The Dead Command Part 19

"Margalida! Margalida!"

After these exclamations, which aroused the girl's curiosity, making her raise her eyes to fix them questioningly on his, he at last began to speak, asking her about the progress of the courting. Had she decided on anyone? Who was to be the lucky man? The Ironworker? the Minstrel?

She lowered her eyes again, in her confusion picking up a corner of her ap.r.o.n and raising it to her bosom. She did not know. She hesitated and lisped like a child in her bashfulness. She did not wish to marry--neither the Minstrel or the Ironworker, nor anybody. She had acquiesced in the courting because all girls did the same when they reached a certain age. Besides (here she flushed vividly), it gave her a kind of satisfaction to humiliate her friends, who were raging with envy on seeing the great number of her suitors. She was grateful to the youths who came from great distances to see her, but as for loving one of them--or marrying----

She had slackened her pace as she spoke. Pep's wife and his son pa.s.sed on unconsciously, and as the two were left alone in the path, they at last stopped, without realizing what they were doing.

"Margalida! Almond Blossom!"

To the devil with shyness! Febrer felt arrogant and masterful as in his better days. Why this fear? A peasant girl! A child!

He spoke with a firm accent, trying to fascinate her with the impa.s.sioned fixedness of her eyes, drawing near her, as if to caress her with the music of his words. And how about him? What did Margalida think of him? What if he should present himself to Pep some day, telling him that he wished to marry his daughter?

"You!" exclaimed the girl. "You, Don Jaime!"

She raised her eyes fearlessly, laughing at the absurdity--the senor was accustomed to fooling her with his jests. Her father said that the Febrers were all as serious as judges, but ever in a good humor. He was jesting at her expense again, as he had done when he had told about his clay sweetheart up there in his tower who had been waiting for him a thousand years.

But when her glance met Febrer's, seeing his pale face, tense with emotion, she turned white also. He seemed a different man; she saw a Don Jaime she had never known before. Instinctively, impelled by fear, she took a step backward. She remained on the defensive, leaning against the slender trunk of a small tree, which grew beside the path, its tiny sickly colored leaves almost loosened by the autumn wind.

She could still smile--a forced smile, pretending to believe it one of the senor's jokes.

"No," replied Febrer with energy, "I am speaking seriously. Tell me, Margalida, Almond Blossom, what if I should become one of your lovers; and if I should come to the courting, what would you answer me?"

She shrunk back against the yielding tree trunk, making herself smaller, as if she would escape those ardent eyes. Her instinctive backward step shook the flexible tree and a shower of yellow leaves, like flakes of amber, fell roundabout her, clinging to her hair. Pale, her lips compressed and blue, she murmured words scarcely more audible than a gentle sigh. Her eyes, enlarged and deep, bore the agonized expression of the humble of spirit who think many things, but who find no words to express them. He, the heir of the Febrers, a gran senor, to marry a peasant girl? Was he crazy?

"No; I am not a great senor; I am an unfortunate creature. You are richer than I, who am living off your charity. Your father wishes your husband to be a man who shall cultivate his lands. Will you marry me, Margalida? Do you love me, Almond Blossom?"

With bowed head, avoiding a glance that seemed to burn her, she continued speaking without listening to him. Madness! It could not be true! The senor to say such things! He must be dreaming!

Suddenly she felt on one of her hands a light, caressing touch. She looked at him again. She saw an unfamiliar face that thrilled her. She experienced a sensation of grave danger--the nervous start which gives a warning. Her knees shook, they contracted as if she were about to faint with fear.

"Do you think me too old?" he murmured in a supplicating voice. "Can you never come to love me?"

The voice was sweet and caressing, but those eyes seemed to devour her!

That pale face, like that of men who kill! She longed to speak, to protest at his last words. She had never thought of Don Jaime's age; he was something superior, like the saints, who grow in beauty with the years. But fear held her silent. She freed herself from the caressing hand, she felt moved by the prodigious rebound of her nerves, as if her life were in danger, and she fled from Febrer as if he were an a.s.sa.s.sin.

"Heaven help me!"

Murmuring this supplication she sprang away, and began to run with the agility of the country girl, disappearing round a turn in the path.

