many other women who passed as impregnable models of virtue, but she

always came out of these misdoings with a feeling of disenchantment and

disgust. She knew that love was a reality for other women, but she had

never succeeded in finding it.

Renovales had stopped painting. The sunlight no longer came in through

the wide window. The panes took on a violet opaqueness. Twilight filled

the studio, and in the shadows there shone dimly like dying sparks, here

the corner of a picture frame, beyond the old gold of an embroidered

banner, in the corners the pummel of a sword, the pearl inlay of a

cabinet.

The painter sat down beside the countess, sinking into the perfumed

atmosphere which surrounded her with a sort of nimbus of keen

voluptuousness.

He, too, was unhappy. He said it sincerely, believing honestly in the

lady's melancholy despair. Something was lacking in his life; he was

alone in the world. And as he saw an expression of surprise on Concha's

face, he pounded his chest energetically.

Yes, alone. He knew what she was going to say. He had his wife, his

daughter. About Milita he did not want to talk; he worshiped her; she

was his joy. When he felt tired out with work, it gave him a sweet sense

of rest to put his arms around her neck. But he was still too young to

be satisfied with this joy of a father's love. He longed for something

more and he could not find it in the companion of his life, always ill,

with her nerves constantly on edge. Besides, she did not understand him.

She never would understand him; she was a burden who was crushing his

talent.

Their union was based merely on friendship, on mutual consideration for

the suffering they had undergone together. He, too, had been deceived in

taking for love what was only an impulse of youthful attraction. He

needed a true passion; to live close to a soul that was akin to his, to

love a woman who was his superior, who could understand him and

encourage him in his bold projects, who could sacrifice her commonplace

prejudices to the demands of art.

He spoke vehemently, with his eyes fixed on Concha's eyes that shone

with light from the window.

But Renovales was interrupted by a cruel, ironical laugh, while the

countess pushed back her chair, as if to avoid the artist who slowly

leaned forward toward her.

"Look out, you're slipping, Mariano! I see it coming. A little more and

you would have made me a confession. Heavens! These men! You can't talk

to them like a good friend, show them any confidence without their

beginning to talk love on the spot. If I would let you, in less than a

minute you would tell me that I am your ideal, that you worship me."

Renovales, who had moved away from her, recovering his sternness, felt

cut by that mocking laugh and said in a quiet tone:

"And what if it were true? What if I loved you?"

The laugh of the countess rang out again, but forced, false, with a tone

that seemed to tear the artist's breast.

"Just what I expected! The confession I spoke of! That's the third one

I've received to-day. But isn't it possible to talk with a man of

anything but love?"

She was already on her feet, looking around for her hat, for she could

not remember where she had left it.

"I'm going, _cher maître_. It isn't safe to stay here. I'll try to come

earlier next time so that the twilight won't catch us. It's a

treacherous hour; the moment of the greatest follies."

The painter objected to her leaving. Her carriage had not yet come. She

could wait a few minutes longer. He promised to be quiet, not to talk to

her, as long as it seemed to displease her.

The countess remained, but she would not sit down in the chair. She

walked around the studio for a few moments and finally opened the organ

that stood near the window.

"Let's have a little music; that will quiet us. You, Mariano, sit still

as a mouse in your chair and don't come near me. Be a good boy now."

Her fingers rested on the keys; her feet moved the pedals and the

_Largo_ of Handel, grave, mystic, dreamy, swelled softly through the

studio. The melody filled the wide room, already wrapped in shadows, it

made its way through the tapestries, prolonging its winged whisper

through the other two studios, as though it were the song of an organ

played by invisible hands in a deserted cathedral at the mysterious hour

of dusk.

Concha felt stirred with feminine sentimentality, that superficial,

whimsical, sensitiveness that made her friends look on her as a great

artist. The music filled her with tenderness; she strove to keep back

the tears that came to her eyes,--why, she could not tell.

