But in vain he poured colors on his palette and took up brushes and prepared canvases. He did nothing but daub; he could make no progress, as if he had forgotten his art. He kept turning his head anxiously, thinking that Josephina was going to enter suddenly, to continue that interview in which she had laid bare the greatness of her soul and the baseness of his own. He felt forced to return to her apartments, to go on tiptoe to the door of the chamber, in order to be sure that she was there.
Her emaciation was frightful; it had no limits. When it seemed that it must stop, it still surprised them with new shrinking, as if after the disappearance of her flesh, her poor skeleton was melting away.
Sometimes she was tormented with delirium, and her daughter, holding back her tears, approved of the extravagant trips she planned, of her proposals to go far away to live with Milita in a garden, where they would find no men; where there were no painters—no painters.
She lived about two weeks. Renovales, with cruel selfishness, was anxious to rest, complaining of this abnormal existence. If she must die, why did she not end it as soon as possible, and restore the whole house to tranquillity!
The end came one afternoon when the master, lying on a couch in his studio, was re-reading the tender complaints of a scented little letter. So long since she had seen him! How was the patient getting on? She knew that his duty was there; people would talk if he came to see her. But this separation was hard!
He did not have a chance to finish it. Milita came into the studio, in her eyes that expression of horror and fright, which the presence of death, the touch of his passage, always inspires, even if his arrival has been expected.
Her voice came breathlessly, broken. Mamma was talking with her; she was amusing her with the hope of a trip in the near future,—and all at once a hoarse sound,—her head bent forward before it fell onto her shoulder—a moment—nothing—just like a little bird.
Renovales ran to the bedroom, bumping into his friend Cotoner who came out of the dining-room, running too. They saw her in an armchair, shrunken, wilted, in the deathly abandon that converts the body into a limp mass. All was over.
Milita had to catch her father, to hold him up. She had to be the one who kept her calmness and energy at the critical moment. Renovales let his daughter lead him; he rested his face on her shoulder, with sublime, dramatic grief, with beautiful, artistic despair, still holding absent-mindedly in his hand the letter of the countess.
"Courage, Mariano," said poor Cotoner, his voice choked with tears. "We must be men. Milita, take your father to the studio. Don't let him see her."