The Torrent Part 21

"Rafael, you don't know _Die Walkure_, do you? You've never heard the Spring Song?"

He shook his head. And Leonora, with her eyes still gazing moonward, her head resting back against her arms, which escaped in all their round, pearly strength from her drooping sleeves, spoke slowly, collecting her memories, recreating in her mind's eye that Wagnerian scene of such intense poetry--the glorification and the triumph of Nature and Love.

Hunding's hut, a barbaric dwelling, hung with savage trophies of the chase, suggesting the brutish existence of man scarcely yet possessed of the world, in perpetual strife with the elements and with wild animals.

The eternal fugitive, forgotten of his father,--Sigmund by name, though he calls himself "Despair," wandering years and years through the forests, harra.s.sed by beasts of prey who take him for one of themselves in his covering of skins, rests at last at the foot of the giant oak that sustains the hut; and as he drinks the hidromel in the horn offered to him by the sweet Siglinda, he gazes into her pure eyes and for the first time becomes aware that Love exists.

The husband, Hunding, the wild huntsman, takes leave of him at the end of the rustic supper: "Your father was the Wolf, and I am of the race of Hunters. Until the break of day, my house protects you; you are my guest; but as soon as the sun rises in the heavens you become my enemy, and we will fight.... Woman, prepare the night's drink; and let us be off to bed."

And the exile sits alone beside the fireplace, thinking of his immense loneliness. No home, no family, not even the magic sword promised him by his father the Wolf. And at daybreak, out of the hut that shelters him the enemy will come to slay him. The thought of the woman who allayed his thirst, the sparkle of those pure eyes wrapping him in a gaze of pity and love, is the one thing that sustains him.... She comes to him when her wild consort has fallen asleep. She shows him the hilt of the sword plunged into the oak by the G.o.d Wotan; n.o.body can pull it out: it will obey only the hand of him to whom it has been destined by the G.o.d.

As she speaks the wandering savage gazes at her in ecstasy, as if she were a white vision revealing to him the existence of something more than might and struggle in the world. It is the voice of Love. Slowly he draws near; embraces her; clasps her to his heart, while the door is pushed open by the breeze and the green forest appears, odorous in the moonlight--nocturnal Springtime, radiant and glorious, wrapped in a mantle of music and perfume.

Siglinda shudders. "Who has come in?" No one--and yet, a Stranger has entered the hovel, opening the door with an invisible hand. And Sigmund, at the inspiration of Love, divines the ident.i.ty of the visitant. "It is Springtime laughing in the air about your tresses. The storms are gone; gone is the dark solitude. The radiant month of May, a young warrior in an armor of flowers, has come to give chase to bleak Winter, and in all this festival of rejoicing Nature, seeks his sweetheart: Youth. This night, which has brought you to me, is the unending night of Spring and Youth."

And, Leonora was thrilled as she heard in her memory the murmur of the orchestra accompanying the song of tenderness inspired by Spring; the rustle of the forest branches benumbed by the winter, now swaying with the new sap that had flowed into them like a torrent of vitality; and out on the brightly lighted _plazoleta_ she could almost see Sigmund and Siglinda clasping in an eternal unseverable embrace, as she had seen them from the wings of the opera, where she would be waiting as a Valkyrie to step out and set an audience wild with her mighty "_Hojotoho!"_

She was feeling the same loneliness and yearning that Sigmund felt in Hunding's hovel. Without a family, without a home, wandering over the world, she longed for someone to lean on, someone to clasp tenderly to her heart! And it was she who unconsciously, instinctively, had drawn closer to Rafael, and placed her hand in his.

She was ill. She sighed softly with the appealing entreaty of a child, as if the intense poetry of that memory of music had shattered the frail remnant of will that had kept her mistress of herself.

"I don't know what's the matter with me to-night. I feel as though I were dying.... But such a sweet death! So sweet!... What madness, Rafael! How rash it was of us to have seen each other on such a night!..."

And with supplicating eyes, as if entreating forgiveness, she gazed out into the majestic moonlight, where the silence seemed to be stirring with the palpitation of a new life. She could divine that something was dying within her, that her will lay prostrate on the ground, without strength to defend itself.

Rafael, too, was overwhelmed. He held her clasped against his breast, one of her hands in his. She was weak, languid, will-less, incapable of resistance; yet he did not feel the brutal pa.s.sion of the previous meeting; he did not dare to move. A sense of infinite tenderness came over him. All he yearned for was to sit there hour after hour in contact with that beautiful form, clasping her tightly to him, making her one with him, as a jewel-case might guard a jewel.

He whispered mysteriously into her ear, hardly knowing what he was saying; tender words that seemed to be coming from someone within him, thrilling him with a tingling, suffocating pa.s.sion as they left his lips.

Yes, it was true; that night was the night dreamed of by the immortal Poet; the wedding night of smiling Youth and of martial May in his armor of flowers. The fields were quivering voluptuously under the rays of the moon; and they, two young hearts, feeling the flutter of Love's wings about their hair, why should they sit unresponsive there, blind to the beauty of the night, deaf to the infinite caress that was echoing from all around?

