Vicente Blasco Ibáñez - The Enemies of Women (Los enemigos de la mujer)

"That is why I always had a special liking for the story of the unhappy queen. And now I know why, when I saw Sir Edwin in London, I fell in love with him on the spot, in the most irresistible fashion. His ancestors were Scottish."

Such reasons were to her as unanswerable as all the others which had guided her actions. And to pay homage to the queenly soul which was, according to all her mystic attendants, reincarnated in her, she was going to live like the beheaded sovereign of Scotland, copying the Queen's clothes as she had seen them in pictures, converting her palace into a mediæval castle, and eating from antique plates nothing but Renaissance delicacies, the recipes for which she had employed a history professor to discover in ancient chronicles.

Carriages now rarely entered the Court of Honor of the palace. The grand stairway was growing mossy between its steps. Not so the delivery entrance. There, each day, the professionals of "the beyond" appeared, poorly dressed and suspicious looking men and women, who were exploiting the Princess, generous as a queen – and was she not one? – under the guise of aiding her in the manipulation of the lamp table, and conjuring up historic phantoms which, to prove their presence, moved the carpets, made the pictures fall from the walls, changed the positions of the chairs, and committed other childish deviltries.

Doña Mercedes avoided visiting the Princess. Her simple faith caused her to be frightened at queens that last for centuries, and at those halls with old furniture that seemed to palpitate with mysterious life. She preferred the quiet wholesome conversation of the priests whom she was supporting for herself. The Aragonese vicar had allowed himself to be snatched away in triumph by another devout millionaire. He had grown tired, no doubt, of the excessive ease and idleness afforded him by his penitent, and was bored with astronomical observations on the roof of the dwelling in the Champs-Élysées.

At present she was offering her hospitality to a Monsignor, a Bishop in partibus , who directed the widow's money into various pious charities of his own invention.

Alicia had married a French Duke, twenty years her senior, and after a few months of marriage was causing herself to be very much talked about. Doña Mercedes, offended, was punishing her by seeing her very seldom, in hopes that such coldness would cause the Duchess de Delille to follow the example of her mother. In the meantime, the latter was concentrating all her family affection on the Monsignor, a saint, and a man of the world, who in the evening, to avoid a discordant note, took off his cassock and sat down at table in a tuxedo, while a flock of mechanical birds sang and flapped their wings in the large gilded cage in the Creole's dining room.

Michael Fedor saw Alicia twice in the Lubimoff palace. She did not feel there the uneasiness her mother experienced, and even declared the manias of the Princess very original and interesting. Afternoons when she was bored, and paid the Princess a visit, she too seemed to believe in the lamp table and in the "Queen's" protégés with the mystic gestures.

She too consulted them to find out whether she would be happy, and especially whether she would be greatly loved, although she never told who it was that was supposed to love her. On other occasions she asked the oracle, with a note of jealous anxiety in her voice, what a certain unknown person was doing at that particular time. The name of the person was kept secret, but some months he would be dark and at other times he would be blond. She and the lamp table understood each other perfectly.

"I always said that girl was cleverer than her mother," the Princess affirmed.

When Alicia first met the Prince, on his return home, she burst out laughing, and almost embraced him.

"Do you remember how we used to hate each other? Do you remember that day in the Bois when we whipped each other?"

She looked at him with an air of interest, scrutinizing him from head to heel without detecting anything of the displeasing youth of former times. She knew of his adventures in Russia, his loves, his duels, his expulsion. An interesting man! A Byronic fellow! Besides, she had heard that he was a bit of a brute with women.

"Come and see me. We must be friends. Remember we are relatives."

Michael scrutinized her also, but with a certain seriousness. He had heard a great deal about her since arriving in Paris. During her three years of married life the Duke had tried twice to divorce her. It weighed on his mind to think that he should be enjoying immense wealth just in return for allowing her to bear his name. When he shook hands with a friend, he was never sure of the latter's relations with his wife. But Alicia had married the Duke in order to be a Duchess, and in the end the couple came to a practical agreement. Half of her income was to go to the Duke, who was to travel, or, if he wished, reside in Paris with a former mistress. Alicia might live as she pleased in her splendid white mansion in the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, and display a ducal coronet on her underwear, on her silver, and on the doors of her motor cars.

The little horsewoman of the Mexican plains, trained to morning gallops, had been transformed into a woman of proud and arrogant beauty. To Michael she looked like a California orange, golden, gleaming, wafting a strong sweet fragrance.

Inwardly he winced at the gaze of those dark eyes, so enticing and fascinating, so provoking and commanding, in full consciousness of power.

But no. He remembered that various men whom he disliked, had, according to common gossip, already preceded him in falling under Alicia's spell. And for the time being he was interested in a French actress, whom he had met on the train returning from Russia.

Besides, he suddenly beheld her again in his imagination as she was years before. Perhaps she had not changed. She was used to managing men with a firm hand, to changing from one to another, as though they were post horses. He and Alicia would quarrel at their second meeting. They might easily end by coming to blows.

He saw no more of her. New preoccupations changed the direction of his thoughts. One day in the street he met a Russian who seemed old and ill. It was Sergueff, his former teacher. Sergueff must now have been some forty years of age. He looked as though he were in his seventies, with a dirty white beard, grayish skin, and a wrinkled almost motheaten face, with no sign of life save in the two green holes that marked his eyes. From Saint Petersburg they had sent him to a prison in Siberia. He had escaped, crossed half of Asia on foot and alone, as far as a Chinese seaport, and there he had taken ship for the United States. The story of this tour of the world was told in a few words, as though it were a single walk on the boulevards.

Michael Fedor took him to the palace. The Colonel seemed dismayed by Sergueff's presence, and drew back into his shell. He must remember his own connections with nobles of the Russian court! Some of them were former generals of police!

The son of Princess Lubimoff talked for several days with the fugitive. The memory of his own expulsion from the court caused Michael vaguely to sympathize with this man who was likewise an exile. Besides, in the depths of his mind something of his mother's character was stirring, with all its inconsistencies and hazy vague desires. The officer of the Guard listened as attentively as a scholar to the doctrines of the revolutionist.

"Why, those men are right!" he exclaimed with the passionate enthusiasm that the Princess herself expressed for every novelty.

For the first few days he felt a yearning for martyrdom, a deep desire for renunciation, the mystic abnegation of the man of his race. He thought of many princes like himself, educated at court, with high social positions, who had given away their wealth to live among the poor and dedicate their lives to the triumph of truth and justice. He would do the same. He would reawaken to true life, and he was sure that his mother would approve. General Saldaña had given his blood to rehabilitate the past; he would give his to overcome all obstacles in the pathway of the future. Times change. The past consists of a certain number of centuries; the future is infinite.