Jaime arose in good spirits, and as he removed the barricade of furniture which obstructed the doorway, he laughed, somewhat ashamed of his precautions, considering them almost a sign of cowardice. The women of Can Mallorquí had worked upon his nerves with their fears. Who would be likely to seek him in his tower, knowing that he was on the alert and would meet a trespasser with shots! The Ironworker's absence when Jaime had presented himself at the forge, and the calm of the night before, gave food for thought. Was the man-slayer wounded? Had some of Jaime's balls reached their mark?
He spent the morning on the sea. Tío Ventolera took him to the Vedrá, praising the lightness and other merits of his boat. He repaired it year after year, not a splinter of its original construction being left in it. They fished in the shelter of the rocks until mid-afternoon. On their way back Febrer saw the Little Chaplain running along the beach waving something white.
Before landing, while the prow of the boat was scraping along the gravel, the boy called to him with the impatience of one who has great news:
"A letter, Don Jaime!"
A letter! Actually, in that remote corner of the world, the most extraordinary event that could disturb the everyday life was the arrival of a letter. Febrer turned it over in his hands, examining it as something strange and rare. He looked at the seal, then at the address on the envelope.... He recognized it—it aroused in his memory the same impression as a familiar face with which we cannot associate a name. From whom was it?
Meanwhile the Little Chaplain gave detailed explanations of the great event. The letter had been brought by the foot postman in the middle of the morning. It had come by the mail steamer from Palma, arriving in Iviza the night before. If he wished to answer it he must do so without loss of time. The boat would return to Majorca the following day.
On his way to the tower Jaime broke the seal and looked for the signature. Almost at the same moment his recollection grew clear and a name surged to his mind—Pablo Valls! Captain Pablo had written to him after a year of silence, and his letter was long, several sheets of commercial paper covered with close writing!
At the first few lines the Majorcan smiled. The captain himself seemed there in those written words, with his vigorous and exuberant personality, turbulent, kindly, and aggressive. Febrer almost saw in the page before him his enormous, heavy nose, his gray whiskers, his eyes the color of oil speckled with flecks of tobacco color, his dented, chambergo hat thrust on the back of his head.
The letter began, "Dear, shameless, fellow;" and the opening paragraphs continued in the same style.
"Something worth while," he murmured, smiling. "I must read this leisurely."
He put it in his pocket with the eagerness of one who sharpens a pleasure by deferring it. Jaime climbed to the tower, after taking leave of the boy.
He seated himself near the window, his chair tilted back against the table, and began to read. An explosion of mock fury, of affectionate insults, of indignation over events Jaime had actually forgotten, filled the first pages. Pablo Valls overflowed with amusing incoherency, like a charlatan condemned for a long time to silence who suffers the torture of his repressed verbosity. He flung into Febrer's face his origin and his pride, which had impelled him to run away without telling his friends good-bye. "In the last analysis you are descended from a race of inquisitors." His ancestors had burned the ancestors of Valls; let him not forget that! But the good must distinguish themselves from the bad in some way, and so he, the reprobate, the Chueta, the heretic hated by everybody, had responded to this lack of friendship by busying himself with Jaime's affairs. Very likely he had already heard about this through his friend Toni Clapés, whose business was thriving, as usual, although he had suffered some set-backs of late. Two of his vessels carrying cargoes of tobacco had been captured.
"But—to the gist of the matter! You know that I'm a practical man, a regular Englishman, an enemy to the wasting of time."
And the practical man, the "Englishman," in order to waste no words, covered two pages more with the explosions of his indignation at everything around him; at his racial brothers, timid and humble, who covered the hand of the enemy with kisses; at the descendants of the old-time persecutors; at the ferocious Padre Garau, of whom not even dust remained; against the whole island, the famous Roqueta, to which his people were held in subjection through love for its soil, a love returned with ostracism and insults.
"But let us not waste words; order, method, and clarity! Above all let us write practically. Lack of practical character is our ruination."
Finally he came to the Popess Juana, that imposing señora, whom Pablo Valls had only seen at a distance, as he seemed to her the personification of all the revolutionary impieties and of all the sins of his race. "There is no hope for you in that direction." Febrer's aunt remembered him only to lament his bad end and to praise the justice of the Lord, who punishes those who travel crooked paths, and depart from sacred family traditions. Sometimes the good lady thought him in Iviza; again she declared she knew for a certainty that her nephew had been seen in America, engaged in the meanest employments. "Anyway, whelp of an inquisitor, your pious aunt will not remember you, and you need not expect the slightest assistance from her." It was now being whispered about the city that, definitely renouncing the pomps of this world and perhaps even the pontifical Golden Rose, which never arrived, she was about to turn over all her property to the priests of her court, going to shut herself up in a convent, with all the advantages of a privileged lady. The Popess was going away forever; it was impossible to expect anything from her. "And here is where I come in, young Garau: I, the reprobate, the Chueta, the long-tailed, who desire to be reverenced and adored by you as if you were Providence himself."
Finally the practical man, the enemy of useless words, fulfilled his promise, and the style of the letter became concise, with a commercial dryness. First a long statement of the properties still possessed by Jaime at the time of his leaving Majorca, burdened with all manner of incumbrances and mortgages; then a list of his creditors, which was longer than that of his properties, followed by lists of interest due and other obligations, an entangled skein in which Febrer's mind became wholly confused, but through which Valls made direct headway, with the confidence of those of his race for disentangling jumbled business affairs.
Captain Pablo had allowed half a year to pass without writing to his friend, but he had occupied himself daily over his affairs. He had haggled with the most ferocious usurers of the island, insulting some, outwitting others in finesse, resorting to persuasion or to bravado, advancing money to satisfy the more urgent creditors, who threatened attachment. In conclusion, he had left his friend's fortune free and sound, but it emerged from the terrible battle shrunken and comparatively insignificant. There only remained to Febrer some thousands of duros; perhaps it would not amount to fifteen thousand, but this was better than to live in his former position as a gran señor without anything to eat, and subjected to the persecution of his creditors. "It is time that you come home! What are you doing there? Are you going to spend the rest of your life like a Robinson Crusoe, in that pirate's tower?" He could live modestly; living is cheap in Majorca. Besides, he could solicit an office from the Government. With his name and pedigree it would not be difficult to accomplish that. He might devote himself to commerce under the direction and advice of a man like himself. If he wished to travel it would not be difficult for Valls to secure him a position in Algiers, in England, or in America. The captain had friends everywhere. "Come back soon, young Garau, dear old inquisitor. I have no more to say."
Febrer spent the rest of the afternoon reading the letter or strolling about the environs of the tower, deeply stirred by this news. Recollections of his past existence, dimmed by his rural and solitary life, stood out now with the same vividness as if they were the events of yesterday. The cafés on the Borne, his friends in the Casino! How strange to return there, passing at a bound into city life after his half savage seclusion in the tower! He would go at once! His mind was made up! He would start the next morning, taking advantage of the return trip of the same steamer which had brought the letter.
