"Does she not say so?" answered Jose, with some slight secret misgiving.
"I do not know," said Sebastiano, looking down. "She does not speak to me."
Jose pushed his hat aside and rubbed his forehead. His respect for Pepita"s whims had begun early in life and was founded on experience.
"She is young," he faltered--"she is very young. When she enjoys herself she--"
He paused with an uneasy movement of his shoulders. It was quite terrible to him that she should treat with such caprice and disdain so splendid and heroic a person; but he knew there was nothing to be done.
"She admires you," he said, with courageous mendacity. "She saw you at the bullfight."
"She will be there again? You will take her--the next time?" said Sebastiano.
"Yes," answered Jose. "She has asked that I will. It was the greatest pleasure of her life."
But it was true that during all the afternoon she had never once spoken to Sebas-tiano. She had been as gay as a young bird, and the spirit of the party, her laughter, her pretty mockeries and sauciness, had carried all before them. Manuel had been reduced to hopeless slavery. Isabella had looked on in secret reverential wonder. Jovita"s old woman had glanced aside again and again, nodding her head, and saying, sagely: "Yes, she will always have it her own way--the little one. You are lucky in having such a grandchild. She will never be a load." But throughout it all Pepita had managed it that not one of her words had fallen directly to Sebastiano. If he spoke to her, she gave her answer to the one nearest to him. If he did not put an actual question to her, she replied merely with a laugh or a piquant grimace or gesture, which included all the rest. It was worse than coldness. To the others it was perhaps not perceptible at all; only he who searched for her eyes, who yearned and strove to meet them, knew that they never rested upon him for an instant.
And then when he so daringly arranged that Jose should invite him to return home with them, to what did it all come? He was lured to old Jovita"s side by the fact that at the beginning of the walk Pepita kept near her, and no sooner had the old woman involved him in tiresome talk, from which he could not escape, than the small figure flitted away and ended the journey homeward under the wing of Jose, and accompanied by Manuel and a certain gay little Carlos, who joked and laughed like a child.
And when after they arrived, and the moon rose, and they sat under the vines, though there was gayety and laughter, he knew, as before, that in some mysterious manner he was excluded from it, though he seemed the honored and distinguished guest. Carlos, who sat near some shrubs in bloom, made a little wreath of white flowers, and as she played and sang to her guitar, Pepita wore it on her head. Then Manuel, not to be outdone, wove a garland of pink oleander, and she threw it about her throat and sang on. Sebastiano forgot at last to speak, and could only sit and look at her. He could see and hear nothing else. It was almost the same thing with the rest, for that matter. She was somehow the centre figure round which they all seemed to have gathered, as she sat there playing, a night breeze sometimes stirring the soft ruffled hair on her forehead, which was like black floss silk; and whatsoever she sang, however pa.s.sionate and tender the wild little song, however pa.s.sionate and tender her voice, her young eyes had mockery in them--mocked at the words, the tenderness of her own voice, and at those who were moved by it; and most of all Sebastiano knew that she mocked at himself.
But he could not go away. Some strange thing had happened to him, it seemed; it was as if a spell had fallen upon him.
Better to be mocked than to go away. He stayed so late that Jovita fell asleep and nodded under the shadow of the grape-vines. And at last Pepita put down her guitar and rose. She stood upright in the moonlight, and extended her pretty arms and stretched them, laughing.
"Good-night," she said. "Jovita will amuse you. Already there have been too many hours in this day."
She ran into the house with no other adieu than a wave of her hand, and the next minute they could hear her singing in her room, and knew she was going to bed.
Sebastiano rose slowly.
"Good-night," he said to Jose.
Manuel and Carlos said good-night also, and went out together, walking side by side down the white moonlit road; but Sebas-tiano moved away from the shadowing vines with a lingering step, and Jose went with him a short distance. Something in his hero"s air of gravity and abstraction somewhat overawed him.
"She has not been entertained," said Sebastiano at last.
"Yes, yes," said Jose. "She has had pleasure all the day. And she is fond of pleasure."
"She said there had been too many hours in the day."
Jose rubbed his head a little reflectively for a moment, and then his countenance somewhat brightened.
"She wished to lie a little for amus.e.m.e.nt," he said, affectionately.
"There is no wrong in her--Pepita--but sometimes, to be amused, she will tell a little lie without sin in it, because she knows we understand her. She does not expect us to believe. We who are used to her know her better. You will also understand in time."
"Then I may come again?" asked Sebas-tiano.
The heavy body of Jose almost trembled with simple pleasure.
"It is all yours, senor," he said, with a gesture including the little house and all the grape-vines and orange blossoms and oleanders. "It is poor and small, but it is yours--and we--"
Sebastiano"s dark eyes rested for an instant on a little window under the eaves where a jasmine vine wreathed a thick tangle of green, starred with white flowers. And as he looked a voice broke through the fragrant barrier singing a careless, broken bit of song--
"White, white is the jasmine flower; Let its stars light thee."
"It is Pepita," said Jose. "She always sings when she is pleased. It is always a good sign."
If her singing was a sign of pleasure, then she must have been enjoying her life greatly in the days that came afterward, for she was singing continually. As she went about her work there was always the shadow of a smile on her lips and in her eyes, as if her thoughts amused her. And she was in such gay spirits that Jose was enchanted. He had only one vague source of trouble: all the rest had turned out so well! It had all occurred just as he had dreamed, but scarcely dared to hope, in those by-gone days when he had been hard-worked and ill-fed and ill-clad. He had a good place, and what seemed by comparison incredibly good wages.