Suddenly she stopped playing and looked around anxiously. The painter

was behind her, she fancied she felt his breath on her neck. She wanted

to protest, to make him draw back with one of her cruel laughs, but she

could not.

"Mariano," she murmured, "go sit down, be a good boy and mind me. If you

don't I'll be cross."

But she did not move; after turning half way around on the stool, she

remained facing the window with one elbow resting on the keys.

They were silent for a long time; she in this position, he watching her

face that now was only a white spot in the deepening shadow.

The panes of the window took on a bluish opaqueness. The branches of the

garden cut them like sinuous, shifting lines of ink. In the deep calm of

the studio the creaking of the furniture could be heard, that breathing

of wood, of dust, of objects in the silence and shadow.

Both of them seem to be captivated by the mystery of the hour, as if the

death of day acted as an anæsthetic on their minds. They felt lulled in

a vague, sweet dream.

She trembled with pleasure.

"Mariano, go away," she said slowly, as if it cost her an effort. "This

is so pleasant, I feel as if I were in a bath, a bath that penetrates to

my very soul. But it isn't right. Turn on the lights, master. Light!

Light! This isn't proper."

Mariano did not listen to her. He had bent over her, taking her hand

that was cold, unfeeling, as if it did not notice the pressure of his.

Then, with a sudden start, he kissed it, almost bit it.

The countess seemed to awake and stood up, proudly, angrily.

"That's childish, Mariano. It isn't fair."

But in a moment she laughed with her cruel laugh, as if she pitied the

confusion that Renovales showed when he saw her anger. "You are

pardoned, master. A kiss on the hand means nothing. It is the

conventional thing. Many men kiss my hand."

And this indifference was a bitter torment for the artist, who

considered that his kiss was a sign of possession.

The countess continued to search in the darkness, repeating in an

irritated voice:

"Light, turn on the light. Where in the world is the button?"

The light was turned on without Mariano's moving, before she found the

button she was looking for. Three clusters of electric lights flashed

out on the ceiling of the studio, and their crowns of white needles,

brought out of the shadows the golden picture frames, the brilliant

tapestries, the shining arms, the showy furniture and the bright-colored

paintings.

They both blinked, blinded by the sudden brightness.

"Good evening," said a honeyed voice from the doorway.

"Josephina!"

The countess ran toward her, embracing her effusively, kissing her

bright red, emaciated cheeks.

"How dark you were," continued Josephina with a smile that Renovales

knew well.

Concha fairly stunned her with her flow of chatter. The illustrious

master had refused to light up, he liked the twilight. An artist's whim!

They had been talking about their dear Josephina, while she was waiting

for her carriage to come. And as she said this, she kept kissing the

little woman, drawing back a little to look at her better, repeating

impetuously:

"My, how pretty you are to-day. You look better than you did three days

ago."

Josephina continued to smile. She thanked her. Her carriage was waiting

at the door. The servant had told her when she came downstairs,

attracted by the distant sound of the organ.

The countess seemed to be in a hurry to leave. She suddenly remembered a

host of things she had to do, she enumerated the people who were waiting

for her at home. Josephina helped her to put on her hat and veil and

even then the countess gave her several good-by kisses through the veil.

"Good-by, _ma chère_. Good-by, _mignonne_. Do you remember our school

days? How happy we were there! Good-by, _maître_."

She stopped at the door to kiss Josephina once more.

And finally, before she disappeared, she exclaimed in the querulous tone

of a victim who wants sympathy:

"I envy you, _chèrie_. You, at least, are happy. You have found a

husband who worships you. Master, take lots of care of her. Be good to

her so that she may get well and pretty. Take care of her or we shall

quarrel."

VI

Renovales had finished reading the evening papers in bed as was his

custom, and before putting out the light he looked at his wife.

She was awake. Above the fold of the sheet he saw her eyes, unusually

wide open, fixed on him with a hostile stare, and the little tails of

her hair, that stuck out under the lace of her night-cap straight and

sedate.

