It was one o'clock when Monsalvat came out of the cabaret. As he stepped out on the sidewalk the cold, waiting thief like at the door, leapt at his throat and face. He turned up the collar of his overcoat and walked slowly away, careless of direction, his eyes following the sidewalk in front of him as a wheel follows a groove.
At the first street corner he paused. People were leaving theatres and cafés, whirling away into the dark in taxis and automobiles. The trams were crowded. The cross-streets, of unpretentious apartment houses and second-rate shops, all darkened and asleep, were poorly lighted; but at its southern end, the center of the capital's night life dusted the sky with a golden sheen. Monsalvat turned in that direction, walking on mechanically till he came out on the brilliantly illuminated avenue. Through the immense plate glass windows of the cafés he could see the multitudes of little tables, and topping them, hundreds of human torsos gesticulating under thick waves of cigarette smoke, pierced with colored lights; while through the opening and closing doors, tango music broke in irregular surges, now strong, now weak. The street corners were sprinkled with men stragglers or survivors from larger groups of joy-seekers. Automobile horns, conversations in every tongue, the bells of blocked street-cars, rent the lurid glow with resounding, impatient clangor. But in spite of all the animation and illumination of the theatre district, the merry-making had not the enthusiasm of the earlier hours. Only that irreducible minimum of vitality remained, that residue of joy-thirst, which survives evenings of revelry, clinging tenaciously to the later hours, and scattering over the after-midnight streets a pervading sense of weariness.
Indifferent to the animation of these glittering thoroughfares, concentrated on his own inner misery, bewildered in the maze of conflicting emotions within him, Monsalvat went on his way, but walking more and more slowly now. He tried to analyze the thoughts and sensations that were tormenting him; but the effort served only to exasperate his distress. He had never suffered like this. All he knew for the moment was that his heart, with an impulsiveness which he felt certain was quite disinterested, had gone out to a girl he saw doomed, the victim of her own will to live and of the evil nature of others. How cowardly, futile, he had felt himself in the presence of her helplessness and humiliation! And then something overwhelming, imperious, had seemed to stir in his being, filling him with a courage strangely unfamiliar to him, lifting him from his chair, and throwing him forward against the girl's tormentors. But had he not played the simple fool—in public? Had not even Nacha joined in the mockery as he left the room, proving incapable of loyalty even toward the man who had defended her? Then that final thrust of the bully: "Take a good look at me! I am Dalmacio Arnedo! Pampa Arnedo!" In the days of his thoughtless prosperity as a student and man of promise, Fernando had thought little of the sister, Eugenia Monsalvat, who shared his own position in his father's family. A touch of shame and sorrow had come to him when he learned that she had left her—and his—mother's home—disappearing from even that penumbra of respectability, to live as the mistress of a man named Arnedo. So this was the man, thus crossing his path a second time, rising before him leering and insulting, and pronouncing his own name as a symbol of redoubled scorn for the name of Monsalvat! And that sister, again! Had he done anything to prevent her fall, in the first place, or to redeem her, now that she had fallen?
He was still walking slowly down the avenue of white lights when he felt a touch on his arm. It was Hamilcar Torres, one of the most intimate of his few intimate acquaintances.
"Give me a few moments, Monsalvat. Let's go in here, shall we?"
They entered one of the large cafés. The orchestra here, composed of girls, was playing a languid gypsy waltz, the music and the musicians, in combination, evoking expressions of melting languor on the faces of the males who were assembled there, most of them, at this advanced hour, gazing about in stupid rapture over wine glasses that were being filled and filled again.
"It was I who sent for the police," said Torres, when they had taken a table. He brought out the words very deliberately, marking the syllables, and in a tone calculated to emphasize the allusion, though his manner at once changed from a mood of reproving seriousness to one of amusement, and bantering knowingness.
Torres was a physician; his strikingly white teeth, crisp curly hair, eyebrows prominent over deep-set black eyes, suggested a trace of African blood in his veins. Under a thick black mustache, rather handsomely set against rosy, smooth-shaven cheeks, he smiled continuously, sometimes sadly, sometimes ironically, sometimes with affected malevolence and shrewdness.
Monsalvat did not reply. The doctor, turning sideways to the table, crossed his long legs, and, thrusting them far beyond the limits of the space which might reasonably be allowed to each patron of the café, obstructed all passage near him.
"I followed along after you," he said, shifting uneasily on his chair and turning his head so as to face Monsalvat, "because I wanted to put you on your guard. You've got to be careful with these people, old man! I know them—they won't stop at anything—and I saw that you ... and the girl ... well ... er ... eh?"