To an Angel · IV

Nevertheless, of the three of the brood, one was already beginning to long to poke his snout out, to dream of gambols, sports, and scampers across the green meadow, which at the foot of the tree spread out cheerful and inviting, enamelled with various flowers and buzzing with insects, butterflies, and reptiles. “I should dearly like to go down there,” thought the young mouse, without daring to say it aloud, out of sheer fear of his mother. One day when some sign of his desire escaped him, the mother exclaimed, trembling with fright: “Do not say so even in jest, child. If you do not wish to grieve me deeply, never speak again of going out into the meadow.”

Do you suppose the prohibition took away the little mouse’s longing? Bah! You well know that prohibitions are the spur of desire.—Not venturing as yet to venture down, the wayward creature spent idle hours gazing at the delightful meadow. How fine it would be to trot among that soft, fragrant grass! How pleasant to bathe in the clear brook that sprayed pearls upon the roots of willows and osiers! What fun to hunt the young vipers and lizards that slithered along, stirring the foliage and making the metallic hues of their elegant bodies gleam in the sun! Why, come now, why did the mother mouse forbid such innocent pastimes?

One day when the mother had gone out, according to custom, in search of sustenance for her brood, the son peered out of the hole, thrusting more than half his body out of the trunk. Suddenly he felt like an electric shock and saw an enchanting creature cross the meadow. It was neither more nor less than a little white cat, white as snow, fixing upon the little mouse her wide emerald eyes.

The mouse remained fascinated, entranced. Never had he seen a prettier thing than that white cat. What grace and gentleness in her movements, what ease in her supple gait, what charm in her roguish face, and what virginal innocence in her ermine coat! And what to say of those green eyes with golden glints, those eyes whose gaze melted, set fire to the heart!

Had the hour at which the mother was wont to return to the burrow not been so near, the mouse would have leaped without hesitation from his nest to approach the lovely cat. Fear and the habit of obedience held him back, which always restrain a little, at first, rebellious impulses; but what he failed to master was his tongue, and wild with enthusiasm, he related to his mother how the apparition of the celestial cat had driven him beside himself.

“What, have you seen that monster?—exclaimed the mother.”

“A monster, so charming a creature!—sighed the little mouse.”

“A horrible monster, the most baleful, the most bloodthirsty, the most atrocious that, by your dark fortune, you could have encountered. Flee from it, my son, as from fire: remember that in flight lies your life; remember that your father perished in the claws of that accursed beast, and that all my tears are its doing.”

“Mother—replied the little mouse in astonishment—I can scarcely believe what you tell me. The water running clean and clear among the flowers of the meadow has not the hues of those innocent eyes, now green, now bluish, always gentle, where light mysteriously plays. The petals of white lilies and lilies of the valley yield in whiteness to her snowy fur, which must be softer than velvet and more supple than silk. How do you expect me to see a bloodthirsty and horrible monster in the cat? Ah, mother! Ever since I beheld her, I think only of her. Whatever is not she seems to me unworthy of existence. Before, I loved the meadow and the sky and the trees. Now everything wearies me and everything I despise. Mother, cure me of this ailment, for I feel so sad that I think my life will come to an end.”

You may well suppose that the poor mother mouse did all she could to distract and comfort her offspring. In order to turn his thoughts to more lawful matters, she took him to the hole of some rats distantly related to them, young, rich, and respectable, who lived gnawing the wheat in a well-stocked granary; but the mouse was bored to death among the heaps of grain, in the darkness of the barn, and missed the meadow, which was illuminated, before the sun, by the presence of the white cat. For already several times he had seen her pass playful and light, fixing her radiant eyes upon the inaccessible heights of the tree, and whenever the cat appeared, the mouse felt life expanding within him and his soul escaping—yes, his soul, for love breathes it even into beasts—after that enchantress of the green eyes.

The mother mouse would not have wished in such critical circumstances to part for a minute from her son, but it was necessary to go out hunting, to procure subsistence for the family, and a morning arrived when, the mother mouse having risen early to leave the nest before dawn, the young mouse, pensive and melancholy, looked out of the hole to see day break. A straight golden band fringed the horizon; little by little the mist parted and was absorbed into the clear purity of the sky, through which the sun mounted like a pale golden rose; the little birds greeted its glorious light with a joyous and triumphant hymn of gladness, and upon the grass, still pearled with dew as upon a net of diamonds, appeared, passing with aristocratic delicacy and prim caution, the lovely white cat.