Jaime did not follow her. He stood motionless in the solitude of the pine forest, erect in the pathway, unconscious of his surroundings, like the hero of a legend subjected to an enchantment. Then he pa.s.sed a hand over his face, as if awakening from a dream, collecting his thoughts.

His audacious words stung him with remorse, Margalida's alarm, the terrified flight which had terminated the interview. How stupid of him!

It was the result of his going to the city; the return to civilized life which, had upset his bachelor calm, arousing pa.s.sions of long ago; the conversation of the young soldiers, who lived with their thoughts ever fixed on women. But no; he did not repent what he had done. It was important for Margalida to know what he had so often vaguely thought in the isolation of his tower.

He continued slowly along his way to avoid meeting the family from Can Mallorqui. Margalida had joined her mother and brother. He saw them from a rise of ground, when they were journeying through the valley in the direction of the farmhouse.

Febrer changed his route, avoiding Can Mallorqui. He directed his steps toward the Pirate's Tower, but when he gained it he pa.s.sed on, not stopping until he reached the sea.

The rock-bound coast, which seemed to overhang the waters, was broken by their incessant las.h.i.+ng for century upon century. The waves, like furious blue bulls, charged, frothing with anger, against the rock, wearing deep caverns, which were prolonged upward in the form of vertical cracks. This age-long battle was destroying the coast, shattering its stony armor, scale by scale. Colossal wall-like fragments loosened. They first separated by forming an imperceptible crevice which grew and grew with the pa.s.sing of centuries. The natural wall leaned for years and years above the waves, which beat furiously at its base, until it would lose its balance some stormy night and topple like the rampart of a besieged citadel, crumbling into blocks, peopling the sea with new reefs soon to be covered with slimy vegetation, while the winding pa.s.sages would seethe with foam and sparkle with the metallic gleam of fish.

Febrer seated himself on the edge of a great projecting rock, a ledge loosened from the coast that inclined boldly over the reefs. His fatalism impelled him to sit there. Would that the inevitable catastrophe might take place at that moment, and that his body, dragged down by the collapsing rock, might disappear in the bottom of the sea, having for its sarcophagus this ma.s.s, equal to the pyramid of a Pharaoh!

What had he to look forward to in life?

Before sinking out of sight the setting sun peeped through an opening of stormy sky lying between riven clouds. It was a gory sphere, a wafer of purple which lightened the immensity of the sea with a fiery glare. The dark ma.s.ses closing in the horizon were fringed with scarlet. A restless triangle of flames spread over the dark green waters. The foam turned red and the coast looked for an instant like molten lava.

In the glow of this stormy light Jaime contemplated the fluctuation of the waters at his feet, hurling their boisterous swirls into the hollows of the rock, roaring and writhing, frothing with anger in the winding pa.s.sages between the reefs. In the depths of this greenish ma.s.s, illuminated by the setting sun with transparencies of opal, he saw strange vegetation growing on the rocks, diminutive forests among whose clinging fronds moved animals of fantastic form, nervous and swift or torpid and sedentary, with hard carapaces, gray and pinkish, bristling with defenses, armed with tentacles, with lances and with horns, making war among themselves and persecuting the weaker creatures which pa.s.sed like white exhalations, flas.h.i.+ng like crystal in the rapidity of their flight.

Febrer felt belittled by the solitude. Faith in his human importance destroyed, he considered himself no bigger than one of those tiny creatures swarming about in the vegetation of the submarine abyss--perhaps even smaller. Those animals were armed for life, they could sustain themselves by their own strength, never knowing the discouragement, the humiliations and the sorrows which afflicted him.

The grandeur of the sea, unconscious of man, cruel and implacable in its anger, overwhelmed Febrer, arousing in his memory an endless chain of ideas which were perhaps new, but which he accepted as vague reminiscences of a former existence, as something which he had thought before, he knew not where nor when.

