For the most part this traffic of the night was conducted by men—young or old, as may be. The capa hid them all, kept their semblance as secret as their affairs. Here and there, but rarely, walked a woman, superbly, as Spanish women will, with a self-sufficiency almost arrogantly strong, robed in white, hooded with a white veil. The mantilla came streaming from the comb, swathed her pale cheeks and enhanced her lustrous eyes; but from top to toe she was (whatever else; she may have been, and it was not difficult to guess) in white.
Manvers watched them pass and repass; at a distance they looked like moths, but close at hand showed the carriage and intolerance of queens. They looked at him fairly as they passed, unashamed and unconcerned. Their eyes asked nothing from him, their lips wooed him not. There was none of the invitation such women extend elsewhere; far otherwise, it was the men who craved, the women who dispensed. When they listened it was as to a petitioner on his knees, when they gave it was like an alms. Imperious, free-moving, high-headed creatures, they interested him deeply.
It was true, as Gil Perez was quick to see, that at his first bull-fight Manvers had been unmoved by the actors, but stirred to the deeps by the spectators; if he had cared to see another it would have been to explore the secrets of this wonderful people, who could become animals without ceasing to be men and women. But why jostle on a bench, why endure the dust and glare of a corrida when you can see what Madrid can show you: the women by the Manzanares, or the nightly dramas of the streets?
Love in Spain, he began to learn, is a terrible thing; a grim tussle of wills, a matter of life and death, of meat and drink. He saw lovers, still as death, with upturned faces, tense and white, eating the iron of guarded balconies. Hour by hour they would stand there, waiting, watching, hoping on. No one interfered, no one remarked them. He heard a woman wail for her lover—wail and rock herself about, careless of who saw or heard her, and indeed neither seen nor heard. Once he saw a couple close together, vehement speech between them. A lovers' quarrel, terrible affair! The words seemed to scald. The man had had his say, and now it was her turn. He listened to her, touched but not persuaded—had his reasons, no doubt. But she! Manvers had not believed the heart of a girl could hold such a gamut of emotions. She was young, slim, very pale; her face was as white as her robe. But her eyes were like burning lakes; and her voice, hoarse though she had made herself, had a cry in it as sharp as a violin's, to out the very soul of you. She spoke with her hands too, with her shoulders and bosom, with her head and stamping foot. She never faltered though she ran from scorn of him to deep scorn of herself, and appealed in turn to his pride, his pity, his honour and his lust. She had no reticence, set no bounds: she was everything, or nothing; he was a god, or dirt of the kennel. In the end—and what a climax!—she stopped in the middle of a sentence, covered her eyes, sobbed, gave a broken cry, turned and fled away.
The man, left alone, spread his arms out, and lifted his face to the sky, as if appealing for the compassion of Heaven. Manvers could see by the light of a lamp which fell upon him that there were tears in his eyes. He was pitying himself deeply. "Señor Jesu, have pity!" Manvers heard him saying. "What could I do? Woe upon me, what could I do?"
To him there, as he stood wavering, returned suddenly the girl. As swiftly as she had gone she came back, like a white squall. "Ah, son of a thief? Ah, son of a dog!" and she struck him down with a knife over the shoulder-blade. He gasped, groaned, and dropped; and she was upon his breast in a minute, moaning her pity and love. She stroked his face, crooned over him, lavished the loveliest vocables of her tongue upon his worthless carcase, and won him by the very excess of her passion. The fallen man turned in her arms, and met her lips with his.
Manvers, shaking with excitement, left them. Here again was a Manuela! Manuela, her burnt face on fire, her eyes blown fierce by rage, her tawny hair streaming in the wind; Manuela with a knife, hacking the life out of Estéban, came vividly before him. Ah, those soft lips of hers could bare the teeth; within an hour of his kissing her she must have bared them, when she snarled on that other. And her eyes which had peered into his, to see if liking were there—how had they gleamed. upon the man she slew? Her sleekness then was that of the cat; but she had had no claws for him.
Why had she left him her crucifix? After all, had she murdered the fellow, or protected herself? She told the monk that she had been driven into a corner—to save Manvers and herself. Was he to believe that—or his own eyes? His eyes had just seen a Spanish girl with her lover, and his judgment was warped. Manuela might be of that sort—she had not been so to him. Nor could she ever be so, since there was no question of love between them now, and never could be.
"Come now," thus he reasoned with himself. "Come now, let us be reasonable." He had pulled her out of a scuffle and she had been grateful; she was pretty, he had kissed her. She was grateful, and had knifed a man who meant him mischief—and she had left him a crucifix.
Gratitude again. What had her gipsy skin and red kerchief to do with her heart and conscience? "Beware, my son, of the pathetic fallacy," he told himself, and as he turned into the carrera San Geronimo, beheld Manuela robed in white pass along the street.