“She was light as a candle-flame. She sparkled and danced like the diamond in the end of the fiddle-bow. You must remember her in the theatre at Karlstad. We saw her when we were young; do you remember?” And the ensign remembered. She was small and ardent. She was like a sparkling flame. She could dance la cachucha. She taught all the young men in Karlstad to dance cachucha and to play the castanets. At the governor’s ball a _pas de deux_ was danced by the ensign and Mlle. von Berger, dressed as Spaniards. And he had danced as one dances under fig-trees and magnolias, like a Spaniard,—a real Spaniard. No one in the whole of Värmland could dance cachucha like him. No one could dance it so that it was worth speaking of it, but he. What a cavalier Värmland lost when the gout stiffened his legs and great lumps grew out on his joints! What a cavalier he had been, so slender, so handsome, so courtly! “The handsome Örneclou” he was called by those young girls, who were ready to come to blows over a dance with him. Then Lilliecrona begins the cachucha again, always the cachucha, and Örneclou is taken back to old times. There he stands, and there she stands, Rosalie von Berger. Just now they were alone in the dressing-room. She was a Spaniard, he too. He was allowed to kiss her, but carefully, for she was afraid of his blackened moustache. Now they dance. Ah, as one dances under fig-trees and magnolias! She draws away, he follows; he is bold, she proud; he wounded, she conciliatory. When he at the end falls on his knees and receives her in his outstretched arms, a sigh goes through the ball-room, a sigh of rapture. He had been like a Spaniard, a real Spaniard. Just at that stroke had he bent so, stretched his arms so, and put out his foot to glide forward. What grace! He might have been hewn in marble. He does not know how it happened, but he has got his foot over the edge of the bed, he stands upright, he bends, he raises his arms, snaps his fingers, and wishes to glide forward over the floor in the same way as long ago, when he wore so tight patent leather shoes the stocking feet had to be cut away. “Bravo, Örneclou! Bravo, Lilliecrona, play life into him!” His foot gives way; he cannot rise on his toe. He kicks a couple of times with one leg; he can do no more, he falls back on the bed. Handsome señor, you have grown old. Perhaps the señorita has too. It is only under the plane-trees of Granada that the cachucha is danced by eternally young gitanas. Eternally young, because, like the roses, each spring brings new ones. So now the time has come to cut the strings. No, play on, Lilliecrona, play the cachucha, always the cachucha! Teach us that, although we have got slow bodies and stiff joints, in our feelings we are always the same, always Spaniards. War-horse, war-horse! Say that you love the trumpet-blast, which decoys you into a gallop, even if you also cut your foot to the bone on the steel-link of the tether. CHAPTER VI