Woman Triumphant Part 23

He said it to himself in order that he might make himself feel sorry, and break out into sobs of grief, but he remained mute.

Josephina was going to die--and he was calm. He wanted to weep; it seemed to him a duty. He blinked, swelling out his chest, holding his breath, trying to take in the whole meaning of his sorrow; but his eyes remained dry; his lungs breathed the air with pleasure; his thoughts, hard and refractory, did not shudder with any painful image. It was an exterior grief that found expression only in words, gestures and excited walking, his interior continued its old stolidness, as if the certainty of that death had congealed it in peaceful indifference.

The shame of his villainy tormented him. The same instinct that forces ascetics to submit themselves to mortal punishments for their imaginary sins dragged him with the power of remorse to the sick chamber. He would not leave the room; he would face her scornful silence; he would stay with her till the end, forgetting sleep and hunger. He felt that he must purify himself by some n.o.ble, generous sacrifice from this blindness of soul that now was terrifying.

Milita no longer spent the nights caring for her mother and would go home, somewhat to the discomfiture of her husband, who had been rather pleased at this unexpected return to a bachelor's life.

Renovales did not sleep. After midnight when Cotoner went away he walked in silence through the brilliantly lighted rooms; he prowled around the chamber--entered it to see Josephina in bed, sweating, shaken from time to time by a fit of coughing or in a deathlike lethargy, so thin and small that the bed-clothes hardly showed the childlike outline of her body. Then the master pa.s.sed the rest of the night in an armchair, smoking, his eyes staring but his brain drowsy with sleep.

His thoughts were far away. There was no use in feeling ashamed of his cruelty; he seemed bewitched by a mysterious power that was superior to his remorse. He forgot the sick woman; he wondered what Concha was doing at that time; he saw her in fancy; he remembered her words, her caresses; he thought of their nights of abandon. And when, with a violent effort, he threw off these dreams, in expiation he would go to the door of the sick chamber and listen to her labored breathing, putting on a gloomy face, but unable to weep or feel the sadness he longed to feel.

After two months of illness, Josephina could no longer stay in bed. Her daughter would lift her out of it without any effort as if she were a feather, and she would sit in a chair,--small, insignificant, unrecognizable, her face so emaciated that its only features seemed to be the deep hollows of her eyes and her nose, sharp as the edge of a knife.

Cotoner could hardly keep back the tears when he saw her.

"There isn't anything left of her!" he would say as he went away. "No one would know her!"

Her harrowing cough scattered a deathly poison about her. White foam came to her lips where it seemed to harden in the corners. Her eyes grew larger, they took on a strange glow as if they saw through persons and things. Oh, those eyes! What a shudder of terror they awakened in Renovales!

One afternoon they fell on him, with the intense, searching glance that had always terrified him. They were eyes that pierced his forehead, that laid bare his thoughts.

They were alone; Milita had gone home; Cotoner was sleeping in a chair in the studio. The sick woman seemed more animated, eager to talk, looking on her husband with a sort of pity as he sat beside her, almost at her feet.

She was going to die; she was certain of death. And a last revolt of life that recoils from the end, the horror of the unknown, made the tears rise to her eyes.

Renovales protested violently, trying to conceal his deceit by his shouts. Die? She must not think of that! She would live; she still had before her many years of happy existence.

She smiled as if she pitied him. She could not be deceived; her eyes penetrated farther than his; she divined the impalpable, the invisible that hovered about her. She spoke weakly but with that inexplicable solemnity that is characteristic of a voice that emits its last sounds, of a soul that unbosoms itself for the last time.

"I shall die, Mariano, sooner than you think, later than I desire. I shall die and you will be free."

He! He desire her death! His surprise and remorse made him jump to his feet, wave his arms in angry protest, writhe, as if a pair of invisible hands had just laid him bare with a rude wrench.

"Josephina, don't rave. Calm yourself. For G.o.d's sake don't talk such nonsense!"

She smiled with a painful, horrible expression, but immediately her poor face became beautiful with the serenity of one who is departing this life without hallucinations or delirium, in perfect mental poise. She spoke to him with the immense sympathy, the superhuman compa.s.sion of one who contemplates the wretched stream of life, departing from its current, already touching with her feet the sh.o.r.es of eternal shadow, of eternal peace.

"I should not want to go away without telling you. I die knowing everything. Do not move; do not protest. You know the power I have over you. More than once I have seen you watching me in terror, so easily do I read your thoughts. For years I have been convinced that all was over between us. We have lived like good creatures of G.o.d--eating together, sleeping together, helping each other in our needs. But I peered within you; I looked at your heart. Nothing! Not a memory, not a spark of love.

I have been your woman, the good companion who cares for the house, and relieves a man of the petty cares of life. You have worked hard to surround me with comforts, in order that I might be contented and not disturb you. But Love? Never. Many people live as we have--many of them; almost all. I could not; I thought that life was something different and I am not sorry to go away. Don't go into a rage; don't shout. You aren't to blame, poor Mariano--It was a mistake for us to marry."

She excused him gently with a kindness that seemed not of this world, generously pa.s.sing over the cruelty and selfishness of a life she was about to leave. Men like him were exceptional; they ought to live alone, by themselves, like those great trees that absorb all the life from the ground and do not allow a single plant to grow in the s.p.a.ce which their roots reach. She was not strong enough to stand isolation; in order to live she must have the shadow of tenderness, the certainty of being loved. She ought to have married a man like other men; a simple being like herself, whose only longings were modest and commonplace. The painter had dragged her into his extraordinary path out of the easy, well-beaten roads that the rest follow and she was falling by the wayside, old in the prime of her youth, broken because she had gone with him in this journey which was beyond her strength.

