t even thump it. He seemed to have exhausted himself
in that scream. There was no other light in the room but the darkened
glow of the embers and I could hardly make out amongst the shadows of
furniture Dona Rita sunk on her knees in a penitential and despairing
attitude. Before this collapse I, who had been wrestling desperately
with her a moment before, felt that I dare not touch her. This emotion,
too, I could not understand; this abandonment of herself, this
conscience-stricken humility. A humbly imploring request to open the
door came from the other side. Ortega kept on repeating: "Open the door,
open the door," in such an amazing variety of intonations, imperative,
whining, persuasive, insinuating, and even unexpectedly jocose, that I
really stood there smiling to myself, yet with a gloomy and uneasy heart.
Then he remarked, parenthetically as it were, "Oh, you know how to
torment a man, you brown-skinned, lean, grinning, dishevelled imp, you.
And mark," he expounded further, in a curiously doctoral tone--"you are
in all your limbs hateful: your eyes are hateful and your mouth is
hateful, and your hair is hateful, and your body is cold and vicious like
a snake--and altogether you are perdition."

This statement was astonishingly deliberate. He drew a moaning breath
after it and uttered in a heart-rending tone, "You know, Rita, that I
cannot live without you. I haven't lived. I am not living now. This
isn't life. Come, Rita, you can't take a boy's soul away and then let
him grow up and go about the world, poor devil, while you go amongst the
rich from one pair of arms to another, showing all your best tricks. But
I will forgive you if you only open the door," he ended in an inflated
tone: "You remember how you swore time after time to be my wife. You are
more fit to be Satan's wife but I don't mind. You shall be my wife!"

A sound near the floor made me bend down hastily with a stern: "Don't
laugh," for in his grotesque, almost burlesque discourses there seemed to
me to be truth, passion, and horror enough to move a mountain.

Suddenly suspicion seized him out there. With perfectly farcical
unexpectedness he yelled shrilly: "Oh, you deceitful wretch! You won't
escape me! I will have you. . . ."

And in a manner of speaking he vanished. Of course I couldn't see him
but somehow that was the impression. I had hardly time to receive it
when crash! . . . he was already at the other door. I suppose