Darles flushed red and began to tremble. He let the curtain fall, and took refuge at the rear of the outer box. His first impulse was to escape; but presently he changed his mind, for it seemed to him more than a little rude to take French leave. The student thought he was bored, but in reality he was afraid. In spite of his agitation, he waited. And bit by bit the magic spell of the opera took possession of him and freed him from embarra.s.sment.

The piece now going on was one of those romantic, wholly lyric poems in which the actors are everything. The environment about them, the sense of objectivity, played no role. The 'cellos, sighing with la.s.situde and pity, lamented in gentle accord; the violins cut through the harmony with sharp cries of rebellion and gay arpeggios. And the voice of the tenor rose above that many-toned, protean, orchestrated poem with warm persuasion, wailing into inconsolable laments.

Enrique got up again, and once more timidly drew apart the curtains of the outer box. n.o.body noticed him. Alicia still sat there with her back toward him, transfixed by the fairy magic of the opera. Her emotions seemed almost to transpire through the white skin of her back and shoulders. Enrique Darles once more began to tremble. His ideas grew fantastic. When he had seen the young woman's eyes, they had appeared two emeralds; and now the emeralds twinkling beneath the blaze of her hair seemed to be looking at him like two pupils. But this absurdity soon faded from his mind. The orchestra was languorously beginning a _ritornelle_; and all through the main motif independent musical phrases were strung like beads. These slid into chromatics, rising, beating up to lose themselves in one vast chord of agony supreme. And, in that huge lamentation, there mingled depths of disillusion, whispers of hope, desires and wearinesses, laughter and grimaces--the whole of life, indeed, seemed blent there, swift-pa.s.sing, tragic, knotted in the bitterness of everything that ever has been and that still must be.

Enrique sat down again. Nameless suffering clutched his throat, so that he felt a profound desire for tears. Like a motion-picture film, both past and present flashed across his vision in swift flight. His poor, old father and the little chemist's shop at home appeared before him--the miserable shop that hardly eked out a penurious living for the old man. Then he saw himself, as soon as his studies should be finished, condemned to go back to that hateful, monotonous little town. There he would labor to pay back his parents everything they had given him; and there all his years of youth, all his love-illusions, all his artistic inspirations would soon fade. There he must bury all the finest of his soul. Then, no doubt, he would marry and have children; and then--well, life would stretch out into a long, straight line, unwavering, with never any depths or heights, lost in the monotony of a blank desert.

What could be more terrible than to know just what we are destined to be in ten years, in twenty years, in thirty?

The poor student tugged at his hair, in desperation, and tears blurred his sight. How he would have loved to be rich, to have no family, to be the sport of the unforeseen! For is not the unforeseen pregnant with all the vicissitudes of poetry? He felt the blood of conquerors pulsing in his arteries, the energies of bold adventurers who dare brave perils and emprise, and leave their bones on far-off sh.o.r.es. This fighting strain, this crave for danger, filled him with boundless melancholy as he reflected that he must live on, on to old age, and do no differently than all other men do, year by year. Destiny meant for him no more than this: to follow a costly, hard and tedious career merely that he might make a pittance, get a wife and find some hole or corner to live in--some poor, mean little house in a world of palaces, some commonplace love in a world throbbing with so many pa.s.sions, some paltry dole in a world crowded with so many fortunes!

Whipped by the music, the foolish grief of Enrique Darles broke into sobs.

Now the second act was done, and Don Manuel and Alicia came into the outer box. The young woman's eyes--green, eloquent eyes--filled with astonishment.

"What?" she asked. "You're crying?"

Before the student could answer, she turned to her companion and said:

"What do you think about that, now? He's been crying!"

In shame, Enrique answered:

"I don't know. I--I'm upset. But--yes, maybe----"

She smiled, and asked:

"You've got a sweetheart, haven't you?"

"No, no, Senorita."

"Well then, why----?"

"It's all foolishness, I know, but every time I hear music--even bad music--it makes me sad."

"That's funny! _I_ don't feel that way!"

The red-faced, thick-set Don Manuel shrugged his square shoulders as much as to say it mattered nothing, and introduced them to each other.

Enrique's feverish hand held for a moment the cool, soft hand--snow and velvet--of Little Goldie. Then all three sat down on the same divan, Alicia between the two men. Don Manuel drew out his cigar-case.

"Smoke?" asked he.

"No, thanks."

