Woman Triumphant Part 22

When the painter awakened it was night. The light from the street lamps shone through the window with a distant, reddish glow.

He shivered with a sensation of cold, as if he were emerging from under an enticing wave where he had lain, he could not remember how long. He felt weak, humiliated, with the anxiety of a child who has done something wrong.

Concha was sobbing. What folly! It had been against her will; she knew they would be sorry for it. But she was the first to recover her calmness. Her outline rose on the bright background of the window. She called the painter who stood in the shadow, ashamed.

"After all, there was no escape," she said firmly. "It was a dangerous game and it could not end in any other way. Now I know that I cared for you; that you are the only man for whom I can care."

Renovales was beside her. Their two forms made a single outline on the bright background of the window, in a supreme embrace as though they desired to take refuge in each other.

Her hands gently parted the heavy locks that hid the master's forehead.

She gazed at him rapturously. Then she kissed his lips with an endless caress, whispering:

"Mariano, dear. I love you, I worship you. I will be your slave. Don't ever leave me. I will seek you on my knees. You don't know how I will care for you. You shall not escape me. You wanted it,--you ugly darling, you big giant, my love."

V

One afternoon at the end of October, Renovales noticed that his friend Cotoner was rather worried.

The master was jesting with him, making him tell about his labors as restorer of paintings in the old church. He had come back fatter and merrier, with a greasy, priestly l.u.s.ter. According to Renovales he had brought back all the health of the clerics. The bishop's table with its succulent abundance was a sweet memory for Cotoner. He extolled it and described it, praising those good gentlemen who, like himself, lived free from pa.s.sion with no other voluptuousness in life than a refined appet.i.te. The master laughed at the thought of the simplicity of those priests who in the afternoon, after the choir, formed a group around Cotoner's scaffold, following the movements of his hands with wondering eyes; at the respect of the attendants and other servants of the episcopal palace, hanging on Don Jose's words, astonished to find such modesty in an artist who was a friend of cardinals and had studied in Rome.

When the master saw him so serious and silent that afternoon after luncheon he wanted to know what was worrying him. Had they complained of his restoration? Was his money gone? Cotoner shook his head. It was not his affairs; he was worrying over Josephina's condition. Had he not noticed her?

Renovales shrugged his shoulders. It was the usual trouble: neurasthenia, diabetes, all those chronic ailments of which she did not want to be cured, refusing to obey the physicians. She was thinner, but her nerves seemed calmer; she cried less; she maintained a sad silence, simply wanting to be alone and stay in a corner, staring into s.p.a.ce.

Cotoner shook his head again. Renovales' optimism was not to be wondered at.

"You are leading a strange life, Mariano. Since I came back from my trip, you are a different man; I wouldn't know you. Once, you could not live without painting and now you spend weeks at a time without taking up a brush. You smoke, sing, walk up and down the studio and all at once rush off, out of the house and go--well. I know where, and perhaps your wife suspects it. You seem to be having a good time, master. The deuce take the rest! But, man alive, come down from the clouds. See what is around you; have some charity."

And good Cotoner complained bitterly of the life the master was leading--disturbed by sudden impatience and hasty departures, from which he returned absent-minded, with a faint smile on his lips and a vague look in his eyes, as if he still relished the feast of memories he carried in his mind.

The old painter seemed alarmed at Josephina's increasing delicacy, acute consumption that still found matter to destroy in her organism wasted by years of illness. The poor little woman coughed constantly and this cough, that was not dry but prolonged and violent, alarmed Cotoner.

"The doctors ought to see her again."

"The doctors!" exclaimed Renovales, "What's the use? A whole medical faculty has been here and to no avail. She doesn't mind them; she refuses everything, perhaps to annoy me, to oppose me. There's no danger; you don't know her. Weak and small as she is, she will outlive you and me."

His voice shook with wrath, as if he could not stand the atmosphere of that house where the only distractions he found were the pleasant memories that took him away from it.

Cotoner's insistence finally forced him to call a doctor who was a friend of his.

Josephina was provoked, divining the cause of their anxiety. She felt strong. It was nothing but a cold; the coming of winter. And in her glances at the artist there was reproach and insult for his attention which she regarded as hypocrisy.

When the doctor and the painter returned to the studio after the examination of the patient and stood face to face, the former hesitated as if he was afraid to formulate his ideas. He could not say anything with certainty; it was easy to make a mistake in regard to that weak system that maintained itself only by its extraordinary reserve power.

Then he had recourse to the usual evasive measure of his profession. He advised him to take her away from Madrid, a change of air,--a change of life.

