“Therese, Therese,” yelled Ortega. “She has got a man in there.” He ran to the foot of the stairs and screamed again, “Therese, Therese! There is a man with her. A man! Come down, you miserable, starved peasant, come down and see.”
I don’t know where Therese was but I am sure that this voice reached her, terrible, as if clamouring to heaven, and with a shrill over-note which made me certain that if she was in bed the only thing she would think of doing would be to put her head under the bed-clothes. With a final yell: “Come down and see,” he flew back at the door of the room and started shaking it violently.
It was a double door, very tall, and there must have been a lot of things loose about its fittings, bolts, latches, and all those brass applications with broken screws, because it rattled, it clattered, it jingled; and produced also the sound as of thunder rolling in the big, empty hall. It was deafening, distressing, and vaguely alarming as if it could bring the house down. At the same time the futility of it had, it cannot be denied, a comic effect. The very magnitude of the racket he raised was funny. But he couldn’t keep up that violent exertion continuously, and when he stopped to rest we could hear him shouting to himself in vengeful tones. He saw it all! He had been decoyed there! (Rattle, rattle, rattle.) He had been decoyed into that town, he screamed, getting more and more excited by the noise he made himself, in order to be exposed to this! (Rattle, rattle.) By this shameless CATIN! CATIN! CATIN!”
He started at the door again with superhuman vigour. Behind me I heard Dona Rita laughing softly, statuesque, turned all dark in the fading glow. I called out to her quite openly, “Do keep your self-control.” And she called back to me in a clear voice: “Oh, my dear, will you ever consent to speak to me after all this? But don’t ask for the impossible. He was born to be laughed at.”
“Yes,” I cried. “But don’t let yourself go.”
I don’t know whether Ortega heard us. He was exerting then his utmost strength of lung against the infamous plot to expose him to the derision of the fiendish associates of that obscene woman! . . . Then he began another interlude upon the door, so sustained and strong that I had the thought that this was growing absurdly impossible, that either the plaster would begin to fall off the ceiling or he would drop dead next moment, out there.
He stopped, uttered a few curses at the door, and seemed calmer from sheer exhaustion.
“This story will be all over the world,” we heard him begin. “Deceived, decoyed, inveighed, in order to be made a laughing-stock before the most debased of all mankind, that woman and her associates.” This was really a meditation. And then he screamed: “I will kill you all.” Once more he started worrying the door but it was a startlingly feeble effort which he abandoned almost at once. He must have been at the end of his strength. Dona Rita from the middle of the room asked me recklessly loud: “Tell me! Wasn’t he born to be laughed at?” I didn’t answer her. I was so near the door that I thought I ought to hear him panting there. He was terrifying, but he was not serious. He was at the end of his strength, of his breath, of every kind of endurance, but I did not know it. He was done up, finished; but perhaps he did not know it himself. How still he was! Just as I began to wonder at it, I heard him distinctly give a slap to his forehead. “I see it all!” he cried. “That miserable, canting peasant-woman upstairs has arranged it all. No doubt she consulted her priests. I must regain my self-respect. Let her die first.” I heard him make a dash for the foot of the stairs. I was appalled; yet to think of Therese being hoisted with her own petard was like a turn of affairs in a farce. A very ferocious farce. Instinctively I unlocked the door. Dona Rita’s contralto laugh rang out loud, bitter, and contemptuous; and I heard Ortega’s distracted screaming as if under torture. “It hurts! It hurts! It hurts!” I hesitated just an instant, half a second, no more, but before I could open the door wide there was in the hall a short groan and the sound of a heavy fall.
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