Benito PErez Galdos

MARÍA EGYPTIACA DRESSES IN GREY AND DOES NOT WASH HER HANDS.

After calling on the doctor, who lived in the house opposite his own, and imploring him to go at once to Carabanchel, for which he lent him his carriage, Leon went home, fully determined to follow him thither as early as possible next morning. The house was silent and unlighted; every footstep echoed and every shadow seemed exaggerated. A sleepy man-servant opened the door, following him, half-nodding, to his room.

“You can go,” said his master. “I shall not go to bed to-night. Is your mistress gone to her room?”

“She was in the oratory till eleven—I will go and ascertain.”

“No, you need not ask. Who has been here this evening?”

“The SeÑora Marquesa de San Joselito, and DoÑa Perfecta.”

Leon repeated the names with dull indifference.

“And they went away when prayers were over.”

“Very well, you can go.”

The man went away; but he noticed in Leon Roch an anxious and absent manner, indicating that he was absorbed by some ruling idea; still, a servant cannot offer to console his master or to persuade him out of his melancholy by demonstrations of affection, so he went.

Leon was alone, and flinging himself into a seat with his elbow on a little table and his chin resting on his hands, his eyes—eyes as black as night—half-closed, he sat thinking. Of what, God alone knows. So complete was his abstraction from external things that he did not hear the soft footfall of a dark form which entered noiselessly, more like a ghost than a woman, and came close up to him. It touched him on the shoulder, and as he turned to look up Leon gave a cry of alarm. The fact is that there are occasions and circumstances when our mind is in a state that makes the simplest events and the most familiar faces seem strange and terrible.

“You startled me,” he said.

“That is strange! so cool a man, so brave and sensible, to be frightened at me!” said MarÍa in the doleful, mechanical voice that she had adopted for the last few months. She was robed in a morning gown of a dull mouse-grey and of the most exaggerated simplicity of make; she was pale and looked sallow, but from want of care rather than from self-mortification; her neat feet were concealed in a pair of coarse felt slippers, and her figure revealed neither shape nor grace; her fine hair hid itself as if ashamed under the folds of a cap of hideous dimensions.

After looking at him for a minute or two MarÍa said in a hard voice: “well, are you afraid of me?”

“Yes, I am afraid of you,” he replied, taking his eyes off his wife and looking at the ground.

“What next!” said MarÍa, smiling with an expression of disdainful superiority. “Because I am so ugly? But, would you believe it, I am delighted to see you quail before me. It is the privilege of humility that it can abash the gaze of the proud.” And as she spoke she seated herself.

Then, either because she detected a look of disgust on her husband’s face, or because she fancied she did, she added: “it annoys you that I should disturb you? So I supposed. That is the very reason why I shall stay. My duty comes before everything: and my conscience requires me to ask you what you have been doing for so long. Leon, your conduct is far from right. You never were a Christian but you kept up appearances at any rate; now, you do not even do that.”

“You do everything in your power to make my home unendurable,” replied Leon coldly. “Your disgust at the presence of those friends whom I most care to see, added to your fancy for filling the house with people whom I dislike; your constant absence—for you too go out, and a great deal more than I do—spending whole days in church; the extraordinary change in your very nature from being loving and amiable to harshness and scolding, are additional motives for my remaining within doors as little as possible. The house is full of gall and bitterness which weighs upon my soul as soon as I enter it.”

“Oh! how can you say such abominable things?” cried MarÍa, casting up her eyes to Heaven and clasping her hands under her chin.

“It is only the truth; I have no art to conceal the truth. You have made my house a desert cave, cold, empty, and dark ... and I want light, light!”

