He did not answer, but seizing a couple of osier branches, bent them forcibly between his fingers until they snapped. The broken branches hung down limply from the tree, held together by the bark, like broken limbs held together by the skin.
“You are not one of those men, either?” resumed the young girl, turning toward him, her hands joined together, almost kneeling on the bank. “Don’t you believe, even in that way? Don Ignacio, do you indeed believe in nothing? In nothing?”
Ignacio sprang to his feet, and standing on the summit of the bank overlooking the whole landscape, slowly said:
“I believe in evil.”
From a distance the group might have seemed a piece of statuary. Lucía, completely overwhelmed, almost knelt, her hands clasped in an imploring attitude. Artegui, his arm raised, his form erect, challenging with sorrowful glance the blue vault above, might have been taken for some hero of romance, some rebellious Titan, were it not for his modern costume, with its prosaic details; the sky grew momentarily darker; leaden clouds, like enormous heaps of cotton, banked themselves up over Biarritz and the ocean. Gusts of hot air blew low down, almost along the ground, bending the reeds and setting in motion the pointed foliage of the osiers with its fiery breath. The plain exhaled a deep groan at these menacings of the storm. It seemed as if evil, evoked by the voice of its worshiper, had appeared, in tremendous form, terrifying nature with its broad black wings, to whose flapping fancy might have attributed the suffocating exhalations that heated the atmosphere. Murky and dark, like the surface of a steel mirror, the lake slept motionless and the aquatic flowers drooped on its border. Artegui’s voice, more intense than loud, resounded through the awe-inspiring silence.
“In evil,” he repeated, “that surrounds and envelops us on all sides, from the cradle to the grave; that never leaves us; in evil, that makes of the earth a vast battle-field where no being can live but by the death and the suffering of other beings; in evil, which is the pivot on which the world turns and the very mainspring of life.”
“Señor de Artegui,” stammered Lucía faintly, “it would seem, according to what you say, that you pay to the devil the worship you refuse to God.”
“Worship! no! Shall I worship the iniquitous power that, concealed in darkness, works for the general woe? To fight, to fight against it is what I desire, now and always. You call this power the devil; I call it evil, universal suffering. I know how alone it may be vanquished.”
“By faith and good works,” exclaimed the young girl.
“By dying,” he answered.