The memory of Margalida rose in his mind as if to detain him on the island. She appeared in his imagination with her white face, her adorable figure, her timid and lowered eyes, which seemed to conceal the dark ardor of her pupils as if it were a sin. Should he leave her? Never see her again? Then she would become the wife of one of those rough peasants who would make no better use of her beauty than to waste it in daily tasks in the field, gradually converting her into a farm animal, black, calloused, and wrinkled!
A pessimistic thought soon aroused him from this cruel doubt. Margalida did not love him; she could not love him. Disconcerting silence and mysterious tears were the only response he had succeeded in eliciting by his declarations of love. Why should he persist in trying to conquer that which seemed to everybody to be impossible? Why continue the senseless struggle against the whole island for a woman he was not as yet sure loved him?
The joy of the recent news turned Febrer into a skeptic. "Nobody dies of love." Yet it would cost him a great effort to abandon this country on the morrow; he would experience profound sorrow when the African whiteness of Can Mallorquí should fade from his view, but, once he had shaken himself free of the atmosphere of the island, no longer living among rustics, and had gone back to his old life, perhaps Margalida would linger only as a vague memory, and he would be the first to laugh at this passion for a peasant girl, the daughter of a former retainer of his family.
He hesitated no longer. He would spend the night in the solitude of his tower, like a primitive man, one of those who live lying in ambush against danger, ready to kill. Tomorrow night he would be seated at a table in a café beneath the light of an electric chandelier, seeing carriages beside the pavements, and gazing at women more beautiful than Margalida strolling along the Paseo del Borne. Back to Majorca, then! He would not live in a palace; the Febrer mansion he would lose forever, according to the arrangement made by his friend Valls; but he would not fail to have a neat little house in the ward of Terreno or somewhere near the sea, and in it the motherly care of Mammy Antonia. No sorrow, no shame would await him there. He would even be rid of the presence of Don Benito Valls and his daughter, from whom he had so discourteously fled, without a word of excuse. The rich Chueta, according to his brother's letter, now lived in Barcelona for the sake of his health, so he said; but undoubtedly, as Captain Pablo believed, this journey was taken for the purpose of finding a son-in-law unhampered by the prejudices which persecuted those of his race on the Island.
As night closed in the Little Chaplain came with his basket of supper. While Febrer was greedily eating, with the appetite aroused by his gladsome news, the boy's eager eyes roved about the room to see if he could discover the letter which had so piqued his curiosity. Nothing was in sight. The señor's good spirits finally enlivened him also, and he laughed without knowing why, feeling obliged to be in a good humor since Don Jaime was so.
Febrer joked him about his approaching return to the Seminary. He was thinking of making him a present, an extraordinary gift, he could never guess what; compared to it the knife would be worthless. As he said this his eyes traveled toward the gun hanging on the wall.
When the boy took his leave Febrer closed the door and diverted himself by taking an inventory and making a distribution of the objects which filled his dwelling. Within an old crudely carved wooden chest, laid away between fragrant herbs, was the clothing carefully folded by Margalida in which he had come to Majorca. He would put them on in the morning. He thought with a kind of terror of the torture of the boots and the torment of the stiff collar after his long season of rustic freedom, but he intended to leave the island as he had come to it. Everything else he would present to Pèp, except the gun, which would go to his son; he smiled as he thought of the expression of the young seminarist when he should receive this gift, which came rather late. By the time he could go hunting with it he would be a priest of one of the island districts.
He drew Valls' letter from his pocket again, taking pleasure in reading it over and over, as if each time he found fresh items of interest. While reading these paragraphs, which were already familiar, his mind was dwelling on the good news. His loyal friend Pablo! How timely was his advice! It called him from Iviza at the most opportune instant, when he was in open war with all these rude people, who were eager for the death of the stranger. The captain was right. What was he doing there, like a new Robinson Crusoe, and one who could not even enjoy the peace of solitude? Valls, opportune, as ever, delivered him from his danger.
His life of a few hours before, when he had not yet received the letter, seemed to him absurd and ridiculous. He was a new man now. He smiled with shame and pity for that mad man who, the day before, with his gun across his shoulder, had journeyed up the mountain to seek a former prisoner, challenging him to a barbarous duel in the solitude of the forest, as if all the life of the planet were concentrated on this little island and one must kill in order to live! As if there were no life nor civilization beyond the sheet of blue which surrounded this bit of land, with its primitive-souled inhabitants clinging to the customs of former centuries! What folly! This was to be the last night of his savage existence. On the morrow everything which had occurred would be but an interesting recollection, with tales of which he could entertain his friends on the Borne.
Febrer suddenly cut the trend of these thoughts, raising his eyes from the paper. As his gaze encountered half the room in shadow and the other half in a ruddy glow, which made objects flicker and tremble, he seemed to return from the long journey on which his imagination had drawn him. He was still living in the Pirate's Tower; he was still in the midst of darkness, of solitude peopled with whispers of Nature, in the interior of a cube of stone, the walls of which seemed to sweat dark mystery.
He had heard something outside; a cry, a howl, different from that of the other night, more stifled, more indistinct. Jaime received the impression that the cry came from very near, that perhaps it was uttered by someone hidden in the clusters of tamarisks.
He concentrated his attention and the howl came again. It was the same wild yell he had heard the other night, but low, repressed, hoarse, as if he who uttered it feared that the cry would scatter too much, and had placed his hands around his mouth in order to send it directly by means of this natural trumpet.
His first surprise subsided, he laughed softly, shrugging his shoulders. He did not intend to stir. What did primitive customs matter to him now, these peasant challenges? "Howl, my good man; yell until you're tired! I'm deaf!"
To divert his mind he returned to the reading of his letter, enjoying with particular zest the long list of creditors, many of whose names evoked choleric visions or grotesque recollections.
The howl continued at long intervals, and each time that the hoarse stridency pierced the silence Febrer thrilled with impatience and choler. Must he spend the whole night without sleep on account of this serenade of threats?
It occurred to him that perhaps the enemy concealed in the bushes saw his light through the cracks of the door and that this caused him to persist in his provocations. He blew out the candle and laid down on the bed, experiencing a sensation of comfort at being in the dark, with his back sunk into the soft, yielding mattress. That barbarian might howl for hours, or until he lost his voice. He did not intend to stir. What did the insults matter to him now? And he laughed with a joy of physical comfort, lying in his soft couch, while the other was making himself hoarse out there in the bushes, with his weapon ready and his eye alert. What a disappointment for the enemy!
Febrer was almost lulled to sleep by these cries of challenge. He had barricaded the door as he had done the night before. As long as the shouts continued he knew that he was in no danger. Suddenly, by a supreme effort, he sat up, flinging off a stupor which preceded sleep. He no longer heard howls. It was the mystery of silence which had awakened him, a silence more threatening and disquieting than the hostile shouts.
By listening intently he thought he could perceive a movement, a faint creaking of wood, something like the insignificant weight of a cat creeping from step to step, climbing up the stairway to the tower, with long intervals of waiting.
