other attentively. The woman was the first to speak.
"Listen to me, Don Tadeo," she said. "In spite of all your efforts, destiny, or, speaking more correctly, woman's genius, which nothing can resist, has brought us together once again. If you live, if you have received only slight wounds, it is because I lavished my gold upon the soldiers charged with your execution; I wished to force you to that explanation which I have so long demanded of you, which you so often have refused me, but which you can now no longer avoid. Submit, then, with a good grace. We will afterwards separate, if not good friends, at least indifferent, never to meet again. Though I do not wish to establish any claim upon your gratitude, you certainly owe your life to me; were it for that service alone, you are bound to hear me."
"What! madam," Don Tadeo replied, proudly, "do you think that I consider what you have done was rendering me a service? By what right have you saved my life? You know me but ill if you fancied I should allow myself to be softened by your tears. No, no, I have been too long your dupe and your slave to do so. Heaven be praised! I know you well now; and the Linda, the mistress of General Bustamente, the tyrant of my country, the executioner of my brothers and myself, has nothing to expect from me! All that you can say, all that you can do, will be to no purpose. Spare yourself, then, I advise you, the trouble of pretending a gentleness which neither accords with your character nor your mode of life. I madly loved you, a young, pure, and prudent girl, in the cabin of the worthy guaso, your father, whose death was caused by your scandalous life; you were then called Maria. At that period, would I not have sacrificed my life and my happiness for you? – you know I would. Many times have I given you proofs of that boundless love; but the Linda, the shameless courtezan, the Linda, the woman branded on the brow like Cain with the seal of infamy, the miserable creature – I know her not. Away, madam! – away! There can be nothing in common between you and me."
And with a gesture of proud authority he waved her from him.
The woman had listened to him with flashing eyes and heaving bosom, trembling with rage and shame. Drops of perspiration stood upon her face, which glowed with a feverish redness. When he had finished, she seized his arm, pressed it with her utmost strength, and placed her face close to his.
"Have you said all?" she muttered from between her teeth. "Have you heaped insults enough upon me? Have you cast sufficient mire in my face? Have you nothing more to add?"
"Nothing, madam," he replied, in a tone of cool contempt. "You can, when you please, summon your assassins – I am ready to receive them."
And throwing himself upon the bed, he waited with an air of the most insolent indifference.
CHAPTER VII
HUSBAND AND WIFE
Doña Maria, notwithstanding the fresh and bitter insult she had just received from Don Tadeo, did not yet renounce the hope of softening him. When she recalled to her mind the early years, already so distant, of her love for Don Tadeo, his devotion to her smallest caprices, when she could bring him trembling and prostrate to her feet by a glance or a smile, and the entire abnegation he had made of his will, in order to live for her and by her; notwithstanding all that had since taken place between them, she could not persuade herself that the violent and deeply-seated passion he had entertained for her, the species of worship he had vowed to her, could have entirely disappeared without leaving some slight traces behind. Her pride revolted at the idea of having lost all her empire over the lofty nature which she so long had moulded at her pleasure like soft wax, under the burning impression of wild caprices. She fancied that, like most other men, Don Tadeo, deeply wounded in his pride, loved her still without being willing to admit it, and that the virulent reproaches he had addressed to her, were flashes of that ill-extinguished fire which still smouldered in his heart, and whose flame she should succeed in reviving.
Unfortunately Doña Maria had never given herself the trouble to study the man she had married, and whom her beauty had so long held in subjection. Don Tadeo had been nothing in her eyes but an attentive, submissive slave, and, under the apparent weakness of the loving man, she had not discovered the powerful energy which formed the foundation of his character. And yet the history itself of their love had been a proof of that energy, and of a will which nothing could control. Doña Maria, then fifteen years of age, dwelt with her father in a hacienda, in the neighbourhood of Santiago. Deprived of her mother, who had died in giving her birth, she was brought up under the care of an old aunt, an incorruptible Argus, who allowed no lover to come near her niece. The young girl, ignorant as all girls brought up in the country are, but whose warm aspirations led her to desire to know the world, and to launch into that whirlwind of pleasures the sound of which died without an echo in her ears, waited impatiently the arrival of the man who should introduce her to these delights, of which, although unknown, she had formed seducing ideas. Don Tadeo had only been the guide charged with initiating her into the pleasures for which she thirsted. She had never loved him; she had only said to herself, on seeing him and learning he was of a noble family, "That is the man I have been looking for."
This hideous and selfish calculation is made by more girls than we may fancy. Don Tadeo was handsome. Doña Maria's self-love was flattered by the conquest; but if he had been ugly and disagreeable, it would not have altered her course. In her extraordinary character, a strange conjunction of the most abject passions, among which shone here and there, like diamonds gleaming in the mire, a few feelings which attached her to humanity, there was the spirit of two women of ancient Rome; Locusta and Messalina were united in her: ardent, passionate and ambitious, covetous and prodigal, this demon, concealed under the outward form of an angel, acknowledged no other laws but her own caprices; and all means, by which she could satisfy them, to her appeared good.
For a long time, Don Tadeo, blinded by passion, had submitted without complaining to the iron yoke of this infernal genius; but when the day arrived that the scales fell from his eyes, he measured with terror the depth of the abyss into which this woman had cast him. The frightful disorders to which, under the sanction of his name, she had abandoned herself, imprinted on his blushing brow a stigma of infamy: the world believed him to be her accomplice.
Don Tadeo had by Maria an only daughter, a fair girl of angelic beauty, at the period of our history fifteen years of age, whom he loved in proportion to the sufferings her mother had inflicted upon him. He trembled to think of the frightful future which lay before this innocent creature. For four years he had been separated from his wife; and during that time she had set no bounds on her irregularities. One day, Don Tadeo presented himself unexpectedly at the house of his wife, and without saying a word as to his ulterior intentions, took away his daughter. From that time – nearly ten years – Doña Maria had never seen her child.
A strange revolution was effected by this step in the mother's feelings; a new sentiment, so to say, germinated in her soul. A thing, till that time unknown to her, happened; she felt the pulses of her heart beat for another – she grieved at the remembrance of the little angel who had been ravished from her. What was the sentiment? She, herself, knew not; she only ardently wished to see her child again. During six years she contended, publicly and privately, with Don Tadeo, to have her daughter restored to her. The father was deaf and dumb; she could never learn what had become of her. Don Tadeo, who, since he ceased to love her, had studied the character of the woman of whom he had made an implacable enemy, had taken his precautions so prudently that all Doña Maria's researches proved fruitless, and all her attempts to obtain an interview remained without a result. She imagined that he was afraid of yielding, if face to face with her; and she resolved, cost what it might, to force him to grant her the interview to which nothing had been able to make him consent.
Such was, at the moment we bring them on the scene, the position of the two personages who now doubtless met for the last time. It was an extraordinary position for both; an unequal contest between a wounded and proscribed man, and an ardent, insulted woman, who, like a lioness deprived of her whelps, was resolved to succeed, whatever might happen, and compel the man whom she had forced to hear her, to