"Good boy!" exclaimed the deputy. "You haven't any vices, have you?"

"What?" asked Alicia. "You don't smoke?"

"No, Senorita."

"How funny you are! Well, _I_ do!"

Enrique blushed again, and looked down. He saw quite clearly that this little detail made the beggarliness of his clothes even more noticeable.

Women always seem to like a man to smoke. Tobacco is their best perfume.

The student felt furious at himself. To regain countenance before this girl he would gladly have consumed all the Egyptian or Turkish cigarettes in Don Manuel's case. But it was too late, now. Opportunity was gone; opportunity, that master-magic which endues everything with grace and worth.

The young woman's self-possession was quite English in its cool perfection as she lighted up and fell to smoking, with one leg crossed over the other. She leaned her shoulders against the dun-hued back of the divan. And now, all about her diabolical, reddish-gold hair, the cigarette-smoke mounted thinly on the quiet air, and wove blue veils.

Darles observed her, from the corner of his eye. Her face was aquiline, with wide nostrils, with a little blood-red, cruel mouth and a low forehead that gave the impression of hard, instinctive selfishness. Her big, greenish eyes peered out with boredom and command. Her whole expression was cold, keen, probing, pitiless.

A string of seed-pearls girdled her soft, rosy throat. Her fingers blazed with the fire of her rings. Her nails were sharp as claws. In the well-harmonized rhythms of her every att.i.tude, in all her perfect modelings, in every nuance and detail of her--wonderful plaything for men's dalliance--Enrique, untutored country boy though he was, discerned a supremely selfish ego. He realized this woman was one of those emotionless creatures of willfulness, wholly self-centered, who are incapable of sorrow.

Don Manuel's mood was brusque, with that brusquerie of a rich, healthy man who has a pretty woman in tow, as he exclaimed:

"Well now, Enrique, how do you like my Little Goldie? I bet you never saw anything like her, back home!" Triumphantly he added: "She doesn't cost much, either. When I first met her, I asked: 'What shall I give you?' She answered: 'A box at the Teatro Real.' Why, that's a bagatelle!

Only a little more than thirteen hundred pesetas for fourteen plays. And here we are. I tell you the little lady doesn't ask much."

Darles answered nothing. His emotions choked him--the novelty of this new world that till now he had not even known by hearsay; a topsy-turvy, unmoral world where, as in art, beauty formed the only criterion of worth; a world where women sold themselves for an opera-box.

All this time Alicia Pardo had been studying Enrique. The downright frankness of her look was alarming in its amus.e.m.e.nt. Enrique's extreme youth; the simplicity of his answers; the Apollo-like perfection of his features; the obsidian hue of his wavy hair which marked him as from the south of Spain; the black ardor of eyes, that in their eager curiosity contrasted with the boyish smoothness of his face; yes, even his p.r.o.neness to blush, had all greatly interested her. Above all, Alicia found her attention wakened by the artistic spirit in him, which had wept at the sound of the music. Alicia had never seen men weep except through jealousy, or through some other even baser and more ign.o.ble emotion. Therefore in the tears of this boy she discovered something wonderful and great.

And through her little head, all filled with curious whims, the idea drifted that it would be pa.s.sing strange and sweet to let herself be loved by such a boy. Suddenly she exclaimed:

"What are _you_ doing in Madrid?"

"I'm studying."

"Ah, indeed? A student, eh? I read a novel, a while ago, that I liked very much indeed. The hero was a student. Quite a coincidence, eh?"

Darles nodded "Yes." The childish simplicity of the remark amazed him.

Goldie went on:

"How old are you?"

"Twenty."

"Honest and true?"

"Fact! Why? Maybe I look older?"

"No, you don't. Younger, I think. I'm not quite nineteen, but _I_ do look older."

Don Manuel had opened a newspaper, and was reading the latest market quotations. Alicia felt a desire to know the boy's name. She asked him what it was.

"Enrique?" she repeated. "That's a pretty name. Very!"

Then she grew silent a while, remembering all the Enriques she had ever known--and there had been plenty of them. She recalled they'd all been nice. Thus, reviewing her life-history, she reached her childish years; quiet years of peace, lived in the Virgilian simplicity of the country.

And she seemed to see in this boy, innocent, healthy and sun-browned, something of what she herself had been.

Quite beside himself with new emotions, ecstatic and open-mouthed, the student looked at her, too, like a man studying some unusually beautiful work of art.