III
And he did not see her; he did not see her for two days. But on the third there came a letter in a long blue envelope scented with a perfume that made him tremble.
The countess complained of his absence in affectionate terms. She needed to see him, she had many things to tell him. A real love-letter which the artist hastened to hide, for fear that if any one read it, he would suspect what was not yet true.
Renovales was indignant.
"I will go to see her," he said to himself, walking up and down the studio. "But it will be only to give her a piece of my mind, and have done with her once and for all. If she thinks she is going to play with me, she is mistaken; she doesn't know that, when I want to be, I am like stone."
Poor master! While in one corner of his mind he was formulating this cruel determination to be a man of stone, in the other a sweet voice was murmuring seductively:
"Go quickly, take advantage of the opportunity. Perhaps she has repented. She is waiting for you; she is going to be yours."
And the artist hastened to the countess's anxiously. Nothing. She complained of his absence with affected sadness. She liked him so much! She needed to see him, she could not have any peace as long as she felt that he was offended with her on account of the other afternoon. And they spent nearly two hours together in the private room she used as an office, until at the end of the afternoon the serious friends of the countess began to arrive, her coterie of mute worshipers and last of all Monteverde with the calm of a man who has nothing to fear.
The painter left the house. Nothing out of the ordinary had happened except that he had twice kissed the countess's hand; the conventional caress and nothing more. Whenever he tried to go farther, moving his lips along her arm, she checked him imperiously.
"I shall be angry, master, and not receive you any more alone! You are not keeping the agreement!"
Renovales protested. They had not made any agreement; but Concha managed to calm him instantly by asking about Milita, praising her beauty, inquiring for poor Josephina, so good, so lovable, showing great concern for her health and promising to call on her soon. And the master was restrained, tormented by remorse, not daring to make any new advances, until his discomfort had disappeared.
He continued to visit the countess, as before. He felt that he must see her; he had grown accustomed to her enthusiastic praise of his artistic merits.
Sometimes the impetuous nature of his youthful days awakened and he longed to rid himself of this shameful chain. The woman had bewitched him; she sent for him without any reason, she seemed to delight in making him suffer, she needed him for a plaything. She spoke of Monteverde and their love with quiet cynicism, as if the doctor were her husband. She had to confide the secrets of her life to some one, with that imperious naïveté that forces the guilty to confess. Little by little she let the master into the secret of her passion, telling him unblushingly of the most intimate details of their meetings, which were often in her own house. They took advantage of the blindness of the count, who seemed almost stunned by his failure to receive the Fleece; they took a morbid delight in the danger of being surprised.
"I tell you this, Mariano, I don't know why it is I feel as I do toward you; I like you as a brother. No, not as a brother, rather as a confidential woman friend."
When Renovales was alone, he despised Concha's frankness. It was just as people believed; she was very attractive, very pretty, but absolutely lacking in scruples. As for himself, he heaped insults on himself in the slang of his Bohemian days, comparing himself with all the horned animals he could think of.
"I won't go there again. It's disgraceful. A pretty part you are playing, master!"
But he had hardly been absent two days when Marie, the Countess's French maid, appeared with the scented letter, or it arrived in the mail, where it stood out scandalously among the other envelopes of the master's correspondence.
"Curse that woman!" exclaimed Renovales, hastening to hide the showy note. "What a lack of prudence. One of these fine days, Josephina will discover these letters."
Cotoner, in his blind devotion to his idol whom he considered irresistible, supposed that the Alberca woman was madly in love with the master and shook his head sadly.
"This will have a bad end, Mariano. You ought to break with her. The peace of your home! You are piling up trouble for yourself."
The letters were always alike; endless complaints at his short absences. "Cher maître, I could not sleep last night, thinking of you," and she ended with "Your admirer and good friend, Coquillerosse," a nom de guerre she had adopted for her correspondence with the artist.