The mouse let out a squeak of joy; the cat was looking at him, seemed to call him, to invite him to descend.—“Do you want to play with me?”—he asked her, without reflecting, without remembering in the least his mother’s warnings.—“Come down”—the little cat seemed to answer with her mysterious eyes. And the mouse hurried down, headlong, intoxicated with happiness, and the game began, with many leaps and chases. The cat pretended to flee; she hid among willows and osiers, and when the mouse grew tired of pursuing her, she let herself drop upon the soft carpet of the meadow, and hiding her claws received the mouse with velvet paws, now dismissing him in jest, now clasping him playfully in a delightful mixture and indecipherable confusion of rough and gentle treatment.

The mouse never knew, in that game of whims, whether he was to be greeted with a tender, fond demonstration or with a fierce, disdainful swipe; and in the beloved eyes of the sphinx he saw now depths of voluptuousness and flashes of laughter, now gleams of ferocity and somber, cruel sparks. More than once he fancied he noticed that the soft, limp paws clenched suddenly, and that beneath the plush fur steel claws emerged. And strange thing! No sooner did he think he perceived such alarming symptoms than the mouse closed his eyes and returned joyful and trembling to sport with the white cat.

The game was still going on when in the afternoon the mother mouse returned and saw from afar the scene and her son hand to hand with the monster. Weeping and desperate, she cried out to him from the distance: “My son, you are undone!” The mouse, of course, paid her not the slightest attention. Indeed, was he in any mood to listen to advice! Exalted to the seventh heaven, never had the game delighted him more. The cat, on the contrary, was beginning to tire and suspect she had wasted enough time with a good-for-nothing little mouse; and noticing that the sun was about to set, that it was growing late—scarcely modifying her attitude, always graceful and playful, as one who does nothing—she twisted her head, secured the little mouse with her mouth, sank her sharp teeth... and tossed him into the air, fluttering and dying, to receive him on her claws, outstretched with ferocious violence...

Just as a cloud of blood was already covering the eyes of the wretched creature, and the delirium of agony was darkening his senses, he could still be heard weakly murmuring: “Do you want to play with me, little white cat?”

Wherefore his mother was wrong to weep bitterly for the incautious mouse. He expired so contented, so entirely satisfied!

Even So...

The penal sanction for a woman—said Carmona in an incisive voice, being fond of relating cases of the kind that send a shiver down one’s spine—is to find no man willing to offer her his hand in marriage. An imperceptible shadow, a slight peccadillo of coquetry or levity, any whim of temper, the most trifling lack of premeditation, is sufficient to tarnish the good name of a maiden, who may be the most virtuous of women, but who, loaded with that badge of infamy, remains unmarried until the end of time, without human remedy. This being so, how is it explained that countless women notoriously vile, and with good reason defamed, if they are widowed a hundred times, find another hundred suitors to lead them to the altar? To prove to you this curious phenomenon, I will tell you an event witnessed back in my youth, which made so indelible an impression upon me that never in all my life did the idea of marrying occur to me. Yes; through the fault of that story I shall die a bachelor,—and I do not regret it, as God well knows.

The affair occurred in M——, where one of the most brilliant regiments of the Spanish army was garrisoned, which for its daring and determination in assault had earned the glorious title of El Adelantado. I was a close friend of Lieutenant Ramiro Quesada, a youth of gallant bearing and hot-headed temper, one of those charming, heedless fellows whom we love as children are loved. Ramiro never went out without me; together we went to the theatre, to balls, to sprees—which existed then even though we called them by another name;—together we took long rides on horseback, and together we made our mounts caracole before the flower-decked window-gratings. We confided to each other our love affairs, our little money troubles, our gambling gains, our dreams and our hopes of five-and-twenty years. Neither he nor I were precisely anchorites, but neither were we profligates: merry young fellows, and nothing more.