Renovales objected. Where could she go, now that winter was beginning, when at the height of summer she had wanted to come home? The doctor shrugged his shoulders and wrote out a prescription, revealing in his expression the desire to write something, not to go away without leaving a piece of paper as a trace. He explained various symptoms to the husband in order that he might observe them in the patient and he went away shrugging his shoulders again with a gesture that revealed indecision and dejection.

Pshaw! Who knows? Perhaps! The system sometimes has unexpected reactions, wonderful reserve power to resist disease.

This enigmatic consolation alarmed Renovales. He spied on his wife, studying her cough, watching her closely when she did not see him. They no longer spent the night together. Since Milita's marriage, the father occupied her room. They had broken the slavery of the common bed that tormented their rest. Renovales made up for this departure by going into Josephina's chamber every morning.

"Did you have a good night? Do you want something?"

His wife's eyes greeted him with hostility.

"Nothing."

And she accompanied this brief statement by turning over in the bed, disdainfully, with her back to the master.

The painter received these evidences of hostility with quiet resignation. It was his duty; perhaps she might die! But this possibility of death did not stir him; it left him cold and he was angry at himself, as if two distinct personalities existed within him. He reproached himself for his cruelty, his icy indifference before the invalid who now produced in him only a pa.s.sing remorse.

One afternoon at the Alberca woman's house, after one of their daring meetings with which they defied the holy calm of the n.o.ble, who had now returned from his trip, the painter spoke timidly of his wife.

"I shall have to come less; don't be surprised. Josephina is very ill."

"Very?" asked Concha.

And in the flash of her glance, Renovales thought he saw something familiar, a blue gleam that had danced before him in the darkness of the night with infernal glow, troubling his conscience.

"No, maybe it isn't anything. I don't believe there is any danger."

He felt forced to lie. It consoled him to discount her illness. He felt that, by this voluntary deceit, he was relieving himself of the anxiety that goaded him. It was the lie of the man who justifies himself by pretending not to know the depth of the harm he has caused.

"It isn't anything," he said to his daughter, who, greatly alarmed at her mother's appearance, came to spend every night with her. "Just a cold. It will disappear as soon as good weather comes."

He had a fire in every fireplace in the house; the rooms were as hot as a furnace. He declared loudly, without any show of excitement, that his wife was merely suffering from a slight cold, and as he spoke with such a.s.surance, a strange voice seemed to cry within him: "You lie, she is dying; she is dying and you know it."

The symptoms of which the doctor had spoken began to appear with ominous regularity in fatal succession. At first he noticed only a constant high fever that seemed to grow worse with severe chills at the end of the afternoon. Then he observed sweats that were terrifying in their frequency--sweats at night that left the print of her body on the sheets. And that poor body, which grew more fragile, more like a skeleton, as if the fire of the fever were devouring the last particle of fat and muscle, was left without any other covering and protection than the skin, and that too seemed to be melting away. She coughed frequently; at all hours of the day and night her painful hacking disturbed the silence of the house. She complained of a continual pain in the lower part of her chest. Her daughter made her eat by dint of coaxing, lifting the spoon to her mouth, as if she were a child. But coughing and nausea made nutrition impossible. Her tongue was dry; she complained of an infernal thirst that was devouring her.

Thus pa.s.sed a month. Renovales, in his optimistic mood, strove to believe that her illness would not last long.

"She is not dying, Pepe," he would say in a convinced tone, as if he were disposed to quarrel with anyone who opposed this statement. "She is not dying, doctor. You don't think she is, do you?"

The doctor would answer with his everlasting shrug. "Perhaps,--it's possible." And as the patient refused to submit to an internal examination, he was forced to inquire of the daughter and husband about the symptoms.

In spite of her extreme emaciation, some parts of her body seemed to be undergoing an abnormal swelling. Renovales questioned the doctor frankly. What did he think of these symptoms? And the doctor bowed his head. He did not know. They must wait: Nature has surprises. But afterward, with sudden decision, he pretended that he wanted to write a prescription, in order that he might talk with the husband alone in his working studio.

"To tell you the truth, Renovales, this pitiful comedy is getting tiresome. It may be all right for the others but you are a man. It is acute consumption; perhaps a matter of days, perhaps a matter of a few months; but she is dying and I know no remedy. If you want to, get some one else."

"She is dying!" Renovales was dazed with surprise as if the possibility of this outcome had never occurred to him. "She is dying!" And when the doctor had gone away, with a firmer step than usual, as if he had freed himself of a weight, the painter repeated the words to himself, without their producing any other effect than leaving him abstracted in senseless stupidity. She is dying! But was it really possible that that little woman could die, who had so weighed on his life and whose weakness filled him with fear?

Suddenly he found himself walking up and down the studio, repeating aloud,

"She is dying! She is dying!"