MarÍa was cowed for an instant by his vehemence, then, making great efforts to check her tears, she went on:

“You need not fancy that your violence will wear out my patience. For some time you have taken to talking to me as if I were one of the men you argue with at your club, or debating societies, or whatever you call them. Light, do you say? Light? Then you are at last tired of your blindness? What do I ask better than to show you the light? It is you who are determined that I shall not—that you will remain as you are—blind. You refuse to see! To me it would be the greatest comfort if we could save our souls together; but you will not ... you will rush on to destruction. I, so far as I am concerned, to my dying hour will never cease to say: ‘Leon, Leon, look and see.... And you laugh? But I am hardened against your laughter; God grants me such patience that I can bear to be the victim of your mockery as well as of your scorn and spite. Laugh as much as you please—laugh me to scorn! I do not care; nay, I ask it of you; my one hope, my one desire is to suffer and endure.’”

“Suffer and endure!” exclaimed Leon bitterly. “That is not my desire, to be sure, but it is my lot. God has so ordered it that where I looked for peace and love I find constant war—war to the knife. I hoped to bear a gentle burden, and a hideous log fell on to my shoulders, tiring me, galling and wounding me!”

“And that log am I! Thank you,” cried MarÍa spitefully, unable to swallow the worldly mortification which struggled with her less genuine mysticism. “This weary burden is your wife?”

“Yes, it is you. I can only speak plainly. I am bound to be honest.”

“Then cast it off! Rid yourself of this intolerable burthen,” she cried with nervous excitement, her cheeks glowing and her eyes sparkling. “I am a load on your shoulders and you hesitate to throw me off! Kill me, kill me at once!—martyrdom is my vocation!”

Leon looked at her scornfully and said very gravely:

“I do not kill—for that.”

“For what then? Nay, you kill for everything. There are other ways of killing besides blows; grief kills too.”

“If grief could kill, MarÍa, I should by this time be dead and buried. This infernal torture by a slow fire, this incessant discussion and recrimination arising from the radical opposition of our views on the things of the next world—and indeed of this—are a constant succession of blows that kill ... aye more surely than steel or lead! Ah! the misery of two beings, together and yet apart; of feeling that two souls that ought to be one are growing further and further asunder, each on its own side.... For all this I grieve bitterly, bitterly, child—and then to find a cold and lonely hearth where the wife I loved once sat—to be isolated and abandoned....” And Leon, deeply agitated, broke down and was silent.

“And in this separation,” said MarÍa, “who is to blame but you? You, who by nature are obdurate to all arguments, blindly obstinate in your atheism and materialism. What have I done constantly, repeatedly, but offer terms of peace and union?”

“What can you have to offer but thorns, bitterness and repulsion? What peace but that of the grave, the peace of a perfunctory, absurd and debasing formalism. You have no genuine feelings—nothing but capricious terrors, horrible stubbornness, a barren and morose mysticism which excludes all genuine love. Nay, do not talk to me of peace, you who have turned against me, doing all you can to vex and gnaw my heart with the fangs of ferocious fanaticism; to me you are like a harpy who calls your venom by the name of Faith, and who have poisoned me with that diabolical secretion.”

“Nay,” cried MarÍa with the air of a martyr, “abuse and insult me as much as you will, but do not attack my faith; that is blasphemy.”

“It is not blasphemy; I only tell you that you, and you alone, have made our marriage tie a chain of bondage. You, MarÍa you! When we married you had your beliefs and I had mine, and my respect for every man’s conscience is so great that I never thought of trying to eradicate your faith; I gave you complete liberty; I never interfered with your devotions, even when they were so excessive as to mar the happiness of our home. Then there came a day when you went mad—I can find no other word to describe the terrific exaggeration of your bigotry since, six months ago, here in my garden, your hapless brother died in your arms. Since then you have not been a woman but a monster of bitterness and vexatiousness; an incarnation of the inquisition in the form of a woman. You have not merely tormented me by ceasing to be in any way amiable and by your odious assumption of sanctity, but you have persecuted me with attempts to make of me too a hypocritical and ridiculous bigot. I have tried to make you give up your monomania; I have even tried giving way to some extent to your earnest entreaties; but you asked too much. It is impossible, utterly impossible, that I should lend myself to the sanctimonious farce, when I thought the moment propitious for acting with determination I have made superhuman efforts to free you from your own fanaticism, but, as you know, it has proved impossible. I have fought for it desperately, have tried every means, every argument of reason, of affection, of command—all in vain. Your spirit has succumbed to some irresistible power, and you live under the dominion of dark influences which I cannot defy. There are some invisible meshes, inscrutable ties, bonds that unite and shears that divide, without my seeing how or when. Against these I am impotent. MarÍa, I am defeated—I acknowledge it. I can have nothing more to say to you but a sad farewell, and to remind you that you once loved me—that we have been for a time happy together. It is a sad, a very sad, end; it leaves no room for hope!”

