When the chambermaid wakened Lucía in the morning, bringing her a bowl
of coffee, the first piece of news she gave her was that Monsieur de
Miranda had not arrived in the train from Spain. Lucía sprang out of bed
and dressed herself quickly, trying to bring together her scattered
recollections and glancing around her room with the surprise which those
unused to traveling are apt to experience on awakening for the first
time in a strange place. She looked at the clock upon the table; it was
eight. She went out into the corridor and knocked softly at the door of
Artegui’s room.
The latter, who was in his shirt-sleeves, finishing his toilet, when he
heard the knock, quickly dried his hands and face, threw his overcoat
over his shoulders, and opened the door.
“Don Ignacio--good-morning. Do I disturb you?”
“No, indeed, will you come in?”
“Are you dressed already?”
“Almost.”
“Do you know that Señor de Miranda has not come by the morning train?”
“I have been told so.”
“What do you say to that? Is it not very strange?”
Ignacio did not answer. He began, in truth, to think the conduct of this
bridegroom, who had abandoned his bride on their wedding-day in the
carriage of a railway train, strange and more than strange. Of course,
some disagreeable and unforeseen accident must have occurred to the
unknown Miranda; whose fate, by a singular chance, had come to influence
his own in the manner it had done during the last forty-eight hours.
“I will telegraph everywhere,” he said; “to Alsásua, to---- do you wish
me to telegraph to Leon, to your father?”
“God forbid!” exclaimed Lucía “he would be capable of taking the next
train to come in search of me, and suffocating on the way with
asthma--and with worry. No, no!”
“At all events I am going to take measures----”
And Artegui thrust his arms through the sleeves of his overcoat and took
up his hat.
“Are you going out?” asked Lucía.
“Do you need anything else?”
“Do you know--do you know that yesterday was Saturday and that to-day is
Sunday?”
“As a general thing Sunday does follow Saturday,” answered Artegui, with
amiable badinage.
“You don’t understand me.”
“Explain yourself, then. What do you wish?”
“What should I wish but to go to mass like all the rest of the world?”
“Ah!” exclaimed Artegui. Then he added: “True. And you wish----”
“That you should accompany me. I am not going to mass alone, I suppose?”
Artegui smiled again, and the young girl observed how well a smile
became that countenance, generally so emotionless and somber. It was
like the dawn when it tints the gray mountains with rose-color; like a
sunbeam piercing the mists on a cloudy clay. The eyes, the pallid and
hollow cheeks kindled; youth was renewed in that countenance faded by
mysterious sorrows, and darkened by perpetual clouds.
“You should always smile, Don Ignacio,” exclaimed Lucía. “Although,” she
added reflectively, “the other way you look more like yourself.”
Artegui, smiling more brightly than before, offered her his arm; but she
declined to take it. When they reached the street she walked along in
silence, with downcast eyes; she missed the protecting shade of the
black veil of her lace manto, which concealed her face and gave her so
modest an air when she walked under the beams of the half-ruined vaulted
roof of the cathedral at Leon. The cathedral of Bayonne seemed to her as
delicately beautiful as a filigree ornament, but she could not listen to
the mass so devoutly there as in the other; the exquisite purity of the
temple, like an elaborately carved casket; the vivid coloring of the
Neo-Byzantine figures painted on a gold background in the transept, the
novelty of the open choir; of the tabernacle, isolated and without
ornament; the moving of the prayer-desks; the walking to and fro of the
women who rented the chairs, all disturbed her. It seemed to her as if
she were in a temple of a different faith from her own. A white-robed
virgin, wearing a mantle ornamented with gold bands and holding in her
arms the Divine Infant in one of the chapels of the nave, tranquillized
her somewhat. Then she recited a number of Hail Marys; she pulled apart
one by one the leaves of the blood red roses of the rosary, of the
mystic lilies of the litany. She left the temple with a light step and a
joyful heart. The first object on which her eyes fell when she reached
the door was Artegui looking with interest at the Gothic cinter of the
portal.
“I have sent telegrams to all the various stations on the route,
Señora,” he said, politely raising his hat when he saw her; “especially
to the most important station, Miranda de Ebro. I have taken the liberty
of signing them with your name.”
“Thanks--but have you not heard mass?” exclaimed the young girl, looking
at him in surprise.
