“How do those stars seem to you? One might fancy they were sad. Is it not true that when they twinkle they look as if they were shedding tears?”
“They are not sad,” responded Lucía, “they are pensive, which is a very different thing. They are thinking, and they have something to think about,—to go no further, God who created them.”
“Thinking! They think as much as that bridge or those vessels think. The privilege of thinking”—Artegui laid a bitter emphasis on the word privilege—“is reserved for man, the lord of creation. And if there be on those stars, as there must be, men endowed with the privileges and the faculties of humanity, they it is who think.”
“Do you believe there are people on those stars? Do you think they are like us, Señor de Artegui? Do they eat? Do they drink? Do they walk?”
“Of that I know nothing. There is only one thing I can assure you of, but that with full knowledge and perfect certainty.”
“What is that?” asked the young girl, with curiosity, watching, by the uncertain light of the stars Artegui’s countenance.
“That they suffer as we suffer,” he answered.
“How do you know that?” she murmured, impressed by the hollow tone in which the words were uttered. “Well, for my part, I fancy that in the stars that are so beautiful and that shine so brightly, there is neither discord nor death, as there is here. It must be blissful there!” she declared, raising her hand and pointing to the refulgent orb of Jupiter.
“Pain is the universal law, here as well as there,” said Artegui, looking fixedly at the Adour which ran, dark and silent, at his feet.
They spoke little more until they reached the hotel. There are conversations which awaken profound thoughts and which are more fittingly followed by silence than by frivolous words. Lucía, tired, without knowing why, leaned heavily on the arm of Artegui, who walked slowly, with his accustomed air of indifference. The last words of their conversation were discordant—almost hostile.