“Ah,” said Jorge, “it is Ernesto.”
Ernesto advanced with hasty steps towards Jorge, and threw his arms around his neck. “I have heard that you are going away, Cousin,” he said. “How do you do, Cousin Luiza?”
The new-comer was a cousin of Jorge, thin and fragile in appearance. He looked more like a school-boy than a man. His scanty mustache, anointed with pomade, curled up at the ends in points like needles, and in his hollow countenance his eyes glittered with an unhealthy brightness. He wore patent-leather shoes, with broad laces. A watch-chain, which supported an enormous locket, with a complicated pattern of flowers and fruits enamelled in relief upon it, hung from his waistcoat. He wrote for the theatre. He had in his portfolio several plays he had translated,—two original ones, in one act each, and a farce. He had just written for the “Variety” a spectacular drama in five acts, called “Love and Honor.” This was the only one of his pieces which had been accepted. Since then he was always seen apparently overwhelmed with business, his pockets filled with manuscripts, surrounded by actors, and paying without a murmur for unlimited cups of coffee and glasses of cognac, an expression of fatigue upon his pallid countenance, his hat pushed back from his forehead, and repeating to every one he met, “This life is killing me.” It is to be observed that he had been led into literature solely by his love for it, as he was employed in the Custom House at a good salary, and possessed, besides, a rent-roll of five hundred thousand reis.[2] He confessed that this passion for art had cost him a good deal of money; he had caused to be made at his own expense the patent leather boots used by the lover, as well as those used by the noble father, in his drama, “Love and Honor.”
He was at once surrounded; and Luiza, laying down her work, remarked to him that he was pale, and looked depressed. He began thereupon to complain of his troubles,—the rehearsals gave him nausea, he had constant disputes with the director. Yesterday he had had to alter, from beginning to end, the finale of an act; yes, he repeated, from beginning to end. “And all,” he added with irritation, “because that stupid fellow wants the scene laid in a salon, when I have placed it on the edge of a precipice.”
“Of a what!” exclaimed Donna Felicidade, in astonishment.
“Of a precipice, Donna Felicidade,” said the counsellor, with his customary suave urbanity. “It might also be called with propriety an abyss.” And he quoted,—
“And straight he plunges into the abyss.”
“But why on the edge of a precipice?” inquired the guests.
The counsellor asked for the argument of the piece.
Ernesto, delighted, sketched in broad strokes the plot of his work.