"Aren't you asleep?" the painter asked in an affectionate tone, in which

there was some anxiety.

"No."

And after this hard monosyllable, she turned over in the bed with her

back to him.

Renovales remained in the darkness, with his eyes open, somewhat

disturbed, almost afraid of that body, hidden under the same sheet,

lying a short distance from him, which avoided touching him, shrinking

with manifest repulsion.

Poor little girl! Renovales' better nature felt tormented with a painful

remorse. His conscience was a cruel beast that had awakened, angry and

implacable, tearing him with scornful teeth. The events of the afternoon

meant nothing, a moment of thoughtlessness, of weakness. Surely the

countess would not remember it and he, for his part, was determined not

to slip again.

A pretty situation for a father of a family, for a man whose youth was

past, compromising himself in a love affair, getting melancholy in the

twilight, kissing a white hand like an enamored troubadour! Good God!

How his friends would have laughed to see him in that posture! He must

purge himself of that romanticism which sometimes mastered him. Every

man must follow his fate, accepting life as he found it. He was born to

be virtuous, he must put up with the relative peace of his domestic

life, must accept its limited pleasures as a compensation for the

suffering his wife's illness caused him. He would be content with the

feasts of his thought, with the revels in beauty at the banquets served

by his fancy. He would keep his flesh faithful though it amounted to

perpetual privation. Poor Josephina! His remorse at a moment of weakness

which he considered a crime, impelled him to draw closer to her, as if

he sought in her warmth and contact a mute forgiveness.

Her body, burning with a slow fever, drew away as it felt his touch, it

shriveled like those timid molluscs that shrink and hide at the least

touch. She was awake. He could not hear her breathing; she seemed dead

in the profound darkness, but he fancied her with her eyes open, a scowl

on her forehead and he felt the fear of a man who has a presentiment of

danger in the mystery of the darkness.

Renovales too remained motionless, taking care not to touch again that

form which silently repelled him. The sincerity of his repentance

brought him a sort of consolation. Never again would he forget his wife,

his daughter, his respectability.

He would give up forever the longings of youth, that recklessness, that

thirst for enjoying all the pleasures of life. His lot was cast; he

would continue to be what he always had been. He would paint portraits

and everything that was given to him as a commission; he would please

the public; he would make more money, he would adapt his art to meet his

wife's jealous demands, that she might live in peace; he would scoff at

that phantom of human ambition which men call glory. Glory! A lottery,

where the only chance for a prize depended on the tastes of people still

to be born! Who knew what the artistic inclinations of the future would

be? Perhaps it would appreciate what he was now producing with such

loathing; perhaps it would laugh scornfully at what he wanted to paint.

The only thing of importance was to live in peace, as long as he could

be surrounded by happiness. His daughter would marry. Perhaps her

husband would be his favorite pupil, that Soldevilla, so polite, so

courteous, who was mad over the mischievous Milita. If it was not he, it

would be López de Sosa, a crazy fellow, in love with his automobiles,

who pleased Josephina more than the pupil because he had not committed

the sin of showing talent and devoting himself to painting. He would

have grandchildren, his beard would grow white, he would have the

majesty of an Eternal Father and Josephina, cared for by him, restored

to health by an atmosphere of affection, would grow old too, freed from

her nervous troubles.

The painter felt allured by this picture of patriarchal happiness. He

would go out of the world without having tasted the best fruits which

life offers, but still with the peace of a soul that does not know the

great heat of passion.

Lulled by these illusions, the artist was sinking into sleep. He saw in

the darkness, the image of his calm old age, with rosy wrinkles and

silvery hair, at his side a sprightly little old lady, healthy and

attractive, with wavy hair, and around them a group of children, many

children, some of them with their fingers in their noses, others rolling

on their backs on the floor, like playful kittens, the older ones with

pencils in their hands, making caricatures of the old couple and all

shouting in a chorus of loving cries: "Grandpa, dear! Pretty grandma!"

