Dragon's Teeth by Eça de Queirós

NEXT morning Juliana entered her mistress's bedroom with a letter in her hand, saying, with an air of mystery, that a servant from the hotel had brought it, and was waiting downstairs for an answer.

Luiza with a trembling hand opened the large blue envelope, with its monogram, "B. B.," in purple and gold, surmounting a count's coronet.

"Very well; there is no answer."

"There is no answer," Juliana repeated to the man, who was waiting in the little passage, smoking a cigar and twirling the ends of his black mustache.

"There is no answer? Very well. Charming weather!"

He saluted her stiffly with his hand, and went down the steps, humming a tune.

"Who rang, Senhora Juliana? " the cook asked her.

"It was nothing," Juliana muttered, -- "a message from the dressmaker."

From this time forth Joanna observed a change in her fellow-servant. When she took her coffee in the kitchen she no longer chatted with the cook as before; she seemed preoccupied, as if her thoughts were in some other place. Joanna was so struck by this that she even asked her, --

"Do you feel worse, Senhora Juliana?"

"I? Thank God, I never felt better."

"You are always so silent!"

"Thoughts that I have here within my head. One is not always in the humor for talking."

As she was shaking out the skirt of the gown her mistress had worn the day before, her hand came in contact with a paper in the pocket. It was the letter Luiza had written to Bazilio: --

"Why do you not come? If you knew what you make me suffer -- "

There was an instant during which Juliana silently bit her lip, and gazed at the letter fixedly, with greedy looks. Finally she put it back again into the pocket. She folded the gown and laid it carefully on the tête-à-tête. Then, hearing the cuckoo-clock striking, she went to call Luiza, saying in mellifluous accents, --

"It is half-past ten, Senhora."

Luiza, still in bed, had read and re-read Bazilio's letter. He could wait no longer, he wrote, to tell her that he adored her. He could not sleep. He had risen with the dawn to tell her that he was madly in love with her, and that he placed his life at her feet.

He had composed this letter at three o'clock in the morning, in the Gremio, after a few rubbers of whist, a beefsteak, two glasses of beer, and a glance at the "Illustracão; " and he ended it by saying: --

"Let others desire fortune, fame, honors; I desire only you! Only you, dearest, because you are the only tie that attaches me to life; and if to-morrow I should lose your love, I swear to you that I would put an end to this useless existence with a bullet."