... When I returned to my boarding-house to dinner, I found Paca waiting at the door to give me a letter. I did not care to open it before the messenger, and tried to dismiss her as soon as possible. But the worthy woman was too happy over her señorita’s escape from the convent, not to chatter for a while. Both interested and impatient, I was treated to all the particulars; how Doña Tula had gone to get Gloria in her carriage; how abominably they had behaved towards her at the convent, no one except the chaplain coming to bid her good-bye; how happy her señorita felt to take off her nun’s dress; how glad every one was to see her “so bright and chipper!” and all the insignificant words which they had exchanged in their talk.
At last she went away, and I hastened to my room, nervously lighted my candle, and opened the note.
“I am out of the convent,” it read. “If you wish to receive the promised scolding, pass in front of my house at eleven o’clock. I will be at the grating, and we will have a talk.”
The keen joy produced in me by that letter may be imagined. All my dreams were coming true at once. Gloria loved me, and was giving me a rendezvous, and this rendezvous was singularly attractive to a poet and a man of the North by being at the grating!
The grating—la reja![15] Does not this word exert a strange fascination? does it not awake in fancy a swarm of vague, sweet thoughts, as though it were the symbol and centre of love and poesy? Who is there with so little imagination as never to have dreamed of a talk with a loved one through the grating on a moonlight night? These talks and these nights have, moreover, the incalculable advantage that they can be described without an actual experience of them. There is not a lyrical mosquito among all those that hum and buzz in the central or septentrional provinces of Spain who has not given expression to his feelings concerning them, and framed a more or less harmonious structure with the sweet notes of the guitar, the scents of tube-roses, the moonlight scattering its delicate filaments of silver over the windows, the heavens bespangled with stars, the orange flowers, the maiden’s fascinating eyes, her warm perfumed breath, &c.
I myself, as a descriptive poet and colourist, have on more than one occasion, to the applause of my friends, jumbled together these commonplaces of Andalusian æsthetics.
But now the reality far exceeded and differed from this poetic conventionalism. For the time being, as I entered the Calle de Argote de Molina, at eleven o’clock, I failed to notice whether moon and stars were shining in the sky or not. It is quite possible that they were, for such things are natural; but I did not notice. What could be seen with perfect distinctness was the watchman with pike and lantern leaning up against a door not very far from Gloria’s.
“Shall I have to wait till this fellow goes off?” I asked myself with a sudden pang of fear.
Fortunately, after a little while I saw him start away from that place and move up the street.
Moreover, I went to the trysting-place without guitar or cloak, merely with a jonquil in my hand, and wearing a plain and inoffensive jacket. Neither did I go mounted on a fiery steed, black, dappled, or sorrel; but on my own wretched legs, which certainly trembled all too violently as I approached the windows of the house. In one of them I saw the gleam of a white object, and I hastened to tap on the grating.