Like a hind wounded by an arrow from some unseen hand, Lucía started at the sound of those words, and opening her eyes, and passing her hand over her forehead, she sprang to her feet and standing before Artegui looked around her, her cheeks flushed with sudden shame; her glance and her intelligence now clear.
“What is this?” she cried, in a changed voice—“I here—yes, I know now what brought me here, why I came and when—and I remember, too—ah! Don Ignacio, Don Ignacio! You must be surprised, and with good reason, to meet me again when you least expected. At what a moment did I come! Thanks, Holy Virgin; now I am in possession of all my senses and my reason, and I can throw myself at your feet, Don Ignacio, and say to you, ‘For God’s sake, by the memory of your mother who is in heaven,—by—by—all you hold sacred, never again, promise me, never again to think of taking the life you can employ so usefully!’ If I knew how to speak, if I were learned like Father Urtazu, I would put it in better words, but you know what I mean—is it not so?—promise me never again—never again——”
And Lucía, with disheveled hair, pathetic, beautiful, threw herself at Artegui’s feet and embraced his knees. Artegui raised her with difficulty.
“You know,” he said, with confusion, “that I have attached little value to life; more, that I have hated it ever since I have realized its hollowness, and have known what a useless burden it is to man; and now that my mother is dead, and there is no one to feel my loss——”
A torrent of tears and sobs straight from the heart were Lucía’s answer. Artegui lifted her in his arms, and, placing her on the sofa, seated himself beside her.
“Don’t cry,” he said, speaking more composedly; “don’t cry; rejoice rather, for you have conquered. And is this to be wondered at since you embody the illusion dearest to man, the one illusion that is worth a hundred realities, the illusion that vanishes only with life! The most persistent and invincible of all the illusions that nature has contrived to attach us to life and prevent the world going back to chaos! Listen to me! I will not tell you that you are for me happiness, for happiness does not exist, and I will not deceive you; but what I will say is this, that for your sake a noble spirit may worthily prefer life to death. Among the deceptions which attach us to life, there is one that cheats us more sweetly than all the others, with delights so blissful, so intoxicating, that a man may well give himself up to a joy that, though it be a fictitious one, can thus embellish and gild existence. Hear me, hear me. I have always shunned women, for knowing the mysterious doom of sorrow pronounced on man, the irremediable suffering of life, I did not wish to attach myself through them to this abode of misery, nor give life to beings who should inherit as their birthright suffering, the only inheritance which every human being has the certainty of transmitting to his children. Yes, I regard it as a matter of conscience to act thus and diminish by so much the sum of sorrows and evils; when I considered how overwhelming was this sum, I cursed the sun that engenders life and suffering on the earth; the stars that are the abodes of misery; the world that is the prison in which our doom is fulfilled, and finally love, love which sustains and preserves and perpetuates unhappiness, interrupting, in order to prolong it, the sacred repose of annihilation. Annihilation! Annihilation was the haven of repose which my weary spirit wished to reach. Annihilation, nothingness, absorption in the universe, dissolution for the body, peace and eternal silence for the spirit. If I had had faith, how beautiful and attractive and sweet would the cloister have seemed to me! Neither will, nor desire, nor feelings, nor passions—a robe of sackcloth, a walking corpse beneath. But——” Artegui bent toward Lucía uneasily.
“Do you comprehend me?” he suddenly asked.
“Yes, yes,” she said, and a shiver ran through her frame.
“But I saw you,” continued Artegui. “I saw you by chance; by chance, too, and without any volition of my own, I remained for a time at your side, I breathed the same air, and against my will—against my will—I knew—I did not wish to acknowledge your victory to myself, nor did I know it until I left you to the embraces of another. Ah, how I have cursed my folly in not taking you with me then! When I received your letter of condolence, I was on the point of going to seek you——”
Artegui paused for a moment.