“No, Señora; I come, as I have just told you, from the telegraph
office,” he answered evasively.
“You must hurry, then, if you wish to be in time. The priest has just
this moment come out, in his vestments.”
A slight frown crossed Artegui’s face.
“I shall not go to mass,” he said, half seriously, half jestingly. “At
least not unless you particularly desire it--in which case----”
“Not go to mass!” exclaimed the young girl with wide-open eyes, amazed
and disturbed as well. “And why do you not go to mass? Are you not a
Christian?”
“Let us suppose that I am not,” he stammered, in a low voice, like a
criminal confessing his crime before his judge, and shaking his head
with a melancholy air.
“Good heavens! What are you then?” And Lucía clasped her hands in
distress.
“What Father Urtazu would call an unbeliever.”
“Ah,” she cried impetuously. “Father Urtazu would say that all
unbelievers are wicked.”
“Father Urtazu might add that they are even more unhappy than wicked.”
“It is true,” replied Lucía, trembling still like a tree shaken by the
blast. “It is true, even more unhappy; Father Urtazu would certainly say
nothing else. And how unhappy they must be! Holy Virgin of the Rosary!”
The young girl bent her head as if stunned by the sudden blow. The
religious sentiment, dormant, until now, along with so many other
sentiments, in the depths of her serene and placid soul, awoke with
vigor at the unexpected shock. Two sensations struggled for the
mastery--piercing pity on the one hand, mingled terror and repulsion on
the other. Horrified, she was prompted to move away from Artegui, and
for this very reason her heart melted with compassion when she looked at
him. The people were coming out of the church; the portico poured forth
wave after wave of this human sea, and Lucía, standing erect and pale as
a Christian martyr in the arena, was hemmed in by the crowd. Artegui
offered her his arm in silence; she hesitated at first, then accepted
it, and both walked mechanically in the direction of the hotel. The
morning, slightly cloudy, promised a temperature cooler and more
agreeable than that of the day before. A delightful breeze was blowing,
and through the light clouds the sun could be seen struggling, like love
struggling through the clouds of anger.
“Are you sad, Lucía?” Artegui asked the young girl softly.
“A little, Don Ignacio.” And Lucía heaved a profound sigh. “And you are
to blame for it,” she added, in a gently reproachful tone.
“I?”
“Yes, you. Why do you say those foolish things, that cannot be true?”
“That cannot be true?”
“Yes, that cannot be true. How can it be true that you are not a
Christian? Come, you are saying what you do not mean.”
“And how does it matter to you, Lucía?” he exclaimed, calling her for
the second time by her Christian name. “Are you Father Urtazu? Am I one
who interests or concerns you in any way? Will you be called upon in any
tribunal to answer for my soul? Child, this is a matter that touches you
in no way.”
“Does it not, indeed? I declare, Don Ignacio, to-day you talk as if--as
if you were crazy. Why should it not matter to me whether you are saved
or lost, whether you are a Christian or a Jew!”
“A Jew! As far as being a Jew is concerned, I am not that,” responded
Artegui, endeavoring to give a playful turn to the conversation.
“It is the same thing--to deny Christ is to be a Jew in fact.”
“Let us drop this, Lucía; I don’t want to see you look like that, it
makes you ugly!” he said lightly, alluding, for the first time, to
Lucía’s personal appearance. “What, do you wish to do now? Shall I take
you to see some of the curiosities of the place? The hospital? The
forts?”
He spoke with more cordiality of manner than he had yet manifested, and
Lucía’s soul was tranquillized, as when oil is poured on the troubled
waters.
“Could we not make a little excursion into the country? I am
passionately fond of trees.”
Artegui turned toward the theater, before the door of which two or three
little basket-carriages were standing. He made a sign to the driver of
the nearest, a Biscayan, who, raising his whip, touched with it the
flanks of the Tarbes ponies, that, with a shake of the mane, prepared to
start. Lucía sprang in and seated herself in the light vehicle, and
Artegui, taking his place beside her, called to the driver:
“To Biarritz.”
The carriage set off, swift as an arrow, and Lucía closed her eyes,
letting her thoughts wander at will, enjoying the light caresses of the
breeze, that blew back the ends of her necktie and her wavy tresses. And
yet the scenery, picturesque and smiling, was well worthy of a glance.
