“What blessed eyes!” added another, “which wound more Christians than all the poniards of Albacete.”
The Gaviota passed on, as always, impassible and disdainful.
“She does not even deign to look at us,” said Pepe Vera. “Listen then, my beautiful: a king is a king, and yet he can look at a cat. See, caballeros, she is, nevertheless, a very beautiful girl, although—”
“Although what?”
“Although she squints.”
Marisalada, on hearing these words, could not repress an involuntary movement. She fixed on the group her large, astonished eyes. The young men set up a loud laugh, and Pepe Vera sent her a kiss at the ends of his fingers.
Marisalada understood at once that this word squint was addressed to her merely to make her turn her head: she could not resist smiling, and then went on her way, having let her handkerchief drop. Pepe picked it up, and approached her as if to hand it to her.
“I will deliver it to you to-night, at the grating of your window,” he said to her hurriedly, in a low voice.
At midnight Mariquita left her bed with precaution, after being convinced that her husband slept profoundly. Stein indeed slept, a smile on his lips, intoxicated with the praises lavished that evening on his wife—his scholar, the beloved of his heart. During this sweet sleep a blackness had rested against one of the gratings of the window. It was impossible to distinguish any feature, for an officious hand had previously extinguished all the lights on the street.
Seville had become already a theatre too confined for the ambition and the thirst for ovations which devoured the heart of Marisalada. Besides, the duke, obliged to return to the capital, desired himself to present this phenomenon, whose reputation had preceded her to Madrid. Pepe Vera, on the other hand, engaged to appear at the Corrida in Madrid, urged Maria to make the journey: she made it. The triumph which she obtained at her début on this new stage, surpassed what she had achieved in Seville. The happy times of Orpheus and Amphion, the wonders of the mythological times, seemed to be brought back again. Stein was confused, the duke was in a state of complete intoxication. Pepe Vera said one day to the cantora: “Caramba! (hah!) Mariquita, they applaud you neither more nor less than if you had killed a bull seven years old.”