Renovales was walking about with ceaseless protests.

"Why, what nonsense you are talking! You are raving! I have always loved you, Josephina. I love you now."

Her eyes suddenly became hard. A flash of anger crossed their pupils.

"Stop; don't lie. I know of a pile of letters that you have in your studio, hidden behind the books in your library. I have read them one by one. I have been following them as they came; I discovered your hiding place when you had only three of them. You know that I see through you; that I have a power over you, that you can hide nothing from me. I know your love affairs."

Renovales felt his ears buzzing, the floor slipping from under his feet.

What astounding witchcraft! Even the letters so carefully hidden had been discovered by that woman's divining instinct!

"It's a lie!" he cried vehemently to conceal his agitation. "It isn't love! If you have read them, you know what it is as well as I; just friendship; the letters of a friend who is somewhat crazy."

The sick woman smiled sadly. At first it was friendship--even less than that, the perverse amus.e.m.e.nt of a flighty woman who liked to play with a celebrated man, exciting in him the enthusiasm of youth. She knew her childhood companion; she was sure it would not go any farther; and so she pitied the poor man in the midst of his mad love. But afterward something extraordinary had certainly happened; something that she could not explain and which had upset all of her calculations. Now her husband and Concha were lovers.

"Do not deny it; it is useless. It is this certainty that is killing me.

I realized it when I saw you distracted, with a happy smile as if you were relishing your thoughts. I realized it in the merry songs you sang when you awoke in the morning, in the perfume with which you were impregnated and which followed you everywhere. I did not need to find any more letters. The odor around you, that perfume of infidelity, of sin, which always accompanied you, was enough. You, poor man, came home thinking that everything was left outside the door, and that odor follows you, denounces you; I think I can still perceive it."

And her nostrils dilated, as she breathed with a pained expression, closing her eyes as though she wished to escape the images which that perfume called up in her. Her husband persisted in his denials, now that he was convinced that she had no other proof of his infidelity. A lie!

An hallucination!

"No, Mariano," murmured the sick woman. "She is within you; she fills your head; from here I can see her. Once a thousand mad fancies occupied her place,--illusions of your taste, naked women, a wantonness that was your religion. Now it is she who fills it. It is your desire incarnated.

Go on and be happy. I am going away--there is no place for me in the world."

She was silent for a moment and the tears came to her eyes again at the memory of the first years of their life together.

"No one has cared for you as I have, Mariano," she said with tender regret. "I look on you now as a stranger, without affection and without hate. And still, there was never a woman who loved her husband so pa.s.sionately."

"I worship you. Josephina, I love you just as I did when we first met each other. Do you remember?"

But in spite of the emotion he pretended to show, his voice had a false ring.

"Don't try to bluff, Mariano; it is useless; everything is over. You do not care for me nor have I either any of the old feeling."

In her face there was an expression of wonder, of surprise; she seemed terror-stricken at her own calmness that made her forgive thus indifferently the man who had caused her so much suffering. In her fancy, she saw a wide garden, flowers that seemed immortal and they were withering and falling with the advent of winter. Then her thoughts went beyond, over the chill of death. The snow was melting; the sun was shining once more; the new spring was coming with its court of love and the dry branches were growing green once more with another life.

"Who knows!" murmured the sick woman with her eyes closed. "Perhaps, after I am dead, you will remember me. Perhaps you will care for me then, and be grateful to one who loved you so. We want a thing when it is lost."

The invalid was silent, exhausted by such an effort; she relapsed into that lethargy which for her took the place of rest. Renovales, after this conversation, felt his vile inferiority beside his wife. She knew everything and forgave him. She had followed the course of his love, letter by letter, look by look, seeing in his smiles the memory of his faithlessness. And she was silent! She was dying without a protest! And he did not fall at her feet to beg her forgiveness! And he remained unmoved, without a tear, without a sigh!

He was afraid to stay alone with her. Milita came back to stay at the house to care for her mother. The master took refuge in his studio; he wanted to forget in work the body that was dying under the same roof.

But in vain he poured colors on his palette and took up brushes and prepared canvases. He did nothing but daub; he could make no progress, as if he had forgotten his art. He kept turning his head anxiously, thinking that Josephina was going to enter suddenly, to continue that interview in which she had laid bare the greatness of her soul and the baseness of his own. He felt forced to return to her apartments, to go on tiptoe to the door of the chamber, in order to be sure that she was there.

Her emaciation was frightful; it had no limits. When it seemed that it must stop, it still surprised them with new shrinking, as if after the disappearance of her flesh, her poor skeleton was melting away.

Sometimes she was tormented with delirium, and her daughter, holding back her tears, approved of the extravagant trips she planned, of her proposals to go far away to live with Milita in a garden, where they would find no men; where there were no painters--no painters.

She lived about two weeks. Renovales, with cruel selfishness, was anxious to rest, complaining of this abnormal existence. If she must die, why did she not end it as soon as possible, and restore the whole house to tranquillity!

The end came one afternoon when the master, lying on a couch in his studio, was re-reading the tender complaints of a scented little letter.

So long since she had seen him! How was the patient getting on? She knew that his duty was there; people would talk if he came to see her. But this separation was hard!

He did not have a chance to finish it. Milita came into the studio, in her eyes that expression of horror and fright, which the presence of death, the touch of his pa.s.sage, always inspires, even if his arrival has been expected.

Her voice came breathlessly, broken. Mamma was talking with her; she was amusing her with the hope of a trip in the near future,--and all at once a hoa.r.s.e sound,--her head bent forward before it fell onto her shoulder--a moment--nothing--just like a little bird.