In his sleepy fancy, the picture grew indistinct and was blotted out. He

no longer saw the figures, but the loving cry continued to sound in his

ears, dying away in the distance.

Then it began to increase again, drew slowly nearer, but it was a

complaint, a howl like that of the victim that feels the sacrificer's

knife at its throat.

The artist, terrified by this moan, thought that some dark animal, some

monster of the night was tossing beside him, brushing him with its

tentacles, pushing him with the bony points of its joints.

He awoke and with his brain still cloudy with sleep, the first sensation

he experienced was a tremble of fear and surprise, reaching from his

head to his feet. The invisible monster was beside him, dying, kicking

violently, sticking him with its angular body. The howl tore the

darkness like a death rattle.

Renovales, aroused by his fear, awoke completely. That cry came from

Josephina. His wife was tossing about in the bed, shrieking while she

gasped for breath.

The electric button snapped and the white, hard light of the lamp showed

the little woman in the disorder of her nervous outbreak; her weak limbs

painfully convulsed, her eyes, staring, dull with an uncanny vacancy;

her mouth contracted, dripping with foam.

The husband, dazed at this awakening, tried to take her in his arms, to

hold her gently against him, as if his warmth might restore her calm.

"Let me--alone," she cried brokenly. "Let go of me. I hate you!"

And though she asked him to let go of her, she was the one who clung to

him, digging her fingers into his throat, as if she wanted to strangle

him. Renovates, insensible to this clutch which made little impression

on his strong neck, murmured with sad kindness:

"Squeeze! Don't be afraid of hurting me. Relieve your feelings!"

Her hands, tired out with this useless pressure on that muscular flesh,

relaxed their grasp with a sort of dejection. The outbreak lasted for

some time, but tears came and she lay exhausted, inert, without any

other signs of life than the heaving of her breast and a constant stream

of tears.

Renovales had jumped out of bed, moving about the room in his night

clothing, searching on all sides, without knowing what he was looking

for, murmuring loving words to calm his wife.

She stopped crying, struggling to enunciate each syllable between her

sobs. She spoke with her head buried in her arms. The painter stopped to

listen to her, astounded at the coarse words that came from her lips, as

if the grief that stirred her soul had set afloat all the shameful,

filthy words she had heard in the streets that were hidden in the depth

of her memory.

"The ----!" (And here she uttered the classic word, naturally, as if she

had spoken thus all her life.) "The shameless woman! The ----!"

And she continued to volley a string of interjections which shocked her

husband to hear them coming from those lips.

"But whom are you talking about? Who is it?"

She, as if she were only waiting for his question, sat up in bed, got

onto her knees, looking at him fixedly, shaking her head on her delicate

neck, so that the short, straight locks of hair whirled around it.

"Whom do you suppose? The Alberca woman. That peacock! Look surprised!

You don't know what I mean! Poor thing!"

Renovales expected this, but when he heard it, he assumed an injured

expression, fortified by his determination to reform and by the

certainty that he was telling the truth. He raised his hand to his heart

in a tragic attitude, throwing back his shock of hair, not noticing the

absurdity of his appearance that was reflected in the bedroom mirror.

"Josephina, I swear by all that I love most in the world that your

suspicions are not true. I have had nothing to do with Concha. I swear

it by our daughter!"

The little woman became more irritated.

"Don't swear, don't lie, don't name my daughter. You deceiver! You

hypocrite! You are all alike!"

Did he think she was a fool? She knew everything that was going on

around her. He was a rake, a false husband, she had discovered it a few

months after their marriage; a Bohemian without any other education than

the low associations of his class. And the woman was as bad; the worst

in Madrid. There was a reason why people laughed at the count

everywhere. Mariano and Concha understood each other; birds of a

feather; they made fun of her in her own house, in the dark of the

studio.