Jaime felt for his revolver, and he sat holding it with a tight clutch. The weapon seemed to tremble between his fingers. He began to feel the anger of the strong man who realizes the presence of an enemy at his door.
The cautious ascent ceased, perhaps half way up the stairs, and after a long silence, Febrer heard a low voice, a voice meant for him alone. It was the voice of the Ironworker. It invited him to step outside, it called him coward, uniting to this insult outrageous indignities against the detested isle of Majorca where Jaime was born.
Jaime sprang from his couch with a sudden impulse, the springs creaking loudly beneath him. As he arose to his feet in the dark, with his revolver in his hand, he began, to feel nothing but scorn for his challenger. Why heed him? It were better to go back to bed. There was a long pause, as if the enemy, when he heard the creaking springs, stood waiting for the inhabitant of the tower to come out. Time passed, and the hoarse and insulting voice once more pierced the calm of night. It called him coward again; it invited the Majorcan to come out. "Come out, you son of a——"
At this insult Febrer trembled, and thrust his revolver back into his belt. His mother, his poor mother, pale and sick, and as sweet as a saint, whose memory was evoked by the greatest of infamies in the mouth of that criminal!
He started instinctively toward the door, colliding after a few steps with the barricade of tables and chairs. No; not the door. A rectangle of blue and hazy light was framed by the dark wall. Jaime had opened the window. The starry light faintly illuminated the contraction of his countenance, a cold grin, desperate, cruel, which gave him resemblance to the knight commander Don Priamo and other navigators of war and destruction whose dust-covered portraits were hanging in the great house in Majorca.
He seated himself on the window, threw his legs over the sill, and cautiously began to descend, feeling with his toes for the hollows in the wall.
As his feet touched earth he drew his revolver from his belt, and bending low, one hand on the ground, he crept around the base of the tower. His feet became entangled in the roots of the tamarisks which the wind had bared, and which sunk in the earth like a tangled skein of black serpents. Each time that he was stopped by a mesh of roots, each time that a stone rolled down or made a sound, he stopped, holding his breath. He was trembling, not with fear, but with the eagerness of the hunter who fears he may arrive too late. He longed to fall upon the enemy, to lay hands upon him while he stood near the door muttering his deadly insults!
Dragging himself along the ground, he came to where he could see the lower end of the stairway, then the upper steps, and finally the door, which stood out white in the light of the stars. Nobody! The enemy had fled.
In his surprise he stood erect, intently watching the black and undulating spot of bushes which extended around the foot of the stairway. Suddenly a red serpent, a streak of flame, followed by a tiny cloud and a thunder clap, leapt from out the tamarisks. Jaime thought he had been struck in the breast by a stone, a hot pebble, perhaps flung into the air by the concussion from the detonation.
"It's nothing!" he thought.
But at the same instant he found himself lying on the ground flat on his back.
He turned instinctively, lying with his breast on the earth, resting on one hand, extending the other which grasped the revolver. He felt strong; he repeated to himself that it was nothing; but suddenly his body almost refused to obey his will. He seemed to be glued to the ground. He saw the bushes move, as if stirred by some dark animal, cautious and malignant. There was the enemy! It thrust out first its head, then its trunk, and finally its legs from the crackling bushes.
With the rapid vision which accompanies the drowning man, a vision in which are concentrated fleeting recollections of all his former life, Febrer thought of his youth, when he used to fire off his pistol while lying on the ground in the garden at Palma as if rehearsing for a deadly encounter. The preparation of long ago was going to stand him in good stead now.
He clearly saw the black bulk of the enemy, motionless and in the line of sight of his revolver. His vision was becoming more hazy, more indistinct, as if the night were steadily growing darker. The enemy was approaching cautiously, also with a weapon in his hand, no doubt with the intention of finishing his deadly work. Then Febrer pulled on the trigger, once, twice, and again, believing that the weapon did not work, failing to hear the detonations, telling himself in his desperation that his enemy was going to fall upon him while he was without means of defense. He no longer saw the enemy. A white haze spread before his eyes; his ears buzzed—but when he thought he felt his adversary near, the mist cleared away, he saw the calm blue light of night again, and, a few steps away, also stretched on the ground, lay a body writhing, arching itself, clawing the earth, emitting a harsh groan, a hiccough of death.
Jaime could not understand this marvel. Really was it he himself who had fired a shot?
He tried to get up, but as he touched the ground his hands dabbled in a thick, warm clay. He touched his breast and he also found it wet by something warm and thick, dripping ceaselessly in slender streams. He tried to contract his legs in order to kneel, but his legs would not obey him. Only then was he convinced that he was wounded.
His eyes lost clearness of vision. He saw the tower double, then triple, then a curtain of cubes of stone extending along the coast, sinking into the sea. An acrid taste spread from his palate to his lips. It seemed to him that he was drinking something warm and strong, but that he was drinking it wrong way about, by a caprice of the mechanism of his life, the strange liquor reaching his palate from the depths of his vitals. The black bulk which lay writhing and moaning a few steps away, seemed to grow larger every time he touched the ground in his contortions. Now he was an apoplectic animal, a monster of the night, which, as it arched its body, reached the stars.
The barking of dogs, and the voices of human beings dissolved this phantom of solitude. Out of the darkness appeared lights.
"Don Jaime! Don Jaime!"
Whose voice was this? Where had he heard it before?
He saw dark figures stirring about, bending over him, carrying red stars in their hands. He saw a man holding back another smaller one who carried in his hand a white lightning flash, perhaps a knife, with which he tried to finish the kicking monster.
He saw no more. He felt a pair of soft arms lift his head. A voice, the same one he had heard a moment ago, tremulous and tearful, sounded in his ears, thrilling him to the depths of his soul.
"Don Jaime! Alas, Don Jaime!"
He felt on his mouth a sweet touch, something which caressed him with a silky sensation; gradually the contact pressed more close, until it became a frantic kiss, desperate, mad with grief.
Before sight forsook him he smiled weakly as he recognized near his own a pair of eyes tearful with love and pain; the eyes of Margalida.
LIFE AND LOVE COMMAND
When Febrer found himself in a room in Can Mallorquí, lying on a white bed—perhaps Margalida's bed—he began to recall the events of a short time before.
He had walked to the farmhouse supported by Pèp and the Little Chaplain, feeling on his back sympathetic, trembling hands. His recollections were vague, dim, surrounded by a nimbus of white haze; something resembling the confused memory of acts and words after a day of intoxication.
He recalled that his head had fallen on Pèp's shoulder with mortal weariness; that his strength was deserting him, as if his life were escaping with the warm and sticky stream trickling down his breast and his back. He recollected that behind him sounded deafening groans, broken words imploring the aid of all the celestial powers; and he, in his weakness, his temples palpitating from the buzzing that accompanied the dizziness, made strenuous efforts to steady himself, advancing step by step, with the fear of falling in the roadway and remaining there forever. How interminable seemed the journey down to Can Mallorquí! It appeared to have lasted hours, days; in his dulled memory the walk seemed as long as the whole of his former life.