A thrill of respect, of instinctive devotion, swept over him, making him forget the event of a short time before, submerging him in religious contemplation. The sea! He thought, he knew not why, of the most remote ancestors of humanity, of primitive man, miserable, scarcely emerged from original animalism, tormented and repelled on every side by a nature hostile in its exhuberance, as a young and vigorous body conquers or throws off the parasites which endeavor to live at the cost of its organism. On the sh.o.r.e of the sea, in the presence of the divine mystery, green and immense, man should experience his most restful moments. The earliest G.o.ds sprung from the bosom of the waters; contemplating the fluctuation of the waves, and soothed by their murmur, man should feel that within him is born something new and powerful--a soul. The sea! The mysterious organisms which people it also live, as do those of the land, subjected to the tyranny of fear, immovable in their primitive existence, repeating themselves throughout the centuries as if ever the same ent.i.ty. There also do the dead command! The strong pursue the weak, and are in their turn devoured by others more powerful, as in the times of their remote progenitors, when the waters were yet warm from the formation of the globe--ever the same, repeating themselves throughout hundreds of millions of years. A monster of prehistoric ages who might return to swim in these waters would find on all sides, in the dark chasms, and along the coasts, the same life and the identical struggles as in his youth. The animal of combat with his green carapace, armed with curving claws and with forceps for torture, implacable warrior of the dark submarine caverns, has never united with the graceful fish, swift and weak, which trails its rose and silver tunic through the transparent waters. His destiny is to devour, to be strong, and, if he should find himself disarmed, his defenses broken, to give himself up to misfortune without protest and to perish. Death is preferable to abdicating one's primal rights, the n.o.ble fatality of birth. For the strong of the land or of the sea there is no satisfaction nor life outside one's own sphere; they are slaves of their own greatness; birth brings them misfortunes as well as honors, and it will ever be the same! The dead are the only ones who rule the living. The first beings who initiated a plan for living wrought with their acts the cage in which succeeding generations must be imprisoned.

The tranquil mollusks which he now saw in the depths of the waters, clinging to the rocks like dark b.u.t.tons, seemed to him divine beings who guard the mystery of creation in their stupid quiet. He imagined them great and imposing like those monsters wors.h.i.+pped by savages for their impa.s.sivity, and in whose rigidity they believe they divine the majesty of the G.o.ds. Febrer recalled his jests of other times, on nights of feasting, seated before a plate of fresh oysters, in the fas.h.i.+onable Parisian restaurants. His elegant companions thought him mad as they listened to the nonsensical ideas aroused by wine, the sight of the sh.e.l.l fish and the recollection of certain fragmentary reading in his youth. "We're going to eat our grandfathers like the merry cannibals that we are." The oyster is one of the primitive manifestations of life on the planet--one of the earlier forms of organic matter, still resting, uncertain and aimless in its evolution in the immensity of the waters. The sympathetic and slandered monkey only has the importance of a first cousin who has failed to make a career for himself, of an unfortunate and absurd relative whom one leaves outside the door, feigning ignorance of his family name, denying him a welcome. The mollusk is the venerable grandfather, the chief of the house, the creator of the dynasty, the ancestor crowned with a n.o.bility of millions of centuries. These thoughts came back to Febrer's mind now with the vividness of indisputable truths.

Humanity is faithful to its sources. n.o.body denies the traditions of those venerable ancestors who seemed to be asleep in the immense catacomb of the sea. Man thinks himself free because he can move from one side of the planet to the other; because his organism is mounted upon two agile and articulate columns which permit of his springing over the ground by the mechanism of walking--but, it is an error! One more of many illusions which deceptively gladden our lives, making us bearers of its misery and its triviality! Febrer was convinced that we are all born shut in between two valves of prejudices, of scruple, and of pride, an inheritance from those who proceeded us, and although man stirs about, he never manages to tear himself from the same rock to which his predecessors clung and vegetated. Activity, incidents of life, independence of character, all are illusions, the vanity of the mollusk which dreams while adhering to the rock, and imagines he is swimming through all the seas on the globe, while his valves continue fastened to the stone!

All creatures are as those who have gone before, and as those yet to come. They change in shape, but the soul remains stationary and immutable like that of those rudimentary beings, eternal witnesses of the first palpitation of life on the planet, which seemed to be sleeping the heaviest of sleeps; and thus will it ever be. Vain are great efforts to free oneself from this fatal environment, from the heritage of fear, from the circle in which we are forced to move, until at last comes death. Then other animals like ourselves appear, and begin whirling around the same circle, imagining themselves free because ever before their footsteps they have new s.p.a.ce in which to run.