She wrote in a disordered style, at unusual hours, just as her fancy and her abnormal nervous system prompted. Sometimes she dated her letter at three in the morning, she could not sleep, got out of bed and to pass the sleepless hours filled four sheets of paper (with the facility of despair) in her fine hand, addressed to her good friend, talking to him of the count, of what her acquaintances said, telling him the latest gossip about the Court, lamenting the doctor's coldness. At other times, there were only four brief, desperate lines. "Come at once, dear Mariano. A very urgent matter."
And the master, leaving his tasks early in the morning, ran to the countess' house, where she received him still in bed in her fragrant chamber which the gentleman with honorary crosses had not entered for many years.
The painter came in in great anxiety, disturbed at the possibility of some terrible event, and Concha, tossing about between the embroidered sheets, tucking in the golden wisps of hair that escaped from her lace cap, talked and talked, as incoherently as a bird sings, as if the silence of the night had hopelessly confused her ideas. A great idea had occurred to her; during her sleep she had thought out an absolutely original scientific theory that would delight Monteverde. And she explained it earnestly to the master, who nodded his approval without understanding a word, thinking it was a pity to see such an attractive mouth uttering such follies.
At other times she would talk to him about the speech she was preparing for a fair of the Woman's Association, the magnum opus of her presidency; and drawing her ivory arms from under the sheet with a calmness that dazed Renovales, she would pick up from the nearby table some sheets of paper scribbled with pencil, and ask her friend to tell her who was the greatest painter in the world, for she had left a blank to fill in with this name.
After an hour of incessant chatter while the artist watched her silently with greedy eyes, he finally came to the urgent matter, the desperate summons that had made the master leave his work. It was always an affair of life or death, compromises in which her honor was at stake. Sometimes she wanted him to paint some little thing on the fan of a foreign lady who was eager to take away from Spain some souvenir of the great master. The person in question had asked her at a diplomatic soirée the night before, knowing her friendship with Renovales. Or she had sent for him to ask him for some little sketch, a daub, any one of the little things that lay in the corner of his studio for a bazaar of the Association for the Benefit of Fallen Women, whom the countess and her friends were very eager to rescue.
"Don't put on such a wry face, master, don't be stingy. You must expect to sacrifice something for friendship. Everybody thinks that I have great power over the famous artist, and they ask me favors and are constantly getting me into difficulty. They don't know you, they don't realize how perverse, how rebellious you are, you horrid man!"
And she let him kiss her hand, smiling condescendingly. But as she felt the touch of his lips and his beard on her arm she struggled to free herself, half-laughing, half-trembling.
"Let me go, Mariano! I'll scream! I'll call Marie! I won't receive you again in my bedroom. You aren't worthy of being trusted. Quiet, master, or I'll tell Josephina everything."
Sometimes when Renovales came, full of alarm at her summons, he found her pale, with dark circles under her eyes, as if she had spent the night weeping. When she saw the master her tears began to flow again. It was pique, deep pain at Monteverde's coldness. He passed whole days without seeing her; he even went so far as to say that women are a hindrance to serious study. Oh, these scholars! And she, madly devoted to him, submissive as a slave, putting up with his whimsical moods, worshiping him with that ardent passion of a woman who is older than her lover and appreciates her own inferiority!
"Oh, Renovales. Never fall in love. It is hell. You do not know the happiness you enjoy in not understanding these things."
But the master, indifferent to her tears, enraged by her confidences, walked up and down gesticulating, just as if he were in his studio, and he spoke to the countess with brutal frankness, as he would to a woman who had revealed all her secrets and weaknesses. What difference did all that make to him? Had she sent for him to tell him such stuff? She grieved with childish sighs from the bed. She was alone in the world, she was very unhappy. The master was her only friend; he was her father, her brother. To whom could she tell her troubles if not to him? And taking courage at the painter's silence who finally was moved by her tears, she recovered her boldness and expressed her wish. He must go to Monteverde, give him a good, heart-to-heart lecture, so that he would be good and not make her suffer. The doctor respected him highly; he was one of his greatest admirers; she was certain that a few words of the master would be enough to bring him back like a lamb. He must show him that she was not alone, that she had some one to defend her, that no one could make sport of her with impunity.