When at last friendly hands helped him climb into bed and began removing his clothing by the light of a candle, Febrer experienced a sensation of well-being and rest. He wished never to arise from this soft couch; he desired to remain here for all time!
Blood! The brilliant red of blood everywhere—on his jacket and shirt which were tossed at the foot of the bed as if they were rags, on the stiff white sheets, in the basin of water which reddened as Pèp wet a cloth to bathe Febrer's chest. Each garment removed from his body was dripping. His underclothing separated from his flesh with a wrench which made him shiver. The light of the candle, with its trembling flame, drew from the shadows a prevailing tone of red.
The women began to wail. Margalida's mother, forgetting all prudence, clasped her hands and raised her eyes with an expression of terror. Reina Santísima!
Febrer wondered at these exclamations. He was all right; why were the women so alarmed? Margalida, silent, her eyes enlarged by terror, moved about the room, turning over clothing, opening chests with the precipitation of fear, but never becoming confused at the furious cries of her father.
Good old Pèp, frowning, a greenish pallor on his dark countenance, attended the wounded man, while at the same time he gave orders.
"Lint! Bring more lint! Silence, women! Why so many cries and lamentations?"
He ordered his wife to go in search of a little pot of marvelous unguent treasured up ever since the times of his glorious father, the formidable man-slayer accustomed to wounds.
And when the mother, astounded at these abrupt orders, started to join Margalida in search of the remedy, her husband called her back to the bedside. She must hold the señor. Pèp had turned him on his side in order to examine and wash his breast and back, declaring that he had seen worse sights than this in his younger days, and that he understood something about wounds. When the blood was wiped off with a wet cloth two orifices were left exposed, one in the chest and the other in the back. Good! The ball had passed through his body; it would not have to be extracted, and this was an advantage.
With his rustic hands, to which he endeavored to impart a feminine tenderness, he tried to form tampons of lint to introduce into the wounds, which continued gently emitting the red liquid. Margalida, wrinkling her brows and turning away to avoid meeting Febrer's eyes, at last brushed Pèp aside.
"Let me do it, father. Perhaps I can do it better."
Jaime thought he felt on his bare flesh, sensitive, vibrating from the cruel wound, a sensation of coolness, of sweet calm, as the tampons were pressed into it by the girl's fingers.
Jaime remained motionless, feeling against his back and on his breast the cloths piled up by the two women in their horror at the blood.
The optimism which had animated him when he sank and fell near the tower, reappeared. Surely it was nothing, an insignificant wound; he felt better already. He was troubled by the sad expressions and the silence of those around him, and he smiled to encourage them. He tried to speak, but his first attempt at words produced extreme fatigue.
The peasant restrained him with a gesture. Silence, Don Jaime; he must keep perfectly still. The doctor would soon be here. Pepet had mounted the best horse on the place and had ridden to San José to call him.
On seeing Don Jaime's eyes opened wide in astonishment, persisting in his encouraging smile, Pèp continued speaking in order to divert Febrer's mind. He told him that he had been sound asleep when suddenly he was awakened by his wife calling him, and by the cries of the children, who made a rush for the door. Outside the farmhouse, in the direction of the tower, sounded shots. Another attack on the señor, the same as two nights before! When Pepet heard the two last shots he seemed to rejoice. Those were from Don Jaime; he recognized the sound of his revolver.
Pèp had lighted a lantern, his wife took the candle, and they all rushed up the hill to the tower, without giving a thought to danger. The first one they found was the Ironworker, his head streaming blood, writhing and howling like a demon.
His sinful life was ended, God have mercy on his soul! Pèp had been compelled to lay hands on his son, who had turned, furious and malignant as a monkey, when he saw who it was, and drew a great knife from his belt, with the intention of finishing him. Where had Pepet found that weapon? Boys are the very devil! A fine plaything for a seminarist!
The father glanced significantly at the knife presented to the Little Chaplain by Febrer, which was lying on a chair.
They had discovered the señor lying face downward near the tower stairway. Ah, Don Jaime, what a fright he and his family had! They thought him dead. In circumstances like this one realizes his affection for a person; and the good peasant glanced tenderly at Jaime, and was accompanied in this mute caress by the two women, who pressed close to the bed.
This glance of affection and of sorrowful anxiety was the last thing Febrer saw. His eyes closed, and he gradually fell into a stupor, without dreams, without delirium, in the gray softness of the void.
When he opened his eyes again the light which illuminated the room was no longer red. He saw the candle hanging in the same place with its wick black and dull. A cold, gloomy light penetrated through the little window of the sleeping room; the light of dawn. Jaime experienced a sensation of chill. The covers were being withdrawn from his body; agile hands were touching the bandages of his wounds. The flesh, numb a few hours before, now flinched at the lightest touch with the excruciating vibration of the pain, arousing an irresistible desire to groan.
Following with his clouded eyes the hands which were torturing him, Febrer saw a pair of black sleeves, then a cravat, a shirt collar different from those used by the peasants, and above all this a face with a gray mustache, a face he had often seen on the roads, but which failed to arouse in his memory a name; however, gradually he came to recognize it. It must be the doctor from San José whom he had seen frequently on horseback or driving along in a buggy; an old practitioner, wearing sandals like a peasant, and differing from them only in his cravat and his stiff collar, signs of superiority which he carefully maintained.
How the man tormented him as he touched his flesh, which seemed to have grown tense, becoming more sensitive, with a sickly and timid sensitiveness, as if it would contract at the mere contact with air! When this face was lost to his view and he no longer felt the torture of the hands he sank again into restful sleep. He closed his eyes, but his hearing seemed to be sharpened. He heard low voices in the next room, but he could only catch a few phrases. An unknown voice was congratulating himself that the ball had not remained in the body; undoubtedly in its trajectory it had passed through the lung. Here arose a chorus of exclamations of astonishment, of repressed sighs, and then of protest from the unfamiliar voice. Yes, the lung; but there was no cause for alarm.
"The lung heals readily. It is the most tractable organ of the whole body. The only thing to be feared is traumatic pneumonia."
Hearing this, Febrer persisted in his optimism. "It is nothing: it is nothing." And again he fell gently into the hazy sea of sleep, a sea immense, smooth, heavy, in which visions and sensations sank without causing a ripple or leaving a trace.
From that instant Febrer lost count of time and reality. He still lived; he was sure of it, but his life was abnormal, strange, a long life of shadow and inconsequence with short intervals of light. He opened his eyes and it was night; the little window was black and the candle flame colored everything with flickering red spots which joined the shadows in a merry jig. He opened them again, imagining that only a few moments had passed, and it was day once more; a ray of sunshine entered the room, tracing a circle of gold at the foot of the bed. In this way day and night succeeded each other with strange rapidity, as if the course of time had become forever reversed; or it seemed to remain stationary, with a maddening monotony. When the sick man opened his eyes it was night, eternally night, as if the globe were overwhelmed by unending darkness. Again it seemed that the sun were forever shining, as in the Arctic regions.
