Then he laughed loud again; and, laughing, sang—
"Avez-vous vu en Barcelonne
Une belle dame, au sein bruni,
Pâle comme un beau soir d'automne?
C'est ma maîtresse, ma lionne,
La Marchesa d'Amaguï."
The rich, loud challenge of the love-song snapped short in two. With a groan and a curse he flung himself on the mud floor, and clutched at it with his empty hands.
"Wine!—wine!" he moaned, lying athirst there as the red bull had lain on the sands of the circus; longing for the purple draughts of his old feast-nights, as the red bull had longed for the mountain streams, so cold and strong, of its own Andalusian birthplace.
Then he laughed again, and sang old songs of Spain, broken and marred by discord—their majestic melodies wedded strangely to many a stave of lewd riot and of amorous verse.
Then for awhile he was quiet, moaning dully, staring upward at the white face of the moon.
After awhile he mocked it—the cold, chaste thing that was the meek trickster of so many mole-eyed lords.
Through the terror and the confusion of her mind, with the sonorous melody of the tongue, with the flaming darkness of the eyes, with the wild barbaric dissolute grandeur of this shattered manhood, vague memories floated, distorted and intangible, before her. Of deep forests whose shade was cool even in midsummer and at mid-day; of glancing torrents rushing through their beds of stone; of mountain snows flashing in sunset to all the hues of the roses that grew in millions by the river-water; of wondrous nights, sultry and serene, in which women with flashing glances and bare breasts danced with their spangled anklets glittering in the rays of the moon; of roofless palaces where the crescent still glistened on the colors of the walls; of marble pomps, empty and desolate, where only the oleander held pomp and the wild fig-vine held possession; of a dead nation which at midnight thronged through the desecrated halls of its kings and passed in shadowy hosts through the fated land which had rejected the faith and the empire of Islam; sowing as they went upon the blood-soaked soil the vengeance of the dead in pestilence, in feud, in anarchy, in barren passions, in endless riot and revolt, so that no sovereign should sit in peace on the ruined throne of the Moslem, and no light shine ever again upon the people whose boast it once had been that on them the sun in heaven never set:—all these memories floated before her and only served to make her fear more ghastly, her horror more unearthly.
There he lay delirious—a madman chained at her feet, so close in the little den that, shrink as she would against the wall, she could barely keep from the touch of his hands as they were flung forth in the air, from the scorch of his breath as he raved and cursed.
And there was no light except the fire in his fierce, hot eyes; except the flicker of the moonbeam through the leaves.