“What is it?” asked Luiza.
The woman shut the door behind her, and stood close beside her mistress. “The senhora has not yet come to any conclusion?” she inquired.
“I have not yet been able to do anything,” responded Luiza, slowly.
Juliana looked at the floor in silence. “Very well,” she muttered at last, and left the room. When she reached the head of the stairs these words fell on Luiza’s ears: “When the master returns, we shall settle accounts.”
When the master returned! Her soul was suddenly shaken by the terrors and the anguish awakened in it by this menace, as the trees of the forest are shaken by a sudden gale. She must do something before his return. Jorge had just written to her that he would be in Lisbon soon, and that he would send her a telegram to let her know by what train to expect him. She wished that the Ministry might send him on some distant journey,—to Spain or Africa,—or that some unforeseen event, without causing him any injury, might keep him away for months. What would he do if he were to discover everything? Would he kill her? She recalled to mind his uncompromising words on the night on which Ernesto had read them the last act of his play. Would he put her in a convent? Already she saw in fancy the heavy door close on its hinges behind her with funereal sound, while the lugubrious eyes of the nuns examined her with curiosity. Her unreasoning terror caused her even to lose the clear idea of her husband; another Jorge, sanguinary and vindictive, presented himself to her imagination, forgetful of his amiable nature, so little disposed to the melodramatic. One day she went into his study, took his case of pistols, put it away in a trunk, and hid the key.
One idea alone sustained her; it was that as soon as Sebastião returned from Almada she would be saved; yet, notwithstanding the unceasing anguish she suffered, she almost dreaded to know that he had returned, so much greater did the anguish appear to her of confessing to him the truth. Then another idea occurred to her,—to write to Bazilio. Her ever-present fears had broken down her pride, as the constant filtration of water saps the foundation of a wall. Every day she found new excuses for asking help from “that traitor.” He had been her lover, he knew about the letters, he was her only relative. In this way she would not be obliged to tell Sebastião. She now regarded her refusal to accept money from Bazilio as a piece of stupid bravado. She ended by writing a long letter to him, somewhat confused, in which she asked him to send her six hundred thousand reis. She herself posted it, covering the envelope with stamps. That same afternoon Sebastião, who had returned from Almada, came to see her. She received him joyfully, happy at not being obliged to make her confession to him. She spoke to him of Jorge’s return, and she even made some allusion to her Cousin Bazilio, and the shameless behavior of the neighbors.
“It is the first thing I shall tell Jorge,” she ended. She now thought herself saved. Every day she followed with her thoughts her letter on its way to France, as if her very life had gone enclosed in that envelope, intrusted to the chances of the railway-trains and the confusion of travel. She saw it reach first Madrid, then Bayonne, and at last Paris. A postman hurried to deliver it in the Rue St. Florentin; Bazilio opened it with trembling hand, he filled an envelope with bank-notes, covered it with kisses, and then the missive that carried her salvation and her peace of mind began its journey towards her. The day on which the answer ought to arrive she rose early, and greatly agitated, and straining her ear to catch every sound, began to await the arrival of the postman. She already saw herself dismissing Juliana, and shedding tears of joy when she had gone. But at half-past ten she began to grow nervous, and at eleven she called to Joanna to ask if the postman had already passed.
“Yes, Senhora; he has already passed.”
“Despicable creature!” she muttered, thinking of Bazilio.
But perhaps he had delayed answering her letter for a day or two. She waited disconsolately and without hope. Nothing! neither now nor on the days that followed. “Traitor!” she repeated to herself. The thought of the lottery occurred to her, for she lived only in the one hope. She bought some tickets, and although she was neither superstitious nor a devotee, she placed them under a pedestal of a Saint Vincent de Paul that stood on the bureau in her bedroom. She neglected nothing; she looked at them every day, added the units together to see whether they amounted to nine, a zero at the end, or an even number, which is of good omen. This daily contact with the image of the saint turned her thoughts to a source of help till now unthought of,—Heaven; and she made a vow that she would cause fifty masses to be said if the tickets drew prizes. But they drew blanks; and then she lost hope altogether. She surrendered herself, almost with pleasure, to inaction, passing entire days without taking the slightest interest in anything, without caring to dress herself, wishing to die, devouring the accounts of suicides, of accidents, of deaths, in the papers, consoling herself for her own unhappiness by the thought that all around her the city was full of sorrow and suffering. At times she was seized by sudden fits of terror. Then she resolved to confide in Sebastião. Again she reflected that it would be better to write to him, but she could not find words in which to do so; she was unable to frame any reasonable story; she lost her courage, and fell back into her former state of inertness, always thinking, “To-morrow, to-morrow.”