During one of his waking spells his eyes met those of the Little Chaplain. Thinking him suddenly better, the boy spoke in a low voice so as not to incur the ire of his father, who had commanded silence.
The Ironworker had already been buried. The bully lay rotting in the earth. What a true shot Don Jaime was! What a hand he had! He had broken the braggart's head.
The boy recalled what had taken place afterward with the pride of one who has enjoyed the honor of witnessing an historic event. The judge had come from the city with his tasselled staff, the chief of the Civil Guard and two gentlemen carrying papers and bottles of ink; all with an escort of men wearing three-cornered hats and carrying guns. These omnipotent personages, after a rest at Can Mallorquí, had climbed up to the tower, examining everything, prying all around, running over the ground as if to measure it, compelling him, the Little Chaplain, to lie down in the very spot where Don Jaime had been found, adopting a similar posture. After the visit of the magistrate some pious neighbors had borne the body of the Ironworker to the cemetery of San José, and the powerful representatives of the law had come down to the farmhouse to quiz the wounded man. It was impossible to make him speak. He was sound asleep, and when they aroused him he looked at them with a vague stare, and immediately closed his eyes again. Really did not the señor remember? They would question him again some other time when he was well. There was nothing to worry about; the magistrates and all honorable people were in his favor. As the Ironworker had no near relatives to avenge his death and as he had made himself obnoxious, the people had no reason for keeping silent, and they all spoke the truth. The Ironworker had gone two nights in search of the señor in his tower, and the señor had defended himself. It was certain that nothing would be done to him. Thus declared the Little Chaplain, who, on account of his warlike tendencies, possessed some of the characteristics of a juris consult. "Self defense, Don Jaime——" It was the sole topic of conversation on the island. It was discussed in the cafés and casinos throughout the city. They had even written to Palma, giving news of the affair so that it would be published in the daily papers. By this time his friends in Majorca would have heard all about it.
The trial would be short. The only one who had been taken to Iviza and thrust into jail was the Minstrel, on account of his threats and lies. He tried to make the people believe that it was he who had gone in search of the detested Majorcan; he extolled the Ironworker as an innocent victim; but he was to be set at liberty at any time by the magistrate who was tired of his deceptions and his lying tales. The boy spoke of him with scorn. That chicken could not pride himself on having wounded a man. A mere farce!
Sometimes when the injured man opened his eyes he saw the motionless and muffled figure of Pèp's wife who sat staring at him with expressionless eyes, moving her lips as if in prayer, and giving vent to profound sighs. No sooner did she encounter the glassy gaze of Febrer than she ran to a small table covered with bottles and glasses. Her affection was manifested by an incessant desire to make him drink all the liquids ordered by the doctor.
When, in moments of turbid wakefulness, Jaime found Margalida's face bending over him, he experienced a joy which helped to dispel his drowsiness. The girl's eyes wore an adoring and timorous expression. She seemed to be imploring forgiveness with her tearful orbs outlined with blue against the nunlike delicacy of her skin. "For me! All on account of me!" she seemed to say tacitly, with a gesture of remorse.
She approached him timidly, vacillating, but without a flush of color, as if the strangeness of the circumstances had overcome her former shrinking. She arranged the disordered covers of his couch, she gave him to drink, and she raised his head to smooth his pillows. When Febrer tried to speak she raised her index finger to impose silence.
Once the wounded man grasped her hand as she passed and pressed it against his lips, caressing it with a prolonged kiss. Margalida dared not draw it away. She turned her head as if she wished to hide her tear-filled eyes. She groaned with anguish, and the sick man thought he heard expressions of remorse such as he had divined in her manner. "On account of me! It happened on account of me!" Jaime experienced a sensation of joy at her tears. Oh, sweet Almond Blossom!
Now he no longer saw the fine, pale face; he could distinguish only the flash of her eyes, surrounded by white mist, as one sees the splendor of the sun on a stormy morning. His temples throbbed cruelly, his sight grew turbid. The sweet stupor, soft and empty as nothingness, was succeeded by a sleep peopled with incoherent visions, of fiery images vibrating against a background of intense blackness, by torture which wrung from his breast groans of fear and cries of anguish. He was delirious. Often he would awake from one of his frightful nightmares for an instant, barely long enough to find himself sitting up in bed, his arms pinned down by other arms, which endeavored to hold him. Then he would sink back into that world of shadows, peopled with horrors. In this fleeting consciousness, like a hasty vision of light from a breathing-hole in the darkness of a tunnel, he recognized near his bed the sorrowful faces of the family of Can Mallorquí. Again his eyes would encounter those of the doctor, and once he even thought he saw the gray whiskers and the oil-colored eyes of his friend, Pablo Valls. "Illusion! Madness!" he thought, as he sank once more into lethargy.
Sometimes while his eyes remained sunk in this world of gloom, furrowed by the red comets of nightmare, his ear vibrated weakly with words which seemed to come from far, very far away, but which were uttered near his bedside. "Traumatic pneumonia—delirium." These words were repeated by different voices, but he doubted that they referred to himself. He felt well. This was nothing; a strong desire to continue lying down; a renunciation of life; the voluptuosity of keeping still, of lying there until the approach of death, which did not arouse in him the slightest fear.
His brain, disordered by fever, seemed to whirl and whirl in mad rotation, and these cycles evoked in his confused mind an image which had often filled it. He saw a wheel, an enormous wheel, immense as a terrestrial sphere, its upper part lost in cloud, its lower arc merging in the sidereal dust which glittered in the darkness of the heavens. The tire of this wheel was composed of human flesh; millions and millions of human beings soldered together, welded, gesticulating, their extremities free, moving them to convince themselves of their activity and of their liberty, while the bodies were joined one to another. The spokes of the wheel attracted Febrer's attention by their diverse forms. Some were swords, their blood-stained blades wound with garlands of laurel, the symbol of heroism; others seemed golden scepters tipped by crowns of kings or emperors; rods of justice; ingots of gold formed by coins laid one upon another; shepherd's crooks set with precious stones, symbols of divine guidance ever since men grouped themselves into flocks to timidly bawl with their gaze fixed on high. The hub of this wheel was a skull, white, clean, shiny, as if made of polished ivory; a skull as big as a planet, which seemed to remain stationary while everything turned around it; a skull luminous, moon-like, which seemed to leer malignantly from its dark eye-sockets, silently mocking at all this movement.
The wheel turned and turned. The millions of human beings fastened to it in its continual revolution shouted and waved their hands, aroused to enthusiasm and enkindled with fervor by the velocity. Jaime saw that no sooner did they rise to the highest point than they began to descend head downward; but, in their illusion they imagined themselves traveling forward, admiring at each revolution new spaces, new things. They fancied the very point through which they had passed but a moment before an unfamiliar and astounding region. Ignorant of the immovability of the center around which they were turning, they believed with the best of faith that the movement was an advance. "How we are running! Where are we going to stop?" they cried. And Febrer pitied their simplicity, seeing their elation at the rapidity of their imagined progress when they were actually remaining in the same place; rejoicing in the velocity of an ascension on which they started for the millionth time and which inevitably must be followed by the downward plunge.
