A Spanish Love

Don Danchon comes back to Madrid after half a year of travelling with the same wound he left with: at the Foreign Minister's ball he saw Princess Maria, and since that night nothing else has held him. He calls on his oldest friend, Don Murio, and finds him grey-faced and sunk in a couch, and Murio's nineteen-year-old sister Caspina, who has loved Danchon for years, warns him at the door that her brother has gone strange — melancholy one hour, wildly gay the next.

Murio confesses. He sent Danchon away on that journey on purpose, he slandered him to Princess Maria until she pitied him, and he has taken her. He offers a duel. Danchon refuses one — a duel is for gentlemen — and promises instead to shoot him like a dog. That night Murio is given a carved silver flute in the avenue of trees by a beggar girl, plays a funeral air on it while a hand-drum and bells circle the house in the gale and a goat cries like a man coughing, and is found dead on his couch with the window shot out, the flower bed trampled, one yellow buckskin glove in the winter roses, and no wound anywhere on his body. Danchon walks in the next morning, lays his pistol on the table and says he fired at a thing that was a man above the waist and a beast below.

The rest is told by Caspina's diary and by a letter from the private detective Ibáñez, who alone refuses to believe the arrest. He asks about bells mixed into the drum, reads Murio's old diaries, then dresses in rags and a horsehide cap and follows a company of thirty Bohemians south — Seville, Granada, the mosque at Córdoba — to a palm grove on a river bank, where a girl called Gossan tells him what an oath sworn two years ago in a Madrid picture gallery, in front of a painting of a cobra, was worth. Princess Maria dies of the same flute, because Caspina gave it to her as a keepsake. Ibáñez lends the flute out once more, and knows what he has done only when he hears it played.