They passed cultivated fields, country houses with pointed roofs,
English parks carpeted with fresh turf and fine grass, yellow now with
the hues of autumn. Descrying a footpath winding among the fields,
Artegui called to the driver to stop, and giving his hand to Lucía
helped her to alight. The Biscayan sought the shelter of a wall where
his horses, bathed in sweat, might rest with safety, and Artegui and
Lucía proceeded on foot along the little path, the latter, who had now
recovered her childlike gayety and her innocent delight in bodily
motion, leading the way. She was enchanted with everything: the clover
blossoms that covered the dark green field with crimson dots; the late
chamomile and the pale corn-flowers growing by the roadside; the
fox-gloves, that she gathered with a smile, bursting the pods between
her hands; the curling plumes of the celery; the cabbages growing in
rows, each row separated by a furrow. The earth, from over-culture,
over-manuring, over-plowing, had acquired an indescribable air of
decrepitude. Its flanks seemed to groan, exuding a viscous and warm
moisture like sweat, while in the uncultivated land bordering the path
were spots of virgin soil where grew at will the ornamental
superfluities of the fields,--vaporous grasses, many-colored flowers,
and sharp thistles.
The path was too narrow to admit of their walking side by side, and
Artegui followed Lucía, although he strayed occasionally into the
fields, with little regard for proprietorial rights. The young girl at
last paused in her meandering course at the foot of a thick osier
plantation on the borders of a marsh, shading a steep grassy bank from
which could be obtained a view of the road they had traversed. They
seated themselves on the natural divan and looked at the plain that
stretched before them like a patch-work composed of the various shades
of the vegetables cultivated in the different fields. In the high-road,
that wound along like a white ribbon, they could distinguish a black
spot--the basket-carriage and the ponies. The sun shone with a mild
light that came softened through a veil of clouds, and the landscape
showed dull tones,--sea-greens, sandy yellow patches, faint ash-colored
distances, soft tints that were reflected in the tranquil pond.
“This is very lovely, Don Ignacio,” said Lucía, in order to say
something, for the silence, the profound solitude of the place, was
beginning to weigh upon her spirits. “Don’t you like it?”
“Yes, I like it,” answered Artegui, with an absent air.
“Although it seems, indeed, as if you liked nothing. You seem, always,
as if you were tired--that is to say, not tired, but sad, rather. See
here,” continued the young girl, taking hold of a flexible osier branch
and wreathing it playfully around her head, “I wager you would not
believe that your sadness is communicating itself to me, and that I,
too, begin to be--I don’t know how to describe it--well, preoccupied. I
would give, I don’t know what, to see you contented and--natural, like
other men. Neither in your face nor your expression do you resemble
other men, Don Ignacio.”
“And I, on my side,” he responded, “find your gayety infectious; I am
sometimes in a better humor than you are yourself. Happiness, too, is
contagious.”
As he spoke he drew toward him another osier branch, whose tender peel
he stripped off with his fingers and threw into the pond, watching
fixedly the circles it made on the surface of the water as it sank.
“Of course it is,” assented Lucía; “and if you wished to be frank, if
you made up your mind to--to confide to me the cause of your trouble,
you should see that in a second’s time I would chase away that shadow
that you now wear on your face. I don’t know why it is that I imagine
that all this seriousness, this gloom, this dejection is not caused by
real unhappiness, but by--by--I don’t know how to explain myself--by
nonsensical notions, by ideas without rhyme or reason, that swarm in
your brain. I wager I am right.”
“You are so right,” exclaimed Artegui, dropping the osier branch and
seizing the young girl’s hand, “that I am now firmly persuaded that
pure and sinless natures possess a certain power of divination, a
certain marvelous and peculiar intuition denied to us who, in exchange,
see clearly the irremediable sadness of life.”
Lucía looked with a serious and disturbed countenance at her companion.
“You see!” she found voice to say at last, making an effort to form her
lips into a smile and succeeding with difficulty. “So that all those
foolish notions that resemble the houses of cards that father used to
build for me when I was a child, and which would fall down at a breath,
have now vanished?”