Suddenly Jaime felt himself pressed forward by an irresistible force. The great skull smiled at him mockingly. "You, also! Why resist your destiny?" And he found himself fastened to the wheel, jumbled with that credulous and childish humanity, but lacking the consolation of their fond delusion; and his traveling companions insulted him, spat upon him, beat him in their indignation when they learned of his absurd denial of their movement, believing him insane for holding in doubt something which was visible to all.
At last the wheel exploded, filling the black space with flames, with thousands of millions of cries and tremulous vibrations from the human beings hurled through the mystery of eternity; and he fell and fell, for years, for centuries, until he dropped upon the soft bed. Then he opened his eyes. Margalida stood near, gazing at him by the candle light with an expression of terror. It must be the early morning. The poor girl gave a gasp of fear as she grasped his arms with her trembling little hands.
"Don Jaime! Ay, Don Jaime!"
He had cried out like an insane man; he was leaning over the bed with an evident desire to fall to the floor, he had been talking about a wheel and a skull. "What is the matter, Don Jaime?"
The invalid felt the loving touch of gentle hands, which smoothed his disordered clothing, drew up the covers and tucked them around his shoulders, maternally, with the same caressing care as if he were a child.
Before sinking back into a state of mental confusion, before again passing through the fiery gateway of delirium, he saw close to his face the moist eyes of Margalida, which were ever growing more sad and tearful within their circles of blue. He felt the warm gust of her breath on his lips, and then he felt their thrill at a silky, moist contact, a light, timid caress, similar to the brushing of a wing. "Sleep, Don Jaime." The señor must sleep. And despite the respect with which she addressed him, her words possessed a murmur of affectionate intimacy, as if Don Jaime were to her a different man since the misfortune which had drawn them together.
The delirium of fever dragged the sick man through strange worlds, where not the slightest vestige of reality remained. He was in his solitary tower again. The gloomy fortress was no longer constructed of stone; it was formed of skulls joined like blocks of stone by a mortar of bonedust. Of bones also were the hill and the cliffs along the coast; white skeletons the lines of foam which crowned the breakers from the sea. Everything that his view embraced, trees and mountains, ships and distant islands, became an ossified, glacial landscape. Craniums with wings similar to those of cherubims in religious pictures fluttered through the heavens uttering through their fleshless jaws hoarse hymns to the great divinity who filled the whole space with the folds of his shroud, and whose bony head was lost in the clouds. He felt that invisible beings were ripping off his flesh in bleeding tatters, which, having adhered to him throughout a whole lifetime, drew from him shrieks of pain as they were torn away. Then he beheld himself a white skeleton, bleached and polished, and a far away voice seemed to murmur a horrible consecration in his ear-cavities. The moment of true greatness had arrived; he had ceased being a man to become converted into a corpse. The slave had passed through the great initiation, and had changed to a demigod. The dead command! It was only necessary to see with what superstitious respect, with what servile fear, the city dwellers saluted those who were passing into the great beyond. The powerful bare their heads in the presence of the dead beggar.
With the potent vision of his black and eyeless sockets, for which there was neither distance nor obstacle, he gazed upon the entire world. Dead, dead on every side! They filled everything. He beheld tribunals of men dressed in black, their eyes haughty and their gesture imposing, listening to the woes of their fellow creatures, while behind them stood an equal number of enormous skeletons, endowed with the grandeur of centuries, wrapped in togas, who were those who moved the hands of the judges as they wrote, and who dictated their sentences over their heads. The dead judge! He saw great halls of vertical light with concentric rows of seats, and on them hundreds of men speaking, vociferating and gesticulating, in the noisy task of making laws. Behind them crouched the real legislators, the dead, the deputies in their winding sheets, whose presence was unguessed by these men of grandiloquent vanity, who imagined that they ever spoke by their own inspiration. The dead legislate! In a moment of doubt it was sufficient for someone to recall what had been the opinion of the dead in former times in order to reëstablish calm, everyone accepting their opinion. The dead, eternal and immutable, were the only reality! Men of flesh and blood were a mere accident, an insignificant bubble bursting with ostentatious pride!
He saw white skeletons guarding like gloomy angels the gates of cities which they had built, watching the flock hemmed within, repelling as accursed the irresponsible madmen who refused to recognize their authority. He saw at the foot of great monuments, museum paintings, and shelves of books in the libraries, the mute grin of the craniums which seemed to say to men: "Admire us! This is our work, and all which you do will be after our example!" The entire world belonged to the dead. They reigned. The living, as they opened their mouths to receive food, masticated particles of those who had preceded them along the pathway of life; when they wished to feast their eyes and ears on beauty, art offered them works and precedents established by the dead. Even love suffered this servitude. Woman in modesty or in bursts of passion, which she deems spontaneous, unconsciously imitated her grandmothers, who had been temptresses with hypocritical modesty or frankly voluptuous, according to the epochs in which they lived.
In his delirium the sick man began to feel oppressed by the density and number of these beings, white and bony, with eyeless sockets and malevolent grins, skeletons of a vanished life, obstinately determined to continue to subsist, dominating everything. They were so many, so many! It was impossible to even stir. Febrer stumbled against their bare and prominent ribs, against the sharp angles of their hips; his ears vibrated with the dry creaking of their knee-pans. They overpowered him, they asphyxiated him; there were millions upon millions; all the ancestors of the human race! Finding no space whereon to set their feet, they stood in rows one upon another. They were a kind of in-coming tide of bones which rose and swelled until it reached the summit of the highest mountains and touched the clouds. Jaime was choking in this white inundation, hard and crackling. They trampled him underfoot; they weighed upon his chest with the heaviness of dead things. He was going to die! In his despair he clutched a hand which seemed to come from far away, appearing out of the shadows; the hand of a living being, a hand of flesh! He tugged at it and gradually in the fog the pale spot began to assume the form of a countenance. After his existence in a world of empty craniums and bleached bones this human face caused him the same sense of grateful surprise as that experienced by the explorer on meeting with one of his race after a long sojourn among savage tribes.
He tugged harder at the hand; the vagueness of the countenance became condensed, and he recognized Pablo Valls bending over him, moving his lips as if murmuring affectionate phrases which he could not hear. Again? The captain was always appearing in his delirium!
After this rapid vision the sick man sank back into unconsciousness. Now his stupor was more tranquil. His thirst, that horrible thirst, which had impelled him to reach his hands outside the bed and to draw his lips away from the emptied glass with a gesture of unsatisfied eagerness, now began to diminish. In his delirium he had seen clear streams, great silent rivers, which he could never reach, his limbs overcome by a painful paralysis. Now he beheld a luminous and foaming cataract rolling down against the background of his dream, and at last he could walk, he could approach it, seeing it more clearly at each step, feeling the cool caress of the moisture on his face.
