as a philosopher and a student of nature, thought that nothing could be better and wished for nothing more. His wife’s beauty had improved wonderfully since her marriage and in these additional charms the husband discovered an appropriate tribute paid by nature to an union so judiciously planned in theory and wrought out in practice.
“We form a compound being,” he would say, “each the complement of the other, and it is hard sometimes to say whether the image produced is mine or hers, our feelings are so intimately blended.”
María’s affection for him, which at first had been bashful and cold as that of a well brought up Cupid who has just had his eyes unbandaged, was soon as ardent as he could wish. The passion, that at first had sat shyly behind a blind, soon peeped out, with its flaming torch, its ambrosial chalice and its chain of yearning anxieties, choking its victim with the pain of a too great happiness; so that for some time her husband forgot his educational schemes, though, in his more lucid moments, his common-sense reminded him that it would be needful to put them into practice and realise the effects of his very superior system. By degrees he recovered his habitual equanimity and his excited feelings subsided into the subordinate place which he had always assigned to them as compared with his intellect. At last he felt like a man who wakes from a long dream; he regarded his mind as a wide and fruitful territory which has been for a time drowned out by an inundation, and where, as the waters subside, at first the highest points become visible, then the hills and at last the plains.
“This will pass away,” he said to himself, “it must. When the land is clear I will attack the dreaded subject and begin to mould”—he was fond of this form of speech—“to mould María’s character. It is of exquisite clay, but formless—almost formless.”
Leon Roch’s young wife was slightly and elegantly-built, every part in such perfect proportion that a sculptor could have hoped for no better model. Her hair was black and her skin white with very little colour, giving such refinement to her grave, fervent expression that all her admirers were her lovers and envied her husband his happiness. It was not a face of Spanish type, and the outline of her profile was an uncommon one in our country, for it was that of the Athenian goddess, so rare here though occasionally met with, even in Madrid. Her eyes were large and open, of a sea-blue colour with changing tawny lights, and their gaze had a sentimental serenity which might have been thought insipid among a crowd of black eyes, firing endless volleys of flashing glances. But María’s looks gained her the reputation of being proud rather than stupid, her lips were brilliantly red, her throat slender, her figure round, and her hands small and “moulded of soft flesh” like those of Melibea. She spoke in measured tones with a sort of deliberate plaintiveness that went to the souls of her hearers; she laughed but little—so little that it added to her reputation of pride, and she was so reserved in her friendships that in fact she had no friends. Even while quite a child she had always been credited with so much good sense that her parents themselves regarded her as the choicest production of their illustrious race, throughout the whole course of its glorious existence. To this almost superhuman beauty—this woman, in whose form and face were combined, as in a perfect æsthetic union, all the charms of antique sculpture, Leon Roch, after ten months of a most platonic engagement, found himself married. Love at first sight had enslaved him: he had met her and spoken to her at a court ball, when she, having only recently been presented, was at that wondering and budding stage when a girl’s beauty still bears the stamp of innocence and still blushes with the reflection of the rosy dawn of infancy. Leon fell in love like a country swain, to his shame be it whispered, and he was himself astonished to find that his theodolite and his blow-pipe had turned to a shepherd’s crook and pipe in his hands. Did he see anything in his wife beyond her uncommon beauty? What share had his heart in this dream of ecstasy? It would be amusing indeed if he, whose boast it was that he was master of his imagination, should find that it had fairly run away with him.
María had been brought up on an estate near Avila by her maternal grandmother, a woman of great tenacity and determination, who talked a great deal about her principles without ever defining what they were or in what they differed from those of her neighbours. Under the protection of this very superior woman, who, at the age of sixty, made up her mind to renounce the vanities of the world for the narrow life of a country house—fashion and society for the dull solitude of a desert—and the chronique scandaleuse of Madrid for the gossip of a village—María learnt her first lessons. She could read well, write badly and say her creed and catechism without missing a comma. Beyond a few notions of grammar and geography, which were infused by a governess of unusual learning, she knew nothing else whatever. However, as she grew older, María, as she turned over the leaves of the books she happened to meet with, gained some items of knowledge on such subjects as do not require any very high degree of intellect.
Her companion during these years passed in the wilderness was her twin brother, Luis Gonzaga. Their grandmother worshipped them both and called them “her death sighs,” because she declared that at her last hour, if they could but stand by her side, she would be able to lift up her last thoughts to God with purer devotion.
The two children were inseparable, sharing their games and their lessons, their bread and cheese at luncheon, and their grandmother’s caresses. They would walk arm-in-arm along the horrible lanes of Avila, and would sit at night, with their heads close together, to count the stars, which shine more brightly in that part of the country than anywhere else in the world. You might have heard them saying: “you must count on that side and I will count on this—you are not to come out of your piece of sky into mine—there, all on this side are mine—we can each have half the sky.”
“No, no, it is all for you both,” said a clacking voice from a window behind them. “Now, my pretties, come in to supper, it is getting late.”
Their only reading in that remote spot consisted in the Lives of the Saints, and the two children took the amazing narrative so deeply to heart, with its tales of suffering, toil, and death, that all they themselves learned to long for was to be martyrs too; and they were possessed by the same idea that mastered St. Theresa in her infancy, when she and her brother discussed the possibility of travelling all over the infidel world that they might at last have their heads cut off.
María and Luisito set out one morning for those heathen lands, fully determined not to return—not to stop, till they should fall in with a troop of Moors who should hew them in pieces. They lay down to sleep that evening under shelter of a rock, where the God who protects the innocent softly kissed their baby lips, and—betrayed them into the hands of the night-patrol, who recognised the pair and took them home.
That home was in a very remote spot from the rest of humanity. The parish priest used to call them “the children of the wilderness” and he would seat them on his knees to amuse himself with their baby games: they would stick up their little fingers and call each by a name, performing a kind of drama with them, known to the children of most lands: the middle finger is a friar who comes to the door of a convent and calls in a big voice, and the third finger answers in a feeble squeak:
“Rat, tat!”
“Who is there?”
“Your brother, who wants to be let in.” And the end of the story is that friar Pedro is sent off with a flea in his ear, the nuns thrashing him with sticks, and he disappears grumbling.
At this the twins would still laugh with glee at an age when most children begin to crave for better playthings than their own fingers; but, as they grew up, their games lost their primitive simplicity and their reading and their characters became more serious. Luis Gonzaga was the delight of his seniors from his quiet good sense and his incapacity for getting into mischief; the only fault to be found with him was his love of solitary wanderings among the rocks, breathing the keen and bracing air that perpetually fans our granite ramparts, which look like the ruins of some cyclopean fortress, or the broken teeth of a giant’s jaws from which the flesh has long since disappeared. He delighted in being alone,
