“He will speak,” came to me the ghostly, terrified murmur of her voice. “Take me out of the house before he begins to speak.”
“Keep still,” I whispered. “He will soon get tired of this.”
“You don’t know him.”
“Oh, yes, I do. Been with him two hours.”
At this she let go my wrist and covered her face with her hands passionately. When she dropped them she had the look of one morally crushed.
“What did he say to you?”
“He raved.”
“Listen to me. It was all true!”
“I daresay, but what of that?”
These ghostly words passed between us hardly louder than thoughts; but after my last answer she ceased and gave me a searching stare, then drew in a long breath. The voice on the other side of the door burst out with an impassioned request for a little pity, just a little, and went on begging for a few words, for two words, for one word—one poor little word. Then it gave up, then repeated once more, “Say you are there, Rita, Say one word, just one word. Say ‘yes.’ Come! Just one little yes.”
“You see,” I said. She only lowered her eyelids over the anxious glance she had turned on me.
For a minute we could have had the illusion that he had stolen away, unheard, on the thick mats. But I don’t think that either of us was deceived. The voice returned, stammering words without connection, pausing and faltering, till suddenly steadied it soared into impassioned entreaty, sank to low, harsh tones, voluble, lofty sometimes and sometimes abject. When it paused it left us looking profoundly at each other.
“It’s almost comic,” I whispered.
“Yes. One could laugh,” she assented, with a sort of sinister conviction. Never had I seen her look exactly like that, for an instant another, an incredible Rita! “Haven’t I laughed at him innumerable times?” she added in a sombre whisper.
He was muttering to himself out there, and unexpectedly shouted: “What?” as though he had fancied he had heard something. He waited a while before he started up again with a loud: “Speak up, Queen of the goats, with your goat tricks. . .” All was still for a time, then came a most awful bang on the door. He must have stepped back a pace to hurl himself bodily against the panels. The whole house seemed to shake. He repeated that performance once more, and then varied it by a prolonged drumming with his fists. It
“Take me out,” whispered Dona Rita feverishly, “take me out of this house before it is too late.”
“You will have to stand it,” I answered.
“So be it; but then you must go away yourself. Go now, before it is too late.”
I didn’t condescend to answer this. The drumming on the panels stopped and the absurd thunder of it died out in the house. I don’t know why precisely then I had the acute vision of the red mouth of Jose Ortega wriggling with rage between his funny whiskers. He began afresh but in a tired tone:
“Do you expect a fellow to forget your tricks, you wicked little devil? Haven’t you ever seen me dodging about to get a sight of you amongst those pretty gentlemen, on horseback, like a princess, with pure cheeks like a carved saint? I wonder I didn’t throw stones at you, I wonder I didn’t run after you shouting the tale—curse my timidity! But I daresay they knew as much as I did. More. All the new tricks—if that were possible.”
While he was making this uproar, Dona Rita put her fingers in her ears and then suddenly changed her mind and clapped her hands over my ears. Instinctively I disengaged my head but she persisted. We had a short tussle without moving from the spot, and suddenly I had my head free, and there was complete silence. He had screamed himself out of breath, but Dona Rita muttering: “Too late, too late,” got her hands away from my grip and slipping altogether out of her fur coat seized some garment lying on a chair near by (I think it was her skirt), with the intention of dressing herself, I imagine, and rushing out of the house. Determined to prevent this, but indeed without thinking very much what I was doing, I got hold of her arm. That struggle was silent, too; but I used the least force possible and she managed to give me an unexpected push. Stepping back to save myself from falling I overturned the little table, bearing the six-branched candlestick. It hit the floor, rebounded with a dull ring on the carpet, and by the time it came to a rest every single candle was out. He on the other side of the door naturally heard the noise and greeted it with a triumphant screech: “Aha! I’ve managed to wake you up,” the very savagery of which had a laughable effect. I felt the weight of Dona Rita grow on my arm and thought it best to let her sink on the floor, wishing to be free in my movements and really afraid that now he had actually heard a noise he would infallibly burst the door. But he didn’t even thump it. He seemed to have exhausted himself in that scream. There was no other light in the room but the darkened glow of the embers and I could hardly make out amongst the shadows of furniture Dona Rita sunk on her knees in a penitential and despairing attitude. Before this collapse I, who had been wrestling desperately with her a moment before, felt that I dare not touch her. This emotion, too, I could not understand; this abandonment of herself, this conscience-stricken humility. A humbly imploring request to open the door came from the other side. Ortega kept on repeating: “Open the door, open the door,” in such an amazing variety of intonations, imperative, whining, persuasive, insinuating, and even unexpectedly jocose, that I really stood there smiling to myself, yet with a gloomy and uneasy heart. Then he remarked, parenthetically as it were, “Oh, you know how to torment a man, you brown-skinned, lean, grinning, dishevelled imp, you. And mark,” he expounded further, in a curiously doctoral tone—“you are in all your limbs hateful: your eyes are hateful and your mouth is hateful, and your hair is hateful, and your body is cold and vicious like a snake—and altogether you are perdition.”
This statement was astonishingly deliberate. He drew a moaning breath after it and uttered in a heart-rending tone, “You know, Rita, that I cannot live without you. I haven’t lived. I am not living now. This isn’t life. Come, Rita, you can’t take a boy’s soul away and then let him grow up and go about the world, poor devil, while you go amongst the rich from one pair of arms to another, showing all your best tricks. But I will forgive you if you only open the door,” he ended in an inflated tone: “You remember how you swore time after time to be my wife. You are more fit to be Satan’s wife but I don’t mind. You shall be my wife!”
A sound near the floor made me bend down hastily with a stern: “Don’t laugh,” for in his grotesque, almost burlesque discourses there seemed to me to be truth, passion, and horror enough to move a mountain.
Suddenly suspicion seized him out there. With perfectly farcical unexpectedness he yelled shrilly: “Oh, you deceitful wretch! You won’t escape me! I will have you. . . .”