But before she finished her request, the painter was walking around the bed waving his arms, cursing in the violence of his excitement.
"That's the last straw! One of these days you'll be asking me to shine his boots. Are you mad, woman? What are you thinking of? You have enough accommodating people already in the count. Don't drag me into it!"
But she rolled over in bed, weeping disconsolately. She had no friends left! The master was like the others; if he would not accede to her requests, their friendship was over. All talk, oaths, and then not the least sacrifice!
Suddenly she sat up, frowning angrily with the coldness of an offended queen. She knew him at last, she had made a mistake in counting on him. And as Renovales, confused at her anger, tried to offer excuse, she interrupted him haughtily.
"Will you, or will you not? One, two–"
Yes, he would do what she wanted; he had sunk so low that it did not matter if he went a little farther. He would lecture the doctor, throwing in his face his stupidity in scorning such happiness,—he said this with all his heart, his voice trembling with envy. What else did his fair despot want? She might ask without fear. If it was necessary he would challenge the count, with all his decorations, to single combat and would kill him so that she might be free to join her little doctor.
"You joker," cried Concha, smiling at her triumph. "You are as nice as can be but you are very perverse. Come here, you horrid man."
And lifting a lock of his heavy hair with her hand, she kissed him on the forehead, laughing at the start the painter gave at her caress. He felt his legs trembling, then his arms strove to embrace the warm, scented body, that seemed to slip from him in its delicate covering.
"It was on the forehead," cried Concha in protest. "A sister's caress, Mariano. Stop! You're hurting me! I'll call!"
And she called, realizing her weakness, seeing that she was on the point of being overcome in his fierce, masterly grasp. The electric bell sounded out of the maze of corridors and rooms and the door opened. Marie entered in a black dress with a white apron and a lace cap, discreet and silent. Her pale, smiling face, accustomed to see everything, to guess everything, did not reveal the slightest impression.
The countess stretched out her hand to Renovales, calmly and affectionately, as if the entrance of the maid had found her saying good-by. She was sorry that he must go so soon, she would see him in the evening at the Opera.
When the painter breathed the air of the street and jostled against the people, he felt as if he were awakening from a nightmare. He loathed himself. "You're showing off finely, master." His weakness that made him give in to all of the countess's demands, his base acquiescence in serving as an intermediary between her and her lover was sickening now. But he still felt the touch of her kiss on his forehead; he still breathed the atmosphere of the bedroom, heavy with perfume. Optimism overcame him. The affair was not going badly. However disagreeable the path was, it would lead to the realization of his desire.
Many evenings Renovales went to the Opera, in obedience to Concha, who wanted to see him, and spent whole acts in the back of her box, conversing with her. Milita laughed at this change in the habits of her father, who used to go to bed early, so as to be able to work early in the morning. She was the one who, charged with the household affairs on account of her mother's constant illness, helped him to put on his dress-coat, and amid caresses and laughter combed his hair and adjusted his tie.
"Papa, dear. I shouldn't know you, you're getting dissipated. When are you going to take me with you?"
The artist excused himself seriously. It was a duty of his profession; artists must go into society. And as for taking her with him—some other time. He had to go alone this time, he had to talk to a great many people at the theater.
Another change took place in him that provoked joyful comments on the part of Milita. Papa was getting young.
Under irreverent trimmings, every week his hair became shorter, his beard diminished until only a light remnant remained of that tangled growth that gave him such a ferocious appearance. He did not want to look like other men, he must preserve the exterior that stamped him as an artist, so that people might not pass by the great Renovales without recognizing him. But he managed, while keeping within this desire, to approach and mingle with the fashionably dressed young men who frequented the countess's house.
Other people too noticed this change. Students in the School of Fine Arts pointed him out from the gallery of the Opera-house or stopped on the sidewalk when they saw him at night, with a shining silk hat on his carefully trimmed hair and the expanse of shirt-front showing in his unbuttoned overcoat. The boys in their simple admiration imagined the great master thundering before his easel, as savage, fierce and intractable as Michael Angelo in his studio. And so when they saw him looking so differently, their eyes followed him enviously. "What a good time the master is having!" And they fancied the great ladies disputing over him, believing in perfect faith that no woman could resist a man who painted so well.