“In this you are mistaken, child,” said Artegui, dropping her hand with
one of his languid, mechanical gestures. “The contrary is the case. When
sadness springs from some definite cause, if the cause is removed the
sadness may also disappear; but if sadness springs up spontaneously in
the soul like those weeds and rushes you see growing on the borders of
that pond, if it is in ourselves, if it is the essence of our being, if
it does not spring up here and there only, but everywhere, if nothing on
earth can alleviate it, then--believe me, child, the patient is beyond
help. There is no hope for him.”
He smiled as he spoke, but his smile was like the light falling on a
statue in a niche.
“But, tell me,” said Lucía, with painful and feverish curiosity. “Have
you ever met with any terrible misfortune--any great grief?”
“None that the world would call such.”
“Have you a family--who love you?”
“My mother adores me--and if it were not for her----” said Artegui,
allowing himself to be drawn, as if against his will, into the gentle
current of confidence.
“And your father?”
“He died many years ago. He was a Biscayan, a Carlist emigrant, a man of
great energy, of indomitable will; he took refuge in the interior of
France; he found himself there without money and without friends; he
worked as he had fought, with lion-like courage, and succeeded in
establishing a vast commercial business, accumulating a fortune, buying
a house in Paris and marrying my mother, who belongs to a distinguished
Breton family, also legitimist. I was their only child; they lavished
affection upon me but without neglecting my education or spoiling me by
over-indulgence. I studied, I saw the world, I expressed a wish to
travel, and my mother placed the means of doing so at my disposal; I had
whims, many whims, when I grew up, and they were gratified, I have
traveled in the United States and in the East, not to speak of Europe; I
spend the winters in Paris and in summer I generally go to Spain; my
health is good and I am not old. You see then that I am what people are
accustomed to call a favorite of fortune, a happy man.”
“It is true,” said Lucía; “but who knows that it is not for that very
reason that you are as you are! I have heard it said that for bread to
be sweet it must be earned; it is true that I have not earned it and yet
so far I have not found it bitter.”
“There was a time,” murmured Artegui, as if in answer to his own
thoughts, “when I fancied that my apathy proceeded from the security in
which I lived, and I desired to be indebted to myself, myself only, for
a livelihood. For two years I refused to receive the allowance made me
by my parents, devoting myself ardently to work and earning, as active
partner in a large commercial house which I entered, more than
sufficient for my wants; fortune attended me, like a faithful lover, but
this constant and pitiless competition sickened me and I desired to try
some work in which mind and body both should have a part and in which
the gain should be no more than sufficient for my wants. I studied
medicine, and taking advantage of the war at that time raging in the
north of Spain, I joined the forces of Don Cárlos. My father’s name
opened every door to me, and I devoted myself to practicing in the
hospitals----”
“Was it then that you cured Sardiola?”
“Precisely, the poor devil had been horribly wounded by a discharge of
grapeshot; his cheek was laid open and the jawbone injured, and, in
addition, he was bleeding from an artery. The cure was a difficult but
most successful one. I worked hard at that time and it was the period
during which I suffered least from tedium. But in exchange----”
Artegui paused, fearing to proceed.
“To what purpose, child, to what purpose should I go on? I don’t even
know why I should have given you all these nonsensical details, probably
to you as unintelligible as the ravings of a madman are to the sane.”
“No, indeed,” declared Lucía, half offended, “I understand you very
well, and, as a proof that I do, I am going to tell you what you have
kept to yourself. You shall see that I will,” she cried, as Artegui
smilingly shook his head. “You were less bored during the period in
which you were an amateur physician, but in exchange--seeing so many
dead people and so much blood and so much cruelty, you became still
more--more of an unbeliever than you were before. Have I guessed right
or not?”
Artegui looked at her, mute with amazement, and his brow contracted in a
frown.
“And do you want me to tell you more? Well, that is what is the matter
with you and it is for that reason that you are so dissatisfied with
fate and with yourself. If you were a good Christian, you might indeed
be sad, but with a different sort of sadness, more gentle and more
resigned. For when one has the hope of going to heaven, one can suffer
here in patience without giving way to despair.”
And as Artegui, with compressed lips, silently turned his head aside,
the young girl murmured in a voice gentle as a caress:
“Don Ignacio, Father Urtazu has told me that there are men who do not
wish to admit what the church teaches and what we believe, but who, in
their own way, according to their fancy, in short, worship a God whom
they have created for themselves, and who believe also that there is
another life and that the soul does not die with the body--are you one
of those men?”
