Cæsar was left alone. He had seen Amparito with his sister many times
but had scarcely ever exchanged more than a few words with her. One
afternoon Cæsar was in the gallery in an arm-chair, with his feet high.
He felt melancholy and lazy, and was watching the clouds move across the
sky. Soon he heard steps, and saw Amparito with an old servant who had
been her nurse.
Cæsar jumped up.
“What’s the matter?” he exclaimed.
“I came to get something Laura forgot,” said Amparito.
“She forgot something?” asked Cæsar stupidly.
“Yes,” replied Amparito; and added, addressing the old woman:
“Go see if there is a little glass box in Señorita Laura’s room.”
The old woman went out, and Amparito, looking at Cæsar, who was on his
feet watching her nervously, said:
“Do you still hate me?”
“I?” exclaimed Cæsar.
“Yes, you do hate me.”
“I! I have never hated you.... Quite the contrary.”
“Whenever you see me you get away, and just now you looked at me as
if you were terrified. Have you such a grudge against me for a joke I
played on you long ago?”
“I, a grudge! No. It is because I have the impression, Amparito, that
you want to upset my plans, to make game of me. Why do you?”
“Do you think I try to amuse myself by worrying you?”
“Yes.”
“No, that isn’t true. You don’t think so.”
“Then why this constant inclination to distress me, to poke fun at me?”
“I never poked fun at you.”
“Then I have made a mistake.... I had come to think that you took some
interest in me.”
“And so I did. I did take an interest in you, and I keep on taking an
interest in you.”
“And why so?”
“Because I see that you are unhappy, and you are alone.”
“Ah! You are sorry for me!” “Now you are offended. Yes, I am sorry for
you.”
“Sorry!”
“Yes, sorry. Because I see that you despise everybody and despise
yourself, because you think people are bad, and that you are too, and to
me this seems so sad that it makes me pity you deeply.”
Cæsar began to walk up and down the gallery, trembling a little.
“I don’t see why you say this to me,” he murmured. “I am a morbid man,
with an ulcerated, wounded spirit.... I know that. But why say it to me?
Do you take pleasure in humiliating me?”
“No, Cæsar,” said Amparito, drawing near him. “You don’t believe that I
take pleasure in humiliating you. No, you know well that I do not.”
On saying this, Amparito burst into tears, and she had to lean against
the gallery window, to hide her face and dissemble her emotion.
Cæsar took her hand, and as she did not turn her head, he seized her
other, too. She looked at him with her eyes shining and full of tears;
and in that look there was so much attachment, so much distress, that
Cæsar felt a weakness in his whole frame. Then, taking Amparito’s head
between his hands, he kissed it several times.
She leaned her head on Cæsar’s shoulder and stood pressed against him,
sobbing. Cæsar felt a sensation of anguish and pain, as if within the
depths of his soul, the strongest part of his personality had broken and
melted.
They heard the footsteps of the old woman, coming back to say that she
had found nothing in the room Laura had occupied during her stay.
Amparito dried her tears, and smiled, and her face was redder than
usual. Presently she said to the nurse:
“Probably you didn’t look well. I am going to go myself.”
Amparito went out.
Cæsar was pale and absorbed; he felt that something extraordinary
had happened to him. His hands trembled and things swam around him.
In a short while Amparito returned. She had a round glass box in her
hand, which she said she had found in Laura’s room.
“This afternoon I am going to Our Lady of the Rock,” said Amparito.
“Will you come, Cæsar?”
“Yes.”
“Then, good-bye till then.”
Amparito gave him her hand, and Cæsar kissed it. The old servant was
dumfounded. Amparito burst out laughing.
“He is my beau. Hadn’t you noticed it before?”
“No,” said the old woman with a gesture of violent negation.
Amparito laughed again and disappeared.
The first days of his engagement Cæsar was constantly in-tranquil and
uneasy. He kept thinking that it was impossible to live like that,
giving his whole attention to nothing except the desires of a girl. He
imagined that the awakening would come from one moment to the next; but
the awakening didn’t arrive.
By degrees Cæsar abandoned all the affairs of the district, which had
taken all his attention, and took to occupying himself solely with his
sweetheart. The whole town knew their relations and talked of the coming
wedding.
That dazzling idyll intrigued all the girls in Castro. The truth was
that none of them had considered Cæsar a marrying man; some had
imagined him already old; others an experienced and vicious bachelor,
incapable of yielding to the matrimonial yoke; and now they saw him a
youth, of distinguished type, with distinguished manners and looks.
Cæsar went almost daily to Amparito’s father’s country-place. It was
a magnificent estate, another ancient property of the Dukes of Castro
Duro, with a house adorned with escutcheons, and an extensive stone
pool, deep and mysterious. The garden did not resemble that at Don
Calixto’s house, for that one was of a frantic gaiety, and the one on
Amparito’s father’s estate was very melancholy. Above all, the square of
water in the pool, whose edges were decorated with great granite vases,
had a mysterious, sad aspect.
“Doesn’t it make you very sad to look at this deep water in the pool?”
Cæsar asked his fiancée.
“No, it doesn’t me.”
“It does me.”
“Because you are a poet,” she said, “and I am not; I am very prosaic.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
The more Cæsar talked with Amparito, the less he understood her and the
more he needed to be with her.
“We really do not think the same about anything,” Cæsar used to tell
himself, “and yet we understand each other.”
Many times he endeavoured to make a psychological résumé of Amparito’s
character, but he didn’t succeed. He didn’t know how to classify her;
her type always escaped him.
“All her notions are different from mine,” he used to think; “she speaks
in another way, feels in another way, she even has a different moral
code. How strange!”
Also, what Amparito knew was completely heterogeneous; she spoke French
well and wrote it fairly correctly; in Spanish, on the other hand, she
had no idea of spelling. Cæsar was always stupefied on seeing the
transpositions of h’s, s’s, and z’s that she made in her letters.
There remained by Amparito, from her passage through the French school,
a recollection of the history of France made up of a few anecdotes and a
few phrases. Thus, it was not unusual to hear her speak of Turenne,
of Francis I, or of Colbert. For the rest, she played the piano badly
enough and with extremely little enthusiasm.
This was the part belonging to her education as a rich young lady; that
which belonged to the country girl, who lived among peasants, was more
curious and personal.
She knew many plants by their vulgar names, and understood their
industrial and medicinal use. Besides, she spoke in such pure, natural
phrases that Cæsar was filled with admiration.
Cæsar had reached such a degree of exaltation that he thought of
nothing any more, except his sweetheart. At night, before going to
sleep, he thought of her deliriously. He often dreamed that Amparito had
changed into the red-flowered oleander of the wild palace garden, and
in every flower of the oleander he used to see Amparito’s red lips and
white teeth.