His enemies, established artists but who were inferior to him, growled in their conversations. "Four-flusher, prig! He wasn't satisfied with making so much money and now he's playing the sport among the aristocracy, to pick up more portraits, to get all he can out of his signature."
Cotoner, who sometimes stayed at the house in the evenings, to keep the ladies company, smiled sadly as he saw him leave, shaking his head. "It's bad. Mariano married too soon. Now that he is almost an old man, he's doing what he didn't do in his youth in his fever for work and glory." Many people were laughing at him already, divining his passion for the Alberca woman, that love without practical results, that made him live with her and Monteverde, acting as a good-natured mediator, a tolerant kindly father. When the famous master took off his mask of fierceness, he was a poor fellow about whom people talked with pity: they compared him with Hercules, dressed as a woman and spinning at the feet of his fair seducer.
He had contracted a close friendship with Monteverde as a result of meeting him so often at the countess's. He no longer seemed foolish and unattractive. Renovales found in him something of the woman he loved and therefore his company was pleasing. He experienced that calm attraction, free from jealousy, that the husband of a mistress inspires in some men. They sat together at the theater, went to walk, conversing amiably, and the doctor frequently visited the artist's studio in the afternoon. This intimacy quite disconcerted people, for they could no longer tell with certainty which one was the Alberca woman's master and which the aspirant, even going so far as to believe that by a mutual agreement they all three lived in an ideal world.
Monteverde admired the master and the latter, from his years and the superiority of his fame, assumed a paternal authority over him. He chided him when the countess complained of him.
"Women!" the doctor would say with a bored expression. "You don't know what they are, master. They are only a hindrance to obstruct a man's career. You have been successful because you haven't let them dominate you because you are strong."
And the poor strong man looked at Monteverde narrowly suspecting that he was making sport of him. He felt tempted to knock him down at the thought that the doctor scorned what he craved so keenly.
Concha was more communicative with the master. She confessed to him what she had never dared to tell the doctor.
"I tell you everything, Mariano. I cannot live without seeing you. Do you know what I think? The doctor is a sort of husband to me and you are the lover of my heart. Don't get excited; don't move or I'll call. I have spoken from my heart. I like you too much to think of the coarse things you want."
Sometimes Renovales found her excited, nervous, speaking hoarsely, working her delicate fingers as if she wanted to scratch the air. They were terrible days that stirred up the whole house. Marie ran from room to room with her silent step, pursued by the ringing of the bells; the count slipped out of doors, like a frightened school-boy. Concha was bored, felt tired of everything, hated her life. When the painter appeared she would almost throw herself in his arms.
"Take me out of here, Mariano; I'm tired of it, I'm dying. This life is killing me. My husband! He doesn't count. My friends! Fools that flay me as soon as I leave them. The doctor! as untrustworthy as a weathercock. All those men in my coterie, idiots. Master, have pity on me. Take me far away from here. You must know some other world; artists know everything."
If she only was not such a familiar figure and if people only did not know the master in Madrid! In her nervous excitement she formed the wildest projects. She wanted to go out at night arm in arm with Renovales. She in a shawl and a kerchief over her head and he in a cape and a slouch hat. She would be his grisette; she would imitate the carriage and stride of a woman of the streets and they would go to the lowest districts like two night-hawks, and they would drink, would get into a brawl; he would defend her and they would go and spend the night in the police station.
The painter looked shocked. What nonsense! But she insisted on her wish.
"Laugh, master, open that great mouth of yours, you ugly thing. What is strange about what I said? You, with all your artist's hair and soft hats, are humdrum, a peaceful soul that is incapable of doing anything original in order to amuse yourself."
