Motion Picture Classic (Jan-Dec 1920)

MOTION PICTLIRK They paid him a visit, and lover should go deeper, know watched Ernesto and more truly, sense more fully. Feodora together jj ^^^ ^^.^^,j ^„j ^^-^ ^-^^ had maintained the dignified silence they should have maintained, the sand of Seville might not have been streaked with tragic blood and bruised hopes and sorrows. Don Julian might still be — but this is going ahead of my story. The World did begin to talk. At first in a whisjier, then, louder and louder, until the echoes came close to the little circle in which Don Julian and Feodora and Ernesto so peacefully and unharmfully moved. The World began first in the persons of Don Severe and his wife. Mercedes, living in a distant town. They heard of Ernesto's presence in their brother's home, and they had very little else to do or to think about . . . They paid him a visit, and watched Ernesto and Feodora, deep in some legend they had come upon together, the dark heads close bent, the forefinger of the girl tracing out the magic, all but indecipherable words for the eager, dark eyes of the man. "It is bad. Julian." Severo said, and shook his head. "You have forgotten your youlTi. Don Julian," the Dona Mercedes sighed ; "you are blinding your eyes and closing your ears." Julian shook his head imi)atiently. "You are both absurd," he said ; "they are bookworms, the pair of them. They take pleasure in talking together, in poring over books, in arguin^ abstract subjects I have long since forgotten. What harm in that, can you say?" "The questions are abstract, my dear brother," Severo made reply, "but those young heads . . . those warm hands, all but touching, those soft lips lingering over enchanted .syllables . . . ah, Julian. Julian, how you have lost sense of the call of the blood! You ... sly one . . . who knew it, once, so well ..." That was the beginning. The next day, while the pair were reading, Don Julian com plained of headache and did not go for his usual ride. It seemed to him, then, that the tracing forefinger of Feodora lingered overlong on the difficult page, until that of Ernesto came to meet it. When, later, they strolled away together, he thought their shoulders touched and did not pull away, and it hurt him, for the first time, that they did not insist, demand that he accompany them. He seemed to himself, too, to be cumbersome and ungainly. The slim height of Ernesto gave him an unaccountable pang. He was a dotard ! Listening to the paltry suspicions of his brother and his wife, who had never had, nor ever would, anything better to spread than slander. Ernesto was his father's son, the sword blade, cleanly kept, of honor. And Feodora . . . why, Feodora was . . . Don Julian leaned back and closed his eyes against the piercing sweetness of what Feodora was to him, the vivid flower of his heart . . . But after that Don Julian went no more to ride when the afternoon readings took place, and when Ernesto and Feodora rode or walked he did not wave them jovial farewell, but watched them, thru wistful, half shut eyes. They wore their mantles of innocence securely or shame would have made them see the pain his heart was nurturing. The riper beginning came when Don Alvarez, a supposed friend of the three, remarked to Don Julian one afternoon at their club that he had seen Ernesto and Feodora riding in the morning. "These young people," he said, with a sneer, "ride solitary paths, it seems to me, and linger overlong, Don Julian, for friends on literary pilgrimages bent." It may have been the way he felt, but on the way home it seemed to Don Julian that Ernesto was no longer his young friend, his father's son and their good comrade, but the venomous enemy that lay ready to snatch from him the flower of his heart. Youth spoke to him with its many beguiling tongues. He had been a blind fool . . . solitary paths . . . dalliance . . . what flowers had they picked, those twain, on what sequestered paths . . . who knew ? When he had reached the house his rage and fear and roused suspicion had all but consumed him. It was not tempered by sight of Ernesto playing a guitar, lazily, while Feodora lay at full length in a hammock and hummed a low, accompanying tune. They loved, he told himself, insanely; they loved, the young two of them, and he, Julian, was left outside, barred away from them, alone and cold . . . With his temples hammering and his tongue twice its habitual size, he told Ernesto that he was a wife robber, a snake in the grass, a knife in the back, a menace, a curse. "I give you my trust,' he snarled, beside himself at sight of the bewildered young faces; "I give you my trust, a sacred thing between man and man, and that is not enough for you . . . you take my wife, too. Steal her — thief! Low-down, damnable thief !" "Julian !" Feodora's voice was anguished, shocked, too, incredulous, but Julian did not, would not hear that . . . (Tu-enty-eiffht)