"The dead command!" Jaime once more declared to himself. It seemed impossible that men do not realize this great truth; that they dwell in eternal night, believing that they make new things in the glow of illusions which rise daily, as rises the great deception of the sun to accompany us through the infinite, which is dark, but which seems to us blue and radiant with light.

When Febrer thought this, the sun had already set. The sea was almost black, the sky a leaden gray, and in the fog on the horizon the lightning quivered and flashed. Jaime felt on his face and on his hands the moist kiss of drops of rain. A storm was about to break which perhaps would last throughout the night. The lightning flashes were coming nearer, a distant cras.h.i.+ng was heard, as if two hostile fleets were cannonading beyond the curtain of fog on the horizon, and approaching each other behind its screen. The sheet of quiet water, glossy as crystal between reefs and coast, began to tremble with the widening undulations of the raindrops.

In spite of this he did not stir. He remained seated on the rock, experiencing a fierce anger against fate, rebelling with all the strength of his nature at the tyranny of the past. Why should the dead command? Why should they darken the atmosphere with the dust of their souls, like powdered bone lodging in the brains of the living, imposing the old ideas?

Suddenly Febrer experienced an overwhelming impression, as if he beheld an extraordinary light, never before seen. His brain seemed to dilate, to expand like a ma.s.s of water bursting an encompa.s.sing vessel of stone.

At that instant a lightning flash colored the sea with livid light, and a thunder clap burst above his head, its echoes rattling with awesome reverberation over the expanse of the sea, in the caverns, and over the hilltops along the sh.o.r.e.

No, the dead do not command! The dead do not rule! As if he were a different man, Jaime ridiculed his recent thoughts. Those rudimentary animals which he had seen among the rocks, and with them all creatures of the sea and of the earth, suffer the slavery of fear. The dead rule them because they do the same things which their ancestors did, the same things their descendants will do. But man is not the slave of fear; he is its collaborator and sometimes its master. Man is a progressive and reasoning being, and can change his condition to suit his desires. Man was a slave to his surroundings in former times, in remote ages, but when he conquered nature and exploited her, he burst the fatal bondage in which other created things still remain prisoners. What matters to him the fear in which he has been born? He can make himself over anew if he will.

Jaime could not continue his reflections. Rain was streaming over the brim of his hat, running down his back. Night had suddenly come. By the glare of the lightning he saw the glazed surface of the sea trembling with the beating of the rain.

Febrer made all haste toward his tower, but he was happy, eager to run, with the overflowing joy of one emerging from long imprisonment and who has not before him s.p.a.ce enough for his repressed activity.

"I will do what I please!" he shouted, rejoicing at the sound of his own voice, which was lost in the clamor of the storm. "Neither dead nor living shall rule me! What do I care for my n.o.ble forefathers, for my moth-eaten prejudices, for all the Febrers?"

Suddenly he was enveloped in a carmine light, and a cannon-shot burst above his head, as if the coast had been rent asunder by the shock of an immense catastrophe.

"That must have struck near here," said Jaime, referring to the electric flash.

His mind occupied with the Febrers, he thought of his ancestor the knight commander Don Priamo. The explosion of thunder recalled to his mind the combats of the diabolical hero, the religious cavalier of the Cross, a mocker of G.o.d and of the devil who always followed his sovereign will, fighting on the side of his kindred, or living among the enemies of the Faith, according to his caprices or his affections.

No! Febrer did not repudiate him. He adored the valorous knight commander; he was his true forbear, the best of them all, the rebel, the demon of the family!

Jaime entered the tower and struck a light; he flung around his shoulders the Arabian haik of coa.r.s.e weave that served him for his nocturnal excursions, and taking a book he tried to distract himself until Pepet should bring his supper.

The storm seemed to be centered on the island. The rain fell on the fields, converting them, into marshes; it rushed down the declivities of the roadways, overflowing like rivers; it soaked the mountains like great sponges through the porous soil of the pine forest and thickets.

The flare of the lightning gave hasty glimpses, like visions in a dream, of the blackish sea, the fretting foam, and flooded fields, which seemed filled with fiery fish, the trees glistening beneath their watery mantles.