When she thought of the couple they had seen one afternoon at Moncloa, she grew melancholy and sentimental. She, too, thought it would be fun to play the grisette, to walk arm in arm with the master as if she were a poor dressmaker and he a clerk, to end the trip in a picnic park, and he would give her a ride in the green swing, while she screamed with pleasure, as she went up and down with her skirts whirling around her feet. That was not foolishness. Just the simplest, most rustic pleasure!
What a pity that they were both so well known. But what they would do, at least, was to disguise themselves some morning and go house-hunting in some low quarter, like the Rastro, as if they were a newly married couple. No one would recognize them in that part of Madrid. Agreed, master?
And the master approved of everything. But the next day, Concha received him with confusion, biting her lips, until at last she broke out into hearty laughter at the recollection of the follies she had proposed.
"How you must laugh at me! Some days I am perfectly crazy."
Renovales did not conceal his assent. Yes, she was a trifle crazy. But with all her absurdities that made him alternate between hope and despair, she was more attractive, with her merry nonsense, and her transitory fits of anger, than the woman at home, implacable, silent, shunning him with ceaseless repugnance, but following him everywhere with her weeping, uncanny eyes, that became as cutting as steel, as soon as, out of sympathy or remorse, he gave the least evidence of familiarity.
Oh, what a heavy, intolerable comedy! Before his daughter and his friends they had to talk to each other, and he, looking away, so that their eyes might not meet, scolded her gently, for not following the advice of the doctors. At first they had said it was neurasthenia, now it was diabetes, that was increasing the invalid's weakness. The master lamented the passive resistance she opposed to all their curative methods. She would follow them for a few days and then give them up with calm obstinacy. Her health was better than they thought: doctors could not cure her trouble.
At night, when they entered the bed-chamber, a deathly silence fell on them; a leaden wall seemed to rise between their bodies. Here they no longer had to dissemble; they looked at each other face to face with silent hostility. Their life at night was sheer torment, but neither of them dared to change their mode of living. Their bodies could not leave the common bed; they found in it the places they had occupied for years. The habit of their wills subjected them to this room and its furnishings, with all its memories of the happy days of their youth.
Renovales would fall into the deep sleep of a healthy man, tired out with work. His last thoughts were of the countess. He saw her in that vague mist that shrouds the portal of unconsciousness; he went to sleep, thinking of what he would say to her the next day. And his dreams were in keeping with his desires, for he saw her standing on a pedestal, in all the majesty of her nakedness, surpassing the marble of the most famous statues with the life of her flesh. When he awakened suddenly and stretched out his arms, he touched the body of his companion, small, stiff, burning with the fire of fever or icy with deathly cold. He divined that she was not asleep. She spent the nights without closing her eyes, but she did not move, as if all her strength was concentrated on something that she watched in the darkness with a hypnotic stare. She was like a corpse. There was the obstacle, the leaden weight, the phantom that checked the other woman when sometimes in a moment of hesitation, she leaned toward him, on the point of falling. And the terrible longing, the hideous thought came forth again in all its ugliness, announcing that it was not dead, that it had only hidden in the den of his brain, to rise more cruelly, more insolently.
"Why not?" argued the rejected spirit, scattering in his fancy the golden dust of dreams.
Love, fame, joy, a new artistic life, the rejuvenation of Doctor Faustus; he might expect everything, if kindly death would but come to help him, breaking the chain that bound him to sadness and sickness.
But straightway a protest would arise within him. Though he lived like an infidel, he still had a religious soul that in the trying moments of his life led him to call on all the superhuman and miraculous powers as if they were under an inevitable obligation to come to his aid. "Lord, take this horrible thought from me. Take away this temptation. Don't let her die. Let her live, even if I perish."
And the following day, filled with remorse, he would go to some doctors, friends of his, to consult with them minutely. He would stir up the house, organizing the cure according to a vast plan, distributing the medicines by hours. Then he would calmly return to his work, to his artistic prejudices, to his passionate longing, forgetting his determinations, thinking his wife's life was already saved.
One afternoon after luncheon, she came into the studio and as the master looked at her, a sense of anxiety crept over him. It was a long time since Josephina had entered the room while he was working.
