Alcala was sensible that he had committed an act of the greatest folly. He had ventured all—his sister's peace of mind, his family's comfort, his own life—for a bubble that was not worth the grasping, even were it within his reach. Alcala was not one to care for the applause of a mob; nay, his proud, reserved nature shrank sensitively from the idea of appearing to court it. The greatest success in the common circus would be rather a disgrace than an honour to an Aguilera; he could not raise but degrade himself by competing for popular favour with professional picadors.
Nor had Alcala the incitement of passion to impel him onwards in his perilous career. His admiration of the governor's daughter had been but a passing fancy, a homage paid to mere beauty; it had no strong hold on his soul. The discovery of Antonia's heartlessness and selfish pride had changed that admiration into something almost resembling contempt. Alcala contrasted Antonia with Inez, the vain selfish beauty with the loving, self-forgetting woman, and felt much as did the knight of old who scornfully flung at the feet of his lady the glove which she had bidden him bring from the arena in which wild beasts were contending.
"Were I offered the hand of Antonia de Rivadeo," mused Aguilera, "I would not now accept it, though she should bring as her dowry all Andalusia!"
Thus even in success there was nothing to attract the young Spaniard. But Alcala had scarcely any hope of success; and if the brighter side of the picture was but dull, the darker was gloomy indeed. Alcala had not frequented bull-fights; the sport was little to his taste, though he did not regard it with all the horror and disgust which he would have felt had he been brought up in England. But though the cavalier had not been frequently seen at the Plaza de Toros, he had often enough been a spectator of the scenes acted in the circus to know well what dangers attend the contest with a furious bull, and how absolutely essential to the safety of a picador is skill in the use of his weapon. Such skill could only be acquired by practice, and until this time Alcala had never handled a spear. In the grasp of the young cavalier it felt unwieldy and cumbrous. He was as little likely to use it effectually, as he would have been to climb to the mast-head of a vessel in the midst of a storm, having never had nautical training.
Superstition, from which Alcala was not perfectly free, although far more enlightened than most of his countrymen, tended to deepen the impression on his mind that he was riding to his destruction. When Alcala had been very young, his mother had consulted an old Gitana, famed for her skill in prognostications, as to the future fate of her boy. The child had never forgotten the weird appearance of the old wrinkled hag, nor the words of her mumbled reply: "He will die in his prime a violent death, and many shall look on at his fall." The warning recurred to Alcala's memory with almost the force of prophecy, now that he appeared so likely to meet such a fate as had been thus foretold.
Then, to think on the position in which his death would leave his family made Alcala de Aguilera writhe with mental torture. What would become of his aged parent, widowed and imbecile—what would become of his gentle loving sister, if their one prop were taken away? They had already parted with most of the relics left of his grandfather's wealth; not an acre which had once belonged to the estates of the Aguileras remained to them now. The mansion in Seville was out of repair, and situated in a now unfashionable quarter; should the ruined family be driven to part with their home, the sale of the house would bring but temporary relief to their need. It was not without a sharp pang that Alcala thought even of Teresa, with all her faults so loving and faithful a retainer, and revolved the probability of her ending her long life of service by becoming a beggar in Seville!
And it was his madness that had done all. He was ruthlessly sacrificing all who loved him, all whom he loved, to the Moloch of his own pride! Alcala, when tortured by such reflections, again and again almost resolved to break his fatal engagement, and make some excuse for not entering the circus. But the sneers of his acquaintance, the scoffs of his rivals, the yells of a disappointed mob, were harder to be encountered than the charge of a savage bull. Alcala had not the moral courage to face them. He could not endure to live on to be taunted as the foreign manufacturer's clerk, who with the estates of his ancestors had also lost all their courage and spirit. There was but one thing (and that thing the cavalier lacked)—the constraining power of faith and love—that could have enabled the Spaniard to throw down and trample under foot that Moloch of pride.
But worse even than fears for his family, worse than the anticipation of a violent death for himself, was the awful darkness which to Alcala hung over the future beyond the grave! To die was to him as a leap into chaos! Alcala was, as has been observed, more enlightened than many Spaniards: he had used the taper-gleams of man's knowledge; but of clear light from Heaven he had none. Alcala had read enough to make him loosen his hold on the vain superstitions of the Church in which he had been reared, but not enough to make him grasp any firm hope in their place. The Spaniard did not believe that a priest could absolve him from sin, therefore he felt that those sins were yet unforgiven. He could not ease his conscience by repeating Latin prayers or reciting a given number of penitential psalms, therefore his conscience remained oppressed. The cavalier had no faith in prescribed penance, purchased masses, or confessions to man, as means of propitiating One who was to him indeed an "unknown God"; where then was he to find peace? What was to assure Alcala that, if he gasped out his last breath that day in the circus, he might not be but exchanging the death agony for torments infinitely more terrible, because they would never be closed by death? The state of mind of the cavalier might, with little alteration, be described in the words of the poet:—
"Before him tortures which the soul may dare,
But doubts how well the shrinking flesh may bear,
Yet deeply feels a single cry would shame
To valour's praise his last, his dearest claim.
The life he lost below—denied above.
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