is that he is desperately in love with her.”
And this was the truth. Leon was bewitched by the beauty of his wife, who every day seemed more lovely and who, without interfering with her pious exercises, had the art of enhancing it by the luxury and taste of her dress and the perfect care of her person. It was equally true of María: she too was desperately in love; for no earthly consideration would she have changed the husband with whom fate and the church had blest her. The void in her heart had been filled by a perfectly unspiritual passion for his extraordinarily handsome person. Nor was he indifferent to the homage paid by the multitude to the lord and master of a gracious and beautiful wife—on the contrary, he was extremely proud of it, and the thought that María could under any conceivable circumstances have belonged to any other man, even in thought or intention, maddened him with rage. In short, they were two divorced beings, so far as mind and feeling were concerned, though united by the power of beauty, on the stormy territory of imagination.
It was of this that Leon was meditating at this hour of the night. At last he came to this bitter reflection:
“The world is governed by words and not by ideas. Hence we see that a marriage may degenerate into mere concubinage.”
“Have you done?” he asked his wife, seeing that she had closed her book and was praying silently with her eyes shut.
“Have you finished your newspaper?—Give it me; I want to look at something. The Duchess de Ojos del Guadiana does not wish to be at the whole expense of to-morrow’s ceremony. Let me see if it is announced in the column of services.” Leon looked and read the column aloud.
“A sermon by Padre Barrios!” exclaimed María with surprise. “We had asked him to withdraw, because he is asthmatic and no one can hear him—What a shame! San Prudencio is getting quite a name as the place of refuge for all the worst preachers, and all the scoffers congregate there to laugh at the chaplain’s stammering and Padre Paoletti’s Italian accent; it is all the result of certain persons undertaking to manage the services and not doing it properly. However, some one will come down upon them and put their house in order.—No, no; do not put down the paper; what is the opera to-morrow night?”
“The same again,” said Leon, laying down the paper and putting his hand on his wife’s arm as she was about to rise. “Wait, I want to speak to you.”
“And seriously it would seem,” replied María smiling. “Are you vexed with me? Oh, I know you are going to scold me. Yes,” she added, curling herself up on a sofa close to his arm-chair, “you are going to scold me for spending too much this month.”
“No.”
“Well, I have been rather extravagant, but I will make up for it by being very economical next month.—I know, my dear, I have spent more than my allowance. Let me see—there are three dresses, sixteen thousand; the triduo, four thousand; the novena which I ordered, ten thousand; the new hangings in my room—but that was all your fault, for laughing at the white angels playing with the blue corn.—Then I have to add the presents made to the actors who would not charge anything for the charitable performance; two watches, two snuff-boxes and two brooches.—But I will give you the whole account to-morrow.”
“It is not that, I tell you—nothing of the kind. You may spend as much as you like—you may ruin me for aught I care, and waste all my substance on dressmakers, priests, and actors. It is a much graver matter than your extravagance that I want to discuss, María: I want to ask you whether you do not think it high time that the emptiness and misery of our married life should have an end—that you should recognise that your excessive devotion to church ceremonies is almost a form of infidelity, and that by giving up so much to the cause of piety you are in fact doing an injury to me and to our common interests?”
“I have told you before,” replied María very gravely, “that I am prepared to account to God for my devotions—for good or for evil.—Not to you, who cannot understand them. Try to do so—be converted to the faith, and then we can talk about it!”
“Faith! it is you who do not understand. I have none—I can have none such as you require. Indeed and if I had, your conduct and your way of carrying out your religious duties would cure me of it. I may tell you, once for all, that in your actions and your fevered excitement about sacred things I see nothing that becomes a Christian wife. My house is not a home, and my wife is no more than a beautiful dream, as remote as she is fair. This, I tell you is not marriage—you are not my wife nor I your husband.”
“And whose fault is that but yours?” she exclaimed eagerly. “If harmony and confidence are absent, who is to blame?—Your atheism, your infidelity, your separation from the Holy Church! I stand safely within the pale of matrimony—it is you who are outside. I call you, I invite you to enter with open arms and you will not come—Coward!”
And she stretched them to him, but Leon made no attempt to throw himself into them.
“I should come,” he said, “come with rapture, if I saw in you the faith which regards religion as the purest form of love. I should admire and respect your faith, and only wish that I could share it—but as it is I do not—I cannot—wish to follow.”
“You are mad, utterly mad! What is it that you do wish? That I should deny God and the Church, that I should turn rationalist like you, that I should read your books full of lies, that I should believe that we are all apes, that materialism is truth, that Nature is the only God, or that there is no God—all your hideous mass of heresies? Happily I have been able to escape falling into that abyss. I am pious and can believe all I ought to believe; I worship sincerely and constantly, for that is the best means of keeping faith alive and active, and of closing the soul against the entrance of any false doctrine.—I go to church too often? I am unreasonably particular in my attention to the rules of the Church? I am extravagant in the services I pay for? I listen every day to the Word of God? I pray night and morning?—This is the old story—is it not? I know I am looked upon as a fanatic. Well, there is a reason for everything. Do you suppose that I should cling so passionately to the Cross if I had not you for my husband—you—an atheist; if I were not—as I am—in constant peril of contamination by your views, and by my daily intercourse with you, nay, by my very love for you? No—if you were not so far from devout I should be less so. If you were a sincere Catholic I should not be a bigot—I should fulfil the most necessary duties but nothing more. It is like this Leon—supposing two men are out together in a small boat on a stormy sea; if both row with equal strength they will easily reach the shore; but no—one only lifts his oar, and does not pull at all. Must not the other work twice as hard or else they perish? Understand that clearly my dear—one oar must save us both.”
“That figure of speech is not of your invention,” said Leon, who knew full well the extent of his wife’s rhetorical powers. “Whose is it, pray?”
“Whether it is mine or not can be of no importance to you,” retorted María with contemptuous asperity. “The important point is that it covers an indisputable fact. Do you wish me to learn the truth from your miserable books?”
“No, no—I do not ask that,” said Leon sadly. “But wicked as I may be—reprobate as you believe me, do you think I am so bad as to deserve that you should not accept a single idea from me, and that you must always conceal and reserve your own, and keep yourself as far away from me as possible?”
“Nay—I accept your love which I believe to be sincere, and your respect for my beliefs which I feel to be honest, and your personal protection—but your views, your opinions....”
María spoke with such emphasis, and broke off with such a sparkle of scorn in her eyes with their dazzling, cat-like gleam, that Leon