He did not answer, but seizing a couple of osier branches, bent them
forcibly between his fingers until they snapped. The broken branches
hung down limply from the tree, held together by the bark, like broken
limbs held together by the skin.
“You are not one of those men, either?” resumed the young girl, turning
toward him, her hands joined together, almost kneeling on the bank.
“Don’t you believe, even in that way? Don Ignacio, do you indeed believe
in nothing? In nothing?”
Ignacio sprang to his feet, and standing on the summit of the bank
overlooking the whole landscape, slowly said:
“I believe in evil.”
From a distance the group might have seemed a piece of statuary. Lucía,
completely overwhelmed, almost knelt, her hands clasped in an imploring
attitude. Artegui, his arm raised, his form erect, challenging with
sorrowful glance the blue vault above, might have been taken for some
hero of romance, some rebellious Titan, were it not for his modern
costume, with its prosaic details; the sky grew momentarily darker;
leaden clouds, like enormous heaps of cotton, banked themselves up over
Biarritz and the ocean. Gusts of hot air blew low down, almost along the
ground, bending the reeds and setting in motion the pointed foliage of
the osiers with its fiery breath. The plain exhaled a deep groan at
these menacings of the storm. It seemed as if evil, evoked by the voice
of its worshiper, had appeared, in tremendous form, terrifying nature
with its broad black wings, to whose flapping fancy might have
attributed the suffocating exhalations that heated the atmosphere. Murky
and dark, like the surface of a steel mirror, the lake slept motionless
and the aquatic flowers drooped on its border. Artegui’s voice, more
intense than loud, resounded through the awe-inspiring silence.
“In evil,” he repeated, “that surrounds and envelops us on all sides,
from the cradle to the grave; that never leaves us; in evil, that makes
of the earth a vast battle-field where no being can live but by the
death and the suffering of other beings; in evil, which is the pivot on
which the world turns and the very mainspring of life.”
“Señor de Artegui,” stammered Lucía faintly, “it would seem, according
to what you say, that you pay to the devil the worship you refuse to
God.”
“Worship! no! Shall I worship the iniquitous power that, concealed in
darkness, works for the general woe? To fight, to fight against it is
what I desire, now and always. You call this power the devil; I call it
evil, universal suffering. I know how alone it may be vanquished.”
“By faith and good works,” exclaimed the young girl.
“By dying,” he answered.
Any one who had observed these two from a distance,--a young and
handsome man and a blooming young girl,--conversing alone in the shady
meadow, would have taken them, to a certainty, for a pair of lovers, and
would never have imagined that they were speaking of suffering and
death, but of love, which is life itself. Artegui, standing on the bank,
could see his image reflected in the blue eyes which Lucía lifted toward
him; eyes, that notwithstanding the darkness of the sky, seemed to
sparkle with light.
“By dying!” she echoed, as the tree echoes back the sound of the blow
that wounds it.
“By dying. Suffering ends only with death. Only death can vanquish the
creative force that delights in creating so that it may afterward
torture its unhappy creation.”
“I do not understand you,” murmured Lucía, “but I am afraid.” And her
form trembled like the osier branches.
Artegui was silent, but a deep and powerful voice resounding through the
heavens suddenly mingled with the strange dialogue. It was the thunder
which pealed in the distance, solemn and awe-inspiring. Lucía uttered a
low cry of terror and fell prone upon the grass. The clouds broke and
large drops of rain fell with a sound like that of molten lead upon the
silky leaves of the osiers. Artegui hurried down the bank, and taking
Lucía in his arms, with nervous force, began to run, without looking to
the right or to the left, leaping ditches, crossing newly plowed fields,
pressing under foot celery plants and cabbages, until, beaten by the
rain and pursued by the thunder, he reached the high road. The driver
was energetically uttering maledictions on the storm when Artegui placed
Lucía, almost insensible, on the seat and pulled up the oilcloth cover
hastily to protect her as far as was possible from the rain. The ponies,
terrified by the tempest, without waiting for the touch of the whip,
with pricked-up ears and distended nostrils, set off toward Bayonne.