"She is your mistress," she said with cold anger. "Come now, admit it.

Repeat all those shameless things about the rights of love and joy that

you talk about to your friends in the studio, those infamous hypocrisies

to justify your scorn for the family, for marriage, for everything. Have

the courage of your convictions."

But Renovales, overwhelmed by this fierce outpouring of words that fell

on him like a rain of blows, could only repeat, with his hand on his

heart and the expression of noble resignation of a man who suffers an

injustice:

"I am innocent. I swear it. Your suspicions are absolutely groundless."

And walking around to the other side of the bed, he tried again to take

Josephina in his arms, thinking he could calm her, now that she seemed

less furious and that her angry words were broken by tears.

It was a useless effort. The delicate form slipped out of his hands,

repelling them with a feeling of horror and repugnance.

"Let me alone. Don't touch me. I loathe you."

Her husband was mistaken if he thought that she was Concha's enemy.

Pshaw! She knew what women were. She even admitted (since he was so

insistent in his protestations of innocence) that there was nothing

between them. But if so, it was due solely to Concha--she had plenty of

admirers and, besides, her old time friendship would impel her not to

embitter Josephina's life. Concha was the one who had resisted and not

he.

"I know you. You know that I can guess your thoughts, that I read in

your face. You are faithful because you are a coward, because you have

lacked an opportunity. But your mind is loaded with foul ideas; I detest

your spirit."

And before he could protest, his wife attacked him; anew, pouring out in

one breath all the observations she had made, weighing his words and

deeds with the subtlety of a diseased imagination.

She threw in his face the expression of rapture in his eyes when he saw

beautiful women sit down before his easel to have their portraits

painted; his praise of the throat of one, the shoulders of another; the

almost religious unction with which he examined the photographs and

engravings of naked beauties, painted by other artists whom he would

like to imitate in his licentious impulses.

"If I should leave you! If I should disappear! Your studio would be a

brothel, no decent person could enter it; you would always have some

woman stripped in there, painting some disgraceful picture of her."

And in the tremble of her irritated voice there was revealed the anger,

the bitter disappointment she had experienced in the constant contact

with this cult of beauty, that paid no attention to her, who was aged

before her time, sickly, with the ugliness of physical misery, whom each

one of these enthusiastic homages wounded like a reproach, marking the

abyss between her sad condition and the ideal that filled the mind of

her husband.

"Do you think I don't know what you are thinking about. I laugh at your

fidelity. A lie! Hypocrisy! As you get older, a mad desire is mastering

you. If you could, if you had the courage, you would run after these

creatures of beautiful flesh that you praise so highly. You are

commonplace. There's nothing in you but coarseness and materialism.

Form! Flesh! And they call that artistic? I'd have done better to marry

a shoemaker, one of those honest, simple men that takes his poor little

wife to dinner in a restaurant on Sunday and worships her, not knowing

any other."

Renovales began to feel irritated at this attack that was no longer

based on his actions but on his thoughts. That was worse than the

Inquisition. She had spied on him constantly; always on the watch, she

picked up his least words and expressions, she penetrated his thoughts,

making his inclinations and enthusiasms a subject for jealousy.

"Stop, Josephina. That's despicable. I won't be able to think, to

produce. You spy on me and pursue me even in my art."

She shrugged her shoulders scornfully. His art! She scoffed at it.

And she began again to insult painting, repenting that she had joined

her lot to an artist's. Men like him ought not to marry respectable

women, what people call "homebodies." Their fate was to remain single or

to join with unscrupulous women who were in love with their own form and

were capable of exhibiting it in the street, taking pride in their

nakedness.