He had the nice little house, and Pepita had holiday garments as gay and pretty as any other girl, and looked, when dressed in them, gayer and ten times prettier than all the rest.
That was what he had looked forward to most of all, and his end was attained. And when he walked out with her, all the young fellows who were allowed to come near--and many who were not--fell in love. Yes, it was true; he saw it himself and heard it on every side. It would take the fingers of both hands to count those who were frankly enamoured, beginning with Carlos and Manuel. But it was at this point that the vague trouble came in. And it was Pepita herself who caused it, by her treatment of her adorers. To say that she dealt out scorn to them would be to say too much; she simply dealt out nothing--and less. They might come and go; they might follow and gaze and sigh--she did not even deign to seem to know they did so, unless by chance one became too pertinacious, and then she merely transfixed him with a soft, cruelly smiling eye. "She will not marry any of them," said Jose to Jovita in bewilderment.
"That will come soon enough," said Jovita. "She is pretty, and it makes her a little fool--all girls are like that; but one of these days you may look out--it will be all over. She is just the one to blaze up all at once."
"I do not think she is a fool like other girls," said Jose, with gravity. "But she does not seem to care about love; she does not seem to know. She is not even sorry for them when they are miserable." He did not consider himself when he thought of her marriage; in truth he put himself in the background, for if some other man filled her life and her heart his vocation would be gone, and there would be some dull hours for him before he could become used to it. But he had an innocent feeling that without this love, of which all men talked so much, the life he wished to be bright would not be quite complete. She was too pretty and too good never to be married--never to have a home of her own and some fine fellow to love the dust she walked on. He himself was only Jose, and a brother was, after all, a poor subst.i.tute for a lover who could talk and sing and make jokes, and wear such a dashing air that she would be proud of him.
"That is it," he said, sagely, to himself. "A woman must have some one to be proud of, and she could never be proud of me. If I were Sebastiano now, it would be different."
He stopped suddenly and rubbed his head, as his habit was when he was startled or confused, and his face became rather red. Perhaps this was because he remembered that among all the rest, the magnificent, the ill.u.s.trious, the beautiful Sebastiano was the one to whom she showed least grace. In fact it was almost mysterious, her manner toward him.
They had seen him often--he had come in many evenings to sit under the vines; when they went out for pleasure it somehow happened that they nearly always met him; but when he joined them Pepita became at once possessed of some strange wilful spirit. Upon reflection Jose found that he had never yet heard her speak to him: it appeared to him as he thought it over that she always by some device avoided answering directly what he said to her.
"That is a strange thing," said Jose, deeply mystified, as he suddenly realized this, "when one remembers how he can slay a bull. There is no one else who can slay a bull as he can. It is enough to make one weep for joy. And yet she can treat him ill."
But he did not know how ill; only Sebas-tiano knew that. Since the day he had stood in the arena and had seen all in a moment, as if a star had suddenly started into the sky, the small black head and rose of a face, he had lived in a fevered dream--a dream in which he pursued always something which seemed within his grasp and yet forever eluded him. What had he cared for all the rest of the women? Nothing. It had confused and angered him when they had thrown themselves in his way or sent him offerings, and when he had been told of this or that beauty who was in love with his proud, bearing and dashing courage. Women! What were women? He had only cared for the bulls, for the clamor of the people, and the wild excitement of the arena. All he had wished for was to learn the best stroke, the finest leap. But this girl, who had never opened her scornful little mouth to deign him a word--who had never once allowed him to look in her eyes--somehow this one drove him half mad.
He could think of nothing else; he forgot even the bulls; he spent all the day and sometimes all the night in devising plans to entrap her into speaking, to force her to look at him. How obstinate she was! How she could elude him, as if by some magic!
What had he not done that he might be near her? He had followed her everywhere. Jose did not know that she scarcely ever went out without his following and speaking to her. He used to spring up by her side as if he had risen out of the earth, but after the first two or three times he never succeeded in making her start or show any feeling whatever.
But that first time, and even the second, she had started. The first time she had gone to the old well for water, and as she stood resting in the shade a moment he appeared With a bouquet of beautiful strange flowers in his hand.
"G.o.d be with you!" he said, and laid the flowers down a moment and drew the water for her.
She watched him draw it, smiling just a little.
"It will be a fine day for the bull-fight," he said, when her jar was filled.
She put her hand up and shaded her working eyes as she looked at the blue sky, but she said nothing.
"Do you go to-day to the Plaza de Toros?" he asked. "You shall have good places--the best. They are good bulls to-day, black Andalusians, fierce and hard to manage. There will be fine sport. You will go?"
[Ill.u.s.tration: She leaned against the side of the well 095]
She leaned against the side of the well and looked down into the water, where she could see her face reflected in the cool, dark depths. The next moment Sebastiano"s was reflected also. He held the flowers in his hand.
"These!" he said. "It was one of the gardeners of the king who gave them to me. They are such as the queen sometimes wears. I brought them that you might wear them at the bull-fight."
She saw their beauty reflected in the water. She would not look at them directly. They were very beautiful. She had never seen such flowers. And the queen herself had worn others like them. If any one else had brought them--but it was Sebastiano. And she remembered Sarita. Perhaps he had at some time given some to Sarita, knowing that to a country girl who knew nothing they would seem very grand. Sarita would have been sure to take them.