From out the noise of this waterfall stifled voices reached his ears. Someone was talking of traumatic pneumonia again. "It is conquered." And a voice added joyfully: "That is good! We have a man again!" The invalid recognized this voice. Pablo Valls was ever reappearing in his delirium!
He continued on his way, attracted by the coolness of the water. He stood beneath the sonorous torrent and he thrilled with voluptuous shivers as he received on his back the force of the falling stream. A sensation of freshness overspread his body, causing him to sigh with pleasure. His limbs seemed to relax beneath the icy touch. His chest broadened, overcoming the oppression which had tortured him until a moment ago, as if the whole earth weighed upon his body. He felt the haze clearing away from his brain. He was still delirious, but his delirium was not pierced by scenes of terror and cries of anguish. It was, instead, a placid sleep, in which the body relaxed, and his thoughts took wing through pleasant horizons of optimism. The foam of the cascade was white, reflecting the colors of the rainbow on its facets of liquid diamonds. The sky was a rose tint, with distant music and mild perfumes. Something trembled mysteriously, invisible, and at the same time smiling, in this fantastic atmosphere; a supernatural force which seemed to beautify it with its contact. It was returning health!
The incessant waters falling over the cliffs, aroused in his memory former dreams. Once more the wheel, the immense wheel, the image of humanity, which turned and turned in its identical place, beginning one ascent after another, ever passing the same places.
The sick man, revived by the sensation of coolness, thought that he possessed a new sense of understanding.
Again he saw the wheel revolving through the infinite, but was it really stationary?
Doubt, the beginning of new truths, caused him to look with closer attention. Was it not a deception of his own eyes? Was it he who was mistaken, and were not those millions of beings who uttered shouts of joy in their whirling prison right in thinking that they realized a fresh advance with each whirl?
It was cruel for life to go on developing for hundreds of centuries in this deceptive agitation, concealing an actual inactivity. For what then the existence of created things? Had humanity no other purpose than to deceive itself, turning by its own effort the cylinder which imprisoned it, as birds by their springing cause the cage which is their prison to vibrate?
Now he no longer saw the wheel. Before his vision passed an enormous globe of bluish color, on which were marked the seas and continents with outlines like those he had seen on maps. It was the Earth! He, an imperceptible molecule in the immensity of space, an abject spectator of the stupendous representation of Nature, beheld the blue globe with its girdle of clouds.
It also was revolving like the fatal wheel. It turned and turned upon itself with exasperating monotony, but this movement which was the nearest, the most visible, that which all could appreciate, was insignificant. Another movement was the one of real importance. Above that of the monotonous rotation, ever around the same axis, was that of translation, which dragged the globe through the infinitude of space in eternal travel, never re-passing through the same place.
Curses on the wheel! Life was not an eternal revolution through identical situations! Only the shortsighted, seeing no farther beyond, as they contemplated this movement, could imagine that it was the only one. The earth itself was the image of life. It ever rotated through determined spaces of time; days and seasons were repeated, as, in the history of mankind, greatness and decline follow each other; but there was something more than all this; the movement of translation, which drew toward the infinite, ever forward, ever forward!
The theory of "the eternal re-beginning of things" was false. Men and events were repeated as are days and seasons on earth; but although everything seemed alike it was not really so. The outer form of objects might be similar, but the soul was different!
No; the wheel had vanished! Perish inactivity! The dead could not command! The world, in its forward movement, ran so fast that they could not sustain themselves upon its surface. They clutched at the crust with their bony claws, struggling for years, perhaps for centuries, to keep firm hold, but the velocity of the race finally cast them off, leaving in their wake a trail of broken bones, of dust, of nothing!
The world, filled with the living, traveled straight forward, never passing over the same place twice. Febrer had seen it appear on the horizon like a tear of luminous blue, then grow larger and larger, until it filled the whole of space, passing near him with the velocity of a rotating projectile; and now it was becoming smaller again, fleeing through the opposite extreme. Now it was a drop, a point, nothing—becoming lost in obscurity! Who knew whither it was bound, and why?
Futilely his ideas of a moment before, being now overcome, returned with the purpose of making a final protest, shouting that this movement of translation was equally false, and that the Earth turned like a wheel around the sun—no; neither was the sun stationary, but with all its familiar company of planets, it fell and fell, if it is possible in the infinite to fall without rising; it traveled on and on—who knows toward what destination, or for what purpose?
Definitely, abominating the wheel, he rent it to bits in his imagination, experiencing the joy of the convict who passes out through the door of his prison and breathes the air of freedom. He thought that scales fell from his eyes as from those of the Hebrew Apostle at Damascus. He beheld a new light. Man is free, and he can liberate himself from the dead by an effort, cutting the knot of slavery that has soldered him to these invisible despots.
He ceased dreaming; he sank into oblivion with the silent and intimate joy of the laborer resting after a profitable day's work.
When, after a long time, he re-opened his eyes, he found those of Pablo Valls fastened upon his. Valls was holding one of his hands, gazing at him affectionately with his amber pupils.
He could no longer doubt; it was reality! He detected the odor of English tobacco, which always seemed to float around his mouth and beard. Was it not then an illusion? Had he really seen him in the course of his delirium? Was it his actual voice which he had heard in the midst of his nightmares?
The captain burst into a laugh, displaying his long teeth, yellowed by the pipe.
"Ah, my fine fellow!" he exclaimed. "You're better, aren't you? The fever has gone; there is no longer any danger. The wounds are healed. You must feel the itching of a thousand demons in them; something as if you had a thousand wasps under the bandages. That is the formation of tissue, the new flesh which hurts as it grows."
Jaime realized the truth of these words. In the region of his wounds he felt an itching, a tension which contracted his flesh.
Valls read a supplication of curiosity in the eyes of his friend.
"Do not talk! Do not tire yourself! How long have I been here? About two weeks. I read about your accident in the Palma newspapers, and I came immediately. Your friend the Chueta will always be the same. What anxiety you have given us! Pneumonia, my boy, and in a dangerous form! You opened your eyes and you did not recognize me; you raved like a madman. But it's all over now! We have given you the best of care. Look! See who's here!"
He stepped away from the bed so that Febrer might see Margalida, hidden behind the captain, shrinking and timid, now that the señor could look at her with eyes free from fever. Ah, Almond Blossom! Jaime's glance, tender and sweet, brought a flush to her cheeks. She feared that the sick man might remember what she had done in the most critical moments, when she was almost sure that he was going to die.
"Now you must keep still," continued Valls. "I will stay here until we can go back to Palma together. You know me. I understand everything; I'll arrange it all. Eh? Do I make myself clear?"
The Chueta winked one eye and smiled mischievously, sure of his cleverness in guessing the desires of his friends.
Famous captain! Ever since his arrival at Can Mallorquí the entire family seemed dependent upon his orders, admiring him as a personage of immense power, tempered by eternal joviality.