"I used to love you; did you know it?" she said coldly. "I used to love

you, but I no longer love you. What's the use? I know that even if you

swore to me on your knees, you would never be faithful to me. You might

be tied to my apron strings but your thoughts would go wandering off to

caress those beauties you worship. You've got a perfect harem in your

head. I think I am living alone with you and when I look at you, the

house is peopled with women that surround me, that fill everything and

mock at me; all fair, like children of the devil all naked, like

temptations. Let me alone, Mariano, don't come near me. I don't want to

see you. Put out the light."

And seeing that the artist did not obey her command, she pressed the

button herself. The cracking of her bones could be heard as she wrapped

herself up in the bed-clothes.

Renovales was left in utter darkness, and feeling his way, he got into

bed too. He no longer implored, he remained silent, angry. The tender

compassion that made him put up with his wife's nervous attacks had

disappeared. What more did she expect of him? How far was it going to

go? He lived the life of a recluse, restraining his healthy passion,

keeping a chaste fidelity out of habit and respect, seeking an outlet in

the ardent vagaries of his fancy, and even that was a crime! With the

acumen of a sick woman, she saw within him, divining his ideas,

following their course, tearing off the veil behind which he concealed

those feasts of fancy with which he passed his solitary hours. This

persecution reached even his brain. He could not patiently endure the

jealousy of that woman who was embittered by the loss of her youthful

freshness.

She began her weeping again in the darkness. She sobbed convulsively,

tossing the clothes with the heaving of her breast.

His anger made him insensible and hard.

"Groan, you poor wretch," he thought with a sort of relish. "Weep till

you ruin yourself. I won't be the one to say a word."

Josephina, tired out by his silence, interjected words amid her sobs.

People made fun of her. She was a constant laughing-stock. How his

friends who hung on his words, and the ladies who visited him in his

studio, laughed when they heard him enthusiastically praising beauty in

the presence of his sickly, broken-down wife! What did she amount to in

that house, that terrible pantheon, that home of sorrow? A poor

housekeeper who watched out for the artist's comforts. And he thought

that he was fulfilling his duty by not keeping a mistress, by staying at

home, but still abusing her with his words that made her an object of

derision. If her mother were only alive! If her brothers were not so

selfish, wandering about the world from embassy to embassy, satisfied

with life, paying no attention to her letters filled with complaints,

thinking she was insane because she was not contented with a

distinguished husband and with wealth!

Renovales, in the darkness, lifted his hands to his forehead in despair,

infuriated at the sing-song of her unjust words.

"Her mother!" he thought. "It's lucky that intolerable old dame is under

the sod forever. Her brothers! A crowd of rakes that are always asking

me for something whenever they get a chance. Heavens! Give me the

patience to stand this woman, the calm resignation to keep a cool head

and not to forget that I am a man!"

He scorned her mentally in order to maintain his indifference in this

way. Bah! A woman! and a sick one! Every man carries his cross and his

was Josephina.

But she, as if she penetrated his thoughts, stopped crying and spoke to

him slowly in a voice that shook with cruel irony.

"You need not expect anything from the Alberca woman," she said suddenly

with feminine incoherence. "I warn you that she has worshipers by the

dozen, young and stylish, too, something that counts more with women

than talent."

"What difference does that make to me?" Renovales' voice roared in the

darkness with an outbreak of wrath.

"I'm telling you, so that you won't fool yourself. Master, you are going

to suffer a failure. You are very old, my good man, the years are going

by. So old and so ugly that if you had looked the way you do when I met

you, I should never have been your wife in spite of all your glory."

After this thrust, satisfied and calm, she seemed to go to sleep.

The master remained motionless, lying on his back with his head resting

on his arms and his eyes wide open, seeing in the darkness a host of red

spots that spread out in ceaseless rotation, forming floating, fiery

rings. His wrath had set his nerves on edge; the final thrust made sleep

impossible. He felt restless, wide-awake after this cruel shock to his

pride. He thought that in his bed, close to him, he had his worst enemy.

He hated that frail form that he could touch with the slightest

movement, as if it contained the rancor of all the adversaries he had

met in life.

