Gallardo in the meanwhile walked towards the president's chair to salute, while his unreasoning partizans accompanied him with applause as noisy as it was ill supported.
"He had no luck," said they, proof against all disillusions. "The estocades were well placed! No one can deny that."
The espada stood for a few moments opposite the benches where his most fervent partizans were seated, and leaning on the barrier he explained, "It was a very bad bull. There had been no means of making a good job of it."
The partizans, with Don José at their head, assented. It was just what they had thought themselves.
Gallardo remained the greater part of the corrida by the step of the barrier, plunged in gloomy thought. It was all very well making these explanations to his friends, but he felt a cruel doubt in his own mind, a distrust of his own powers that he had never felt before.
The bulls seemed to him bigger, and endowed with a "double life," which made them refuse to die, whereas formerly they had fallen under his rapier with miraculous facility. Indubitably they had loosed the worst of the herd for him, to do him an evil turn. Some intrigue of his enemies most probably.
Other suspicions, too, rose confusedly from the depths of his mind, but he scarcely dared to drag them out of their darkness and verify them. His arm seemed shorter at the moment when he presented the rapier in front of him; formerly it had reached the brute's neck with the quickness of lightning, now there seemed a fearful and interminable space that he knew not how to cover. His legs too seemed different. They seemed to be free and independent of the rest of his body. In vain his will ordered them to remain calm and firm as in former days, but they did not obey. They seemed to have eyes which saw the danger, and leapt aside with exceeding lightness as soon as they felt the brute charging.
Gallardo turned against the public the rage he felt at his failure, and his sudden weakness. What did those people want? Was he to let himself be killed for their pleasure?... Did he not carry marks enough of his mad daring on his body? He had no need to prove his courage. That he was still alive was a miracle and owing to celestial intervention, because God is good, and had listened to the prayers of his mother and his poor wife. He had seen the fleshless face of Death closer than most people, and he now knew better than any one the value of living.
"If you think you are going to have my skin!" he said to himself as he looked at the crowd.