Would
she go? Was not her promise a mere whim that she had immediately
forgotten? He sent a note to an ex-minister of State, whose portrait he
was painting, to ask him not to come to the studio that afternoon, and
after luncheon he got into a cab, telling the cabby to beat the horse,
to go full speed, for fear of being late.
He knew that it would be hours before she came, if she did come; but a
mad, unreasonable impatience filled him. He thought without knowing why
that, by arriving ahead of time, he would hasten the countess's coming.
He got out in the square in front of the little palace of Moncloa. The
cab disappeared in the direction of Madrid, up hill along an avenue that
was lost in the distance behind an arch of dry branches.
Renovales walked up and down, alone in the little square. The sun was
shining in a patch of blue sky, among the heavy clouds. In the places
which its rays did not reach, it was cold. The water ran down from the
foot of the trees, after dripping from the branches and trickling down
the trunks; it was melting rapidly. The wood seemed to weep with joy
under the caress of the sun, that destroyed the last traces of the white
shroud.
The majestic silence of Nature, abandoned to its own power, surrounded
the artist. The pines were swinging with the long gusts of wind, filling
space with a murmur, like the sound of distant harps. The square was
hidden in the icy shadow of the trees. Up above in the front of the
palace some pigeons, seeking the sun above the tops of the pines, swept
around the old flagpole and the classic busts blackened by the weather.
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