Only Pepita sat without color or applause—only Pepita’s fan was motionless amidst all the fluttering—though her breast moved up and down, and the throbbing in her side was like the beating of a hammer. She was speaking to herself, though her lips were closed; she was speaking to Sebastiano.
“He will look soon,” she was saying. “He will look as he did that first day. My eyes will make him look. They will force him to it. Listen! it is Pepita whose eyes are on you. You must feel them. You have not forgotten. No. And it is Pepita—Pepita!”
All the strength of her body and soul she threw into her gaze—all the fire of her young wildly beating heart and throbbing pulses.
“You must hear,” she said. “Pepita! Pepita!”
And unconsciously she leaned forward so that her white face and great eyes, and the little black head with the rose burning in its hair, stood out among the faces of those about her.
And he looked up and saw her, and their eyes met; and without knowing she started to her feet.
No one knew, no one but herself saw, how it happened: even she did not understand until all was past. Their eyes met, as they had done on the day a year before. No, not as they had done then, but with a strange new look. Sebastiano started; the arena swam before him; there was a second—a fatal second in which he saw only a small face without color and the red rose which was the color of blood. Then there was a roar near him—a roar among the people—a wild shriek from the women. The bull was upon him; he made a misstep, and was caught, amid the shrieks and bellows, and flung inert far out upon the hoof-trodden dust with the blood pouring from his side.
“But,” they said in the wine-shops at night, “when they took him up, though they thought him gasping in death, he had not lost himself; and as they carried him out they came upon a girl—the one who is called ‘the pretty sister of José’—her brother was taking her away. She looked like one dead three days; and Sebastiano—there is a man for you!—tore the devisa from his shoulder and dropped it at her feet; and she snatched it up—all wet with his blood—and thrust it in her breast, and dropped like a stone. It is said that he loved her, and she had a devil of a temper and treated him badly. He is a good fellow—her brother José—and wept like a child for Sebastiano, and has begged to be allowed to nurse him, and Sebastiano will have it so.”
“I am strong as an ox,” José had said, weeping. “I can watch like a dog. I want neither sleep nor food, if it comes to that; and once when one of my comrades fell from a scaffold I was the only one who could nurse him without killing him with the pain. He will tell you that I nursed him well, and was never tired.”
“Let him stay,” said Sebastiano.