Margalida blushed at his words and winks, but she was fond of him for being so devoted to his friend. She remembered his eyes brimming with tears one night when they thought Don Jaime was going to die. Valls had wept, while at the same time he muttered curses. The Little Chaplain adored that great gentleman from Majorca ever since he saw him burst out laughing on learning that his parents intended him to be a priest. Pèp and his wife followed him like obedient and submissive dogs.
Several afternoons Pablo and the sick man discussed past events.
Valls was a man quick in his decisions.
"You know that I never tire of doing for my friends. When I landed in Iviza I went to see the judge. Everything can be satisfactorily arranged. You are in the right, and everybody knows it—self defense! A few annoyances when you get well, but they won't amount to much. The matter of your health is decided also. What else is there? Ah, yes! There is something else, but I have that about settled also."
He laughed knowingly as he said this, pressing the hands of Febrer, who, on his part, wished to ask no more; fearful of suffering a disappointment.
Once, when Margalida entered the room, Valls grasped her by the arm and drew her near the couch.
"Look at her!" he said, with burlesque gravity, turning toward the sick man. "Is this the girl you love? They haven't succeeded in changing her, have they? Then give her your hand, stupid! What are you doing there, staring at her with those frightened eyes?"
Febrer clasped Margalida's right hand with both of his. Was it really true? His eyes sought those of the girl, which remained lowered, while emotion whitened her cheeks and made her nostrils palpitate.
"Now kiss each other," said Valls, gently shoving the girl toward Febrer.
But Margalida, as if she felt threatened by a danger, freed her hands, fleeing from the room.
"Good!" said the captain. "You'll kiss each other before very long—when I'm not around."
Valls declared himself in favor of this union. Did Febrer love her? Then go ahead. This was more logical than the marriage with his niece for her father's millions. Margalida was a fine woman. He understood these things; when Jaime should take her away from the island, and accustom her to different ways and to different dress, with the adaptability of woman, it would soon be impossible to recognize the former peasant girl.
"I have arranged your future, young inquisitor. You know that your friend the Jew always accomplishes what he undertakes. You have enough left in Majorca so that you can live modestly. Don't shake your head; I know that you want to work, and now more than ever since you are in love and mean to raise a family. You will work. We'll set up a business together; we can decide on that later. I always have my head crammed with projects. That's characteristic of my race. If you prefer to leave Majorca, I'll look for a situation for you abroad. You must think it over."
In all matters relating to the family of Can Mallorquí the captain spoke with the authority of a master. Pèp and his wife dared not disobey him. How could they argue with a señor who knew everything? The peasant farmer offered little resistance. Since Don Pablo desired the marriage of Margalida to the señor and gave his word that it would not bring misfortune to the girl, they might marry. It was a great sorrow for the two old people to see her leave the island, but they preferred this to having Febrer with them as a son-in-law, for he inspired them with a respect which they could not outlive.
The Little Chaplain was almost ready to kneel before Vall's. "And yet they say in Palma that Chuetas are bad!" he murmured. It was clear that those who said so were Majorcans—a people unjust and proud! The captain was a saint. Thanks to him, he would not have to go to the Seminary. He would be a peasant-farmer. Can Mallorquí would be left to him. He had even received the knife from his father, at the intercession of Don Pablo, and he was counting on the gift of a modern pistol promised by the captain, one of those marvelous weapons which he had admired in Palma in the show windows along the Borne. As soon as Margalida's marriage had taken place he would go throughout the district in search of a bride, wearing in his girdle two noble companions. The race of brave men must not die out on the island. In his veins coursed the heroic blood of his grandfather!
One sunny morning Febrer, leaning on Valls and Margalida, made his way with the step of a convalescent as far as the porch of the farmhouse. Seated in a great armchair he gazed fondly upon the tranquil landscape outspread before him. Upon the summit of the headland rose the Pirate's Tower. How much he had dreamed and suffered there! Now he loved it as he remembered that within it, alone and forgotten of the world, this passion, destined to fill the rest of a once aimless life, had originated.
Enfeebled by the long weeks in bed and by the loss of blood, he breathed in the warm atmosphere of the luminous morning pierced by the breezes which blew in from the sea.
Margalida, after contemplating Jaime with loving eyes, which still held something of timidity, went into the house to prepare the morning meal.
The two men remained long in silence. Valls had taken out his pipe, filling it with English tobacco, and expelling fragrant mouthfuls.
Febrer, with his gaze fixed on the landscape, his dazzled eyes embracing the sky, the hills, the fields, and the sea, spoke in a low voice, as if talking to himself.
Life was beautiful. He affirmed it with the conviction of one arisen from the grave who returns unexpectedly to the world. Man could move freely, the same as the bird and the insect, on the bosom of Nature. There was a place for all. Why confine oneself by the bonds which others had invented, tyrannizing over the future of the men who were to come after them? The dead, ever the accursed dead, trying to meddle in everything, complicating our existence!
Vall's smiled, looking at him with mischievous eyes. Several times he had heard him in his delirium talking of the dead, waving his arms as if fighting, trying to repel them with frightful struggles. As he listened to Jaime's explanations, as he realized his respect for the past and his submission to the influence of the dead that had stultified his life, and had banished him to a remote island, Vall's remained silent and lost in thought.
"Do you believe that the dead command, Pablo?"
The captain shrugged his shoulders. For him there was nothing absolute in the world. Perhaps the dominion of the dead was tottering and was already in its decadence. In other times they commanded like despots; there was no doubt of that. It might be that now they commanded only in some places, in others losing forever all hope of power. In Majorca they still governed with a strong hand; he said it, he, the Chueta. In other lands, perhaps not.
Febrer experienced deep annoyance as he recalled his mistakes and his worries. Accursed dead! Humanity could never be happy and free until they should cast off their power.
"Pablo, let us kill the dead!"
The captain looked at his friend for an instant with a certain anxiety, but seeing the serenity of his eyes he was reassured and said, smiling:
"Kill them, for all I care!"
Then, recovering his gravity, and leaning back in his chair, while he puffed a mouthful of smoke, the Chueta added: "You are right. Let us kill the dead! Let us crush beneath our feet all useless obstacles, old things that obstruct and complicate our pathway. We live according to the word of Moses, to the word of Jesus, of Mohammed, or of other shepherds of men, when the natural and logical thing would be to live according to what we ourselves think and feel."
Jaime glanced behind him, as if his eyes would seek in the interior of the house the sweet figure of Margalida. Then he thought over all his old anxieties and all the new truths to which he had awakened, repeating the same vigorous declaration: "Let us kill the dead!"
Pablo's voice aroused him from his reflections.
"Would you have married my niece in your present state of mind, without fear or compunction?"
Febrer hesitated before replying. Yes, he would have married her, regardless of the scruples which had caused him so much suffering; yet something was lacking for the fulfillment of that union; something which was above the will of man, superior to his power, something which could not be bought and which ruled the world; something which the humble Margalida unconsciously brought with her.
His troubles had ended. Now for a new life!
No; the dead do not command! It is life that commands, and above life, love!