"Leonora! Leonora!" moaned Rafael.

He had slipped down from the bench. Before he was aware of it, he found himself kneeling at her feet, clutching her hands, and thrusting his face upward without daring to reach her lips.

She drew weakly back, protesting feebly, with a girlish plaint:

"No, no; it would hurt me.... I feel that I'm dying."

"You belong to me," the youth continued with an exaltation ill-suppressed. "You belong to me forever; to gaze into your dear eyes, and to murmur in your ear, your sweet, beautiful, name, and die, if need be, here. What do we care for the world and its opinions?"

And Leonora with weakening resistance, continued to refuse:

"No, no.... I must not. It's a feeling I can't explain."

And that was so. The gentle quiver of Nature under the kiss of Springtime, the intense perfume of the flower that is the emblem of virginity, had transfigured that madcap singer, that adventuress of a career so checkered, who had been violently thrust into her first experience of pa.s.sion, and now for the first time felt the blush of modesty in the arms of a man. Nature, intoxicating her, shattering her will, seemed to have created a strange virginity in that body so familiar with the call of pa.s.sion.

"Oh, Rafael, what is happening to me?... What's happening to me? It must be love; a new love that I did not think I should ever know.... Rafael ...

Rafael, my own boy!"

And weeping softly, she took his head in her hands, pressed her lips to his, and then fell back in her seat with eyes distended, maddened with the joy of that kiss.

"I belong to you, Rafael! Yours ... but forever. I have always loved you from the first, but now ... I adore you.... For the first time in my life I say that with all my soul."

Hardly able to realize his good fortune, Rafael was thrilled by a deeply generous sentiment. There was nothing he would not give to that woman....

"Yes; you belong to me forever.... I will marry you."

But in his dreamy, wild intoxication he saw the artiste's eyes open wide in surprise, as a sad smile flitted across her lips.

"Marry me And why?... That's well enough for other women; but me you must love, my darling child, ever so much, as much as you can.... Just love me!... I believe only in Love!"

V

"But my dear child, when are we getting to this island of yours?... It bores me to be here sitting on this seat, so far away from my little boy, watching his arms get tired from all that rowing. I must kiss him..

even if he says no! It will rest him, I am sure."

And rising to her feet, Leonora took two steps forward in the white boat, though threatening to upset it, and kissed Rafael several times.

He lay aside the oars and laughingly defended himself.

"Madcap! We'll never get there at this rate. With rests like this we make very little progress, and I've promised to take you to my island."

Once again he bent to the oars, heading out toward midstream over the moonlit water, as if to vouchsafe the groves on either bank an equal pleasure in the romantic escapade.

It had been one of her caprices--a desire repeated during his visits to the Blue House on some afternoons, in the presence of dona Pepa and the maid, and on every night, as he pa.s.sed through the opening in the hedge where Leonora's bare arms were waiting for him in the darkness.

For more than a week Rafael had been living in a sweet dream. Never had he imagined that life could be so beautiful. It was a mood of delicious abstraction. The city no longer existed for him. The people that moved about him seemed like so many spectres: his mother and Remedios were invisible beings. Their words he would hear and answer without taking the trouble to look up.

He spent his days in feverish impatience for night to come--that the family might finish supper and leave him free to go to his room, whence he would cautiously tip-toe, as soon as the house was silent and everybody was asleep.

Indifferent to everything foreign to his love, he did not realize the effect his conduct was having on his mother. She had noticed that his door was locked all morning while he slept off the fatigue of a sleepless night. She had already tired of asking him whether he was ill, and of getting the same reply:

"No, mama; I've been working nights; an important study I'm preparing."

It was all his mother could do on such occasions to restrain herself from shouting "Liar!" Two nights she had gone up to his room, to find the door locked and the keyhole dark. Her son was not inside. She would lie awake for him now; and every morning, somewhat before dawn, she would hear him softly open the outside door and tip-toe up the stairs, perhaps in his stocking-feet.

The female Spartan said nothing however, h.o.a.rding her indignation in silence, complaining only to don Andres of the recrudescence of a madness that was upsetting all her plans. Through his numerous henchmen the counselor kept watch upon the young man. His spies followed Rafael cautiously through the night, up to the gate of the Blue House.

"What a scandal!" exclaimed dona Bernarda. "At night, too! He'll wind up by bringing her into this house! Can it be that that simpleton of a dona Pepita is blind to all this?"

And there was Rafael, unaware of the storm that was gathering about his head, no longer deigning even to speak to Remedios, or look at her, as with her head bowed like a sulky goat, she went around stifling her tears at the memory of those happy strolls in the orchard under dona Bernarda's surveillance.

The deputy had eyes for nothing outside of the Blue House; his happiness had blinded him. The one thing that annoyed him was the necessity of hiding his joy--his inability to make his good fortune public, so that all his admirers might learn of it.

He would willingly have gone back to the days of the Roman decadence, when the love affairs of the powerful became matters of national adoration.