Old! Contemptible! Inferior to those young bloods that swarmed around

the Alberca woman; he, a man known all over Europe, and in whose

presence all the young ladies that painted fans and water-colors of

birds and flowers, grew pale with emotion, looking at him with

worshiping eyes!

"I will soon show you, you poor woman," he thought, while a cruel laugh

shook silently in the darkness. "You'll soon see whether glory means

anything and people find me as old as you believe."

With boyish joy, he recalled the twilight scene, the kiss on the

countess's hand, her gentle abandon, that mingling of resistance and

pleasure which opened the way for him to go farther. He enjoyed these

memories with a relish of vengeance.

Afterwards, his body, as he moved, touched Josephina, who seemed to be

asleep, and he felt a sort of repugnance as if he had rubbed against a

hostile creature.

She was his enemy; she had distorted and ruined his life as an artist,

she had saddened his life as a man. Now he believed that he might have

produced the most remarkable works, if he had not known that little

woman who crushed him with her weight. Her silent censure, her prying

eyes, that narrow, petty morality of a well-educated girl, blocked his

course and made him turn out of his way. Her fits of temper, her nervous

attacks, made him lose his bearings, belittling him, robbing him of his

strength for work. Must he always live like this? The thought of the

long years before him filled him with horror, the long road that life

offered him, monotonous, dusty, rough, without a shadow or a resting

place, a painful journey lacking enthusiasm and ardor, pulling at the

chain of duty, at the end of which dragged the enemy, always fretful,

always unjust, with the selfish cruelty of disease, spying on him with

searching eyes in the hours when his mind was off its guard, while he

slept, violating his secrecy, forcing his immobility, robbing him of his

most intimate ideas, only to parade them before his eyes later with the

insolence of a successful thief. And that was what his life was to be!

God! No, it was better to die.

Then in the black recesses of his brain there rose, like a blue spark of

infernal gleam, a thought, a desire, that made a chill of terror and

surprise run over his body.

"If she would only die!"

Why not? Always ill, always sad, she seemed to darken his mind with the

wings that beat ominously. He had a right to liberty, to break the

chain, because he was the stronger. He had spent his life in the

struggle for glory, and glory was a delusion, if it brought only cold

respect from his fellows, if it could not be exchanged for something

more positive. Many years of intense existence were left; he could still

exult in a host of pleasures, he could still live, like some artists

whom he admired, intoxicated with worldly joys, working in mad freedom.

"Oh, if she would only die!"

He recalled books he had read, in which other imaginary people had

desired another's death that they might be able to satisfy more fully

their appetites and passions.

Suddenly he felt as though he were awakening from a bad dream, as though

he were throwing off an overwhelming nightmare. Poor Josephina! His

thought filled him with horror, he felt the infernal desire burning his

conscience, like a hot iron that throws off a shower of sparks when

touched. It was not tenderness that made him turn again towards his

companion; not that; his old animosity remained. But he thought of her

years of sacrifice, of the privations she had suffered, following him in

the struggle with misery, without a complaint, without a protest, in the

pains of motherhood, in the nursing of her daughter, that Milita who

seemed to have stolen all the strength of her body and perhaps was the

cause of her decline. How terrible to wish for her death! He hoped that

she would live. He would bear everything with the patience of duty. She

die? Never, he would rather die himself.

But in vain did he struggle to forget the thought. The atrocious,

monstrous desire, once awakened, resisted, refused to recede, to hide,

to die in the windings of his brain whence it had arisen. In vain did he

repent his villainy, or feel ashamed of his cruel idea, striving to

crush it forever. It seemed as though a second personality had arisen

within him, rebellious to his commands, opposed to his conscience, hard

and indifferent to his sympathetic scruples, and this personality, this

power, continued to sing in his ear with a merry accent, as if it

promised him all the pleasures of life.

"If she would only die! Eh, master? If she would only die!"