But this prudence of a good house-mistress was trampling under foot their conjugal life of former times. One day Ferragut, with a return of his old affection, and desiring to illuminate Cinta's twilight existence with a pale ray of sunlight, ventured to caress her as in the early days of their marriage. She drew herself up, modest and offended, as though she had just received an insult. She escaped from his arms with the energy of one who is repelling an outrage.
Ulysses looked upon a new woman, intensely pale, of an almost olive countenance, the nose curved with wrath and a flash of madness in her eyes. All that she was guarding in the depths of her thoughts came forth, boiling over, expelled in a hoarse voice charged with tears.
"No, no!… We shall live together, because you are my husband and God commands that it shall be so; but I no longer love you: I cannot love you…. The wrong that you have done me!… I who loved you so much!… However much you may hunt in your voyages and in your wicked adventures, you will never find a woman that loves you as your wife has loved you."
Her past of modest and submissive affection, of supine and tolerant fidelity, now issued from her mouth in one interminable complaint.
"From our home my thoughts have followed you in all your voyages, although I knew your forgetfulness and your infidelity. All the papers found in your pockets, and photographs lost among your books, the allusions of your comrades, your smiles of pride, the satisfied air with which you many times returned, the series of new manners and additional care of your person that you did not have when you left, told me all…. I also suspected in your bold caresses the hidden presence of other women who lived far away on the other side of the world."
She stopped her turbulent language for a few moments, letting the blush which her memories evoked fade away.
"I loathed it all," she continued. "I know the men of the sea; I am a sailor's daughter. Many times I saw my mother weeping and pitied her simplicity. There is no use weeping for what men do in distant lands. It is always bitter enough for a woman who loves her husband, but it has no bad consequences and must be pardoned…. But now…. Now!…"
The wife became irritated on recalling his recent infidelities…. Her rivals were not the public women of the great ports, nor the tourists who could give only a few days of love, like an alms which they tossed without stopping their progress. Now he had become enamored with the enthusiasm of a husky boy with an elegant and handsome dame, with a foreign woman who had made him forget his business, abandon his ship, and remain away, as though renouncing his family forever…. And poor Esteban, orphaned by his father's forgetfulness, had gone in search of him, with the adventurous impetuosity inherited from his ancestors: and death, a horrible death, had come to meet him on the road.
Something more than the grief of the outraged wife vibrated in Cinta's laments. It was the rivalry with that woman of Naples, whom she believed a great lady with all the attractions of wealth and high birth. She envied her superior weapons of seduction; she raged at her own modesty and humility as a home-keeping woman.
"I was resolved to ignore it all," she continued. "I had one consolation,—my son. What did it matter to me what you did?… You were far off, and my son was living at my side…. And now I shall never see him again!… My fate is to live eternally alone. You know very well that I shall not be a mother again,—that I cannot give you another son…. And it was you, you! who have robbed me of the only thing that I had!…"