A northeast wind had been blowing for the past few days, which had made the sea very rough. Great, grand waves came rolling in from a distance, and dashed their gigantic forms against the end of the mole, and the foam flew straight up.
The eyes of the young man were soon directed to a launch about to enter the harbor, as it danced like a walnut shell upon the waves. Its entrance interested him, and he followed all its peripatetics with as much attention as if he were concerned in it.
At the end of a quarter of an hour, when the entrance to the harbor was effected, his thoughts resumed their course, and sighing and murmuring "Come," he went forward and leaned against the wall. As the tide rose higher, a larger wave than the rest drenched him with its foam. The unexpected bath was agreeable to him, as it refreshed him physically. He stood waiting for some time to see if another would come with equal force, but none came, so he continued his walk.
Arriving at the end of the mole he threw himself down on the mole and fixed his melancholy gaze on the waves coming in.
It was the same spot where, a few years previously, he had had the conversation with his uncle about breaking off his engagement with Cecilia and marrying Ventura.
The stern, severe words of the old man seemed now to reecho in his ears:
"God can not help the man who breaks his word. The journey is long, the sea wide and powerful, and what is merely pretty is soon submerged in the swell."
"How right my uncle was!" thought the young man, without turning his eyes from the sea.
"Bah!" he muttered at the end of a few minutes, "if I had been a hundred times in the same position I should have done the same. There are fatalities. That woman has inoculated my blood with poison which can only be ejected with its last drop."
He stood some time again lost in thought. The sea water, which had immersed him, and the rain, which still incessantly fell, chilled him to the bone. The morning dawned damp and foggy. It was not like that beautiful night when, after talking with his uncle, he had then also been plunged in thought. Then the magnificent splendor of the heavens spangled with stars, the crystal clearness of the water, in which the light of the moon was reflected, and the soft breeze whispered to him of death—yea, but it was in sweet, harmonious, friendly strains, like the voice of a friend calling him to rest. But now it was as if he heard a cry of desolation, a threat: "Come, come, death is very sad, but life is the saddest of all!"