Suddenly I noticed that Ramiro was becoming sullen, and withdrawing from my company and society took to walking alone, as if he had something he cared to conceal. A vain attempt, for in M—— there is no room for secrets. We were not long in discovering the reason for the lieutenant’s change of character. The key to the enigma was none other than the wife of Captain Ortiz, one of those women whom I will not describe as very beautiful, but worse than if they were: dark, petite, graceful in her walk, pale, with eyes that looked like candles of hell and a rounded waist such as could be circled with a garter. Ortiz, it seemed (and with good reason, though without fruit), was extremely jealous, and Ramiro, to meet his tormentor, had to employ the artifices of a prisoner or a savage. On the day when an appointment was thwarted or a furtive conversation at the grating opening onto a dark and lonely alley was spoiled, the poor fellow was like a madman: he would not even answer if we spoke to him. Although I did not parade as a moralist, nor possessed authority to advise, least of all in such matters, I declare that my friend’s illicit relations troubled me greatly, and a presentiment—I call it thus, because I know not how to define the uneasiness and anxiety I felt—forewarned me that something grave, something painful must be brought upon Ramiro by those evil ways. Yet I was far—a thousand leagues from suspecting the tragedy that took place.

One morning the news spread through M—— that Captain Ortiz had been found dead, with a bullet in the chest and another in the head, almost at the doors of his house, near the corner where the gloomy lane opened. In the first moments the terrible suspicion did not assail me: I believed Ramiro noble and loyal, and only when public rumour pointed to him did I understand that he alone, possessed by the devil, could have accomplished that deed of darkness...

A few hours after the discovery of the corpse, Ramiro was arrested. The court-martial assembled, and the trial proceeded with the lightning rapidity that characterizes military justice, stimulated by the express will of the Captain-General, who desired that legal prescriptions should be fulfilled to the letter and the victim and the murderer buried at the same time. At first Ramiro attempted to deny it; but two or three sentences of indignation from the prosecutor provoked in him an outburst of haughty frankness, and he confessed outright that he had treacherously fired two pistol shots, the previous night, at Captain Ortiz. As to the motives of the crime, he swore and swore again that they were none other than insults from superior to subordinate, rancours over matters of duty. Called upon to testify, Ortiz’s wife appeared in black, undaunted, and declared she scarcely knew the assassin by sight. The latter, without batting an eye, confirmed the lady’s deposition; and the accused being convicted upon his own confession, and there being neither time nor need for further inquiries, the death sentence was pronounced, and Ramiro entered the condemned cell at three in the afternoon, to be shot at daybreak the following day, exactly twenty-four hours after the crime.

Needless to say, I took my place at my friend’s side in the chapel, where he displayed stoic fortitude. Knowing how much a confidence, an unburdening of the heart relieves, I addressed him with affectionate questions full of concern; but the prisoner shut himself up in somber silence, and I noticed that his eyes were stubbornly fixed upon the door of the chapel as if waiting for it to give entrance to someone... What the unhappy man was waiting for—I needed no great discernment to divine—was the arrival of the woman for whose sake he was to drink the bitter cup! Surely she could not fail; she could not deny him the supreme consolation of a farewell; surely the muffled sound of footsteps echoing in the ante-room was hers, made faltering by fear and grief... But the afternoon passed, the hours of the last night began to slip by slow and solemn, and hope abandoned the condemned man. The priest who exhorted him and was to absolve him and administer holy communion before the sun appeared upon the horizon withdrew for a moment to rest, and alone with Ramiro, I saw his livid lips open at last.

—A moment ago I was grieved that she did not come—he murmured, taking my hands in his burning ones—. Now I am glad. Since it costs me my life, let it not cost me my soul too. How did I commit that atrocity, that cowardly murder of Ortiz? Look, I scarcely know. It seems to me that he who committed that villainous deed was not Ramiro Quesada, but another person, a man different from myself, who entered into my body. Do you remember how cheerful, how frank I used to be? Ever since I drew near... that woman... I became another man. I was bewitched... Her husband, whom we wronged, seemed to me my personal enemy, the obstacle to our happiness; I hated him... I think more than I loved her. As soon as she noticed it... keep my secret always! do not tell it even to your mother! she began to hint to me, in veiled words, the possibility of the crime. We did not speak plainly of that matter, but we understood each other perfectly; we formed plans of retiring to the country afterwards, and even—look at what a detail—she bought a new black dress, saying that it always comes in useful. Like a screw the purpose of the crime fixed itself in my brain. And as soon as she saw me resolved, she spoke freely, excited me further, promised me she would share my fate, whatever it might be...

Here Ramiro paused, and I saw his face change more deeply. In a voice moist with emotion he murmured:

“I did not want so much... Share my fate! You see that before the court-martial I managed to save her... I prefer to die alone... But to see her here, for a moment... before... After all, if I was an assassin, I was one for her sake, solely for her sake... Accursed be my fortune! Had I not met that woman, I should have remained honest always and perhaps have been killed defending my country. The fate of man!”