She would not sit down; standing beside the easel she spoke slowly and meekly to her husband, without looking at him. Renovales was frightened at this simplicity.
"Mariano, I have come to talk to you about our daughter."
She wanted her to be married: it must come some day and the sooner, the better. She would die before long and she wanted to leave the world with the assurance that her daughter was well settled.
Renovales felt forced to protest loudly with all the vehemence of a man who is not very sure of what he is saying. Shucks! Die! Why should she die? Her health was better now than it had ever been. The only thing she needed was to heed what the doctors told her.
"I shall die before long," she repeated coldly; "I shall die and you will be left in peace. You know it."
The painter tried to protest with a greater show of righteous indignation but his eyes met his wife's cold look. Then he contented himself with shrugging his shoulders in a resigned way. He did not want to argue; he must keep calm. He had to paint; he must go out that afternoon as usual on important business.
"Very well, go ahead. Milita is going to be married. And to whom?"
Led by his desire to maintain his authority, to take the lead, and because of his long-standing affection for his pupil, he hastened to speak of him. Was Soldevilla the suitor? A good boy with a future ahead of him. He worshiped Milita; his dejection when she treated him ill was pitiful. He would make an excellent husband.
Josephina cut short her husband's chatter in a cold, contemptuous tone.
"I don't want any painters for my daughter; you know it. Her mother has had enough of them."
Milita was going to marry López de Sosa. The matter was already settled as far as she was concerned. The boy had spoken to her and, assured of her approval, would ask the father.
"But does she love him? Do you think, Josephina, that these things can be arranged to suit you?"
"Yes, she loves him; she is suited and wants to be married. Besides she is your daughter; she would accept the other man just as readily. What she wants is freedom, to get away from her mother, not to live in the unhappy atmosphere of my ill health. She doesn't say so, she doesn't even know that she thinks it, but I see through her."
And as if, while she spoke of her daughter, she could not maintain the coldness she had toward her husband, she raised her hand to her eyes, to wipe away the silent tears.
Renovales had recourse to rudeness in order to get out of the difficulty. It was all nonsense; an invention of her diseased mind. She ought to think of getting well and nothing else. What was she crying for! Did she want to marry her daughter to that automobile enthusiast? Well, get him. She did not want to? Well, let the girl stay at home.
She was the one who had charge; no one was hindering her. Have the marriage as soon as possible? He was a mere cipher, and there was no reason for asking his advice. But steady, shucks! He had to work; he had to go out. And when he saw Josephina leaving the studio to weep somewhere else, he gave a snort of satisfaction, glad to have escaped from this difficult scene so successfully.
López de Sosa was all right. An excellent boy! Or anyone else. He did not have time to give to such matters. Other things occupied his attention.
He accepted his future son-in-law, and for several evenings he stayed at home to lend a sort of patriarchal air to the family parties. Milita and her betrothed talked at one end of the drawing-room. Cotoner, in the full bliss of digestion, strove with his jests to bring a faint smile to the face of the master's wife, but she stayed in the corner, shivering with cold. Renovales, in a smoking jacket, read the papers, soothed by the charming atmosphere of his quiet home. If the countess could only see him!
One night the Alberca woman's name was mentioned in the drawing-room. Milita was running over from memory the list of friends of the family,—prominent ladies who would not fail to honor her approaching marriage with some magnificent present.
"Concha won't come," said the girl. "It's a long time since she has been here."
There was a painful silence, as if the countess's name chilled the atmosphere. Cotoner hummed a tune, pretending to be thinking of something else; López de Sosa began to look for a piece of music on the piano, talking about it to change the subject. He too seemed to be aware of the matter.
"She doesn't come because she doesn't have to come," said Josephina from her corner. "Your father manages to see her every day, so that she won't forget us."
Renovales raised his eyes in protest, as if he were awakening from a calm sleep. Josephina's gaze was fixed on him, not angry, but mocking and cruel. It reflected the same scorn with which she had wounded him on that unhappy night. She no longer said anything, but the master read in those eyes: