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He was tired of Madrid. The Countess of Alberca was at Biarritz with her husband. Doctor Monteverde had gone there too, dragged along by her. They made the trip, but it did not last more than a month. The master hardly finished two canvases. Josephina felt ill. When they reached the watering-place, her health improved greatly.
Monteverde was her lover, just as formerly a musician had been, at a period when the countess talked of nothing but Beethoven and Wagner, as if they were callers, and long before that a pretty little duke, who gave private amateur bull-fights at which he slaughtered the innocent oxen after greeting lovingly the Alberca woman, who, wrapped in a white mantilla, and decorated with pinks, leaned out of the box in the grandstand.
Renovales was missing in the formal entrance; he was very busy attending to the guests; a gracious smile, half hidden behind a fan, detained him at one end of the drawing-room. He had felt some one touch his shoulder and, turning around, he saw the solemn Count of Alberca with his wife on his arm. The count had congratulated him on the appearance of the studios; all very artistic.
He felt attracted by her mad jesting, by her almost childish levity, and at the same time he hated her for the pitying air with which she treated him. For her he was a good fellow, but very commonplace, who by some rare caprice of Nature possessed the gift of painting well. Renovales returned this scorn by insulting her mentally. That Countess of Alberca was a fine one.
The portrait of the Countess of Alberca was no longer in the studio; in a glittering frame it hung on the walls of the illustrious lady's drawing-room, where it received the worship of her admirers. Sometimes of an afternoon when the ladies had left the studio and the dull mumble of the car and the tooting of the horn had died away, the master and his friend would talk of López de Sosa.
Beyond, through half-veiling draperies, might be seen the great court of the Alberca, whose peristyles were hung with flowers; while, in the centre, the gigantic basin, which gives its name to the court, caught the sunlight obliquely, and its waves glittered on the eye from amidst the roses that then clustered over it.
He, accustomed to handling the brush and poorly trained in his childhood, took up the pen with timidity, and even in his letters to the Alberca woman preferred to represent his passionate phrases with amusing pictures, to embodying them in words. The old Bohemian got him out of this difficulty. He knew his Madrid well.
And with this public news there reached the artist on the whispering wings of Madrid gossip other tales that represented the Countess of Alberca as consoling herself merrily for the mistake she had made in marrying an old man. At Court, they had taken her name from the lists, as a result of this reputation.
Cotoner looked at the clock on the Government Building. "Aren't you going to the Alberca woman's house to-night?" Renovales seemed to awaken. Yes, he must go; they expected him. But he was not going. His friend looked at him with a shocked expression, as if he considered it a serious error to scorn a dinner.
At one side, a gentleman who rested under the endless list of his titles and honors, a sort of Count of Alberca, who had fallen asleep in the solemnity of his greatness, waiting for the angel's trumpet-blast to appear before the Lord with all his parchments and crosses.
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