MarÍa was so impatient to be heard that she hardly waited for him to cease before she broke in:

“I too have my bill of indictment, and it is a heavy one. I was brought up in our holy faith and taught to put my faith into practice in all sincerity and truth. I married you—I loved you, I believed you to be good, kind, honourable, and did not understand the hideous void in your soul; I loved you—and I love you still, for it is my duty to love and respect you; but I soon began to see that in loving you I followed the promptings of a worldly passion, and that my choice was a fatal mistake; that my soul was in the utmost peril of contamination; that we could never come to an agreement; that your learning was of a most pernicious character; that I, as your wife and influenced by your reprobate ideas, might fall into the depths and lose my faith.—I was on my guard. I fully admit that you were tolerant and lenient, that you did not abuse my devotions, nor mock at religion as you have done since. But you cannot deny that there was a certain amount of contempt in the facilities you granted me; you had a particular smile when I spoke to you of such subjects.—However, we got on very well. Then one day it struck me: ‘I am a fool if I do not convert him. Why should I not light the lamp of faith in that darkened soul?’ But you gave me to understand that I was mad, that all believers were mad; and you smiled—how you smiled—and with what affectation of good humour you would laugh at all our sacred dogmas. ‘Let things alone,’ you said, ‘let every man save his soul in his own way.’ This made me miserable, for there is but one—if I repeat it a thousand times—there is but one way of being saved. Then came those dreadful days, that I can only call my sainted brother’s Holy Week—the days of agony of that angelic being, whom God vouchsafed to send to me that he might direct my steps into the right road—I see that the recollection of them vexes you. You cannot forget the bitter humiliation of your spirit in those days when the mere presence of my brother was a constant ground of remorse to you.”

Leon made no reply, he did not even look at his wife. There was something so repellent in her appearance that it vexed his sight as much as her words revolted his feelings.

“I too felt remorse or rather deep repentance for my sins, and an eager desire to grow more like the angel whose soul, as God had willed, was twin to mine. I believe I am reserved for a death no less glorious than his. Celestial fires were lighted in my heart, ardent but pure—different indeed from my love for you! What joys I felt, what heavenly strains I heard, what visions I saw, what glories I dreamed of, what anxieties I endured, what a craving for sorrow on earth that I may be happy in heaven! What a longing to die that I may enjoy, if only a small part of that sacred peace in which my brother revelled. I have prayed and longed till my brother has appeared to me, whether in my dreams or no I know not, radiant with happiness and beauty, calling me to him, and repeating the exhortations and warnings he gave me in the last hour of his life. I never pass a night without hearing his voice in my ears! You, of course, will not believe in this ecstasy, you are fast bound in materialism and can see only with your bodily eyes. Oh! wretched handful of clay! And this is what the world calls a wise man, because he has learnt half a dozen facts which cannot matter to any one. Wretched and miserable man! Still more miserable if you had no one to intercede for you, to beseech God for the mercy you do not deserve.”

“Thank you!” said Leon drily; and as his wife came nearer to him he put out his hand to keep off the contact of that grey dress. There was something in the smell of the coarse woollen stuff that sickened him.

“Your irony will not avail to quell or to shake me,” exclaimed his wife. “I know that your stubbornness will yield at last, a voice in my soul tells me so. God himself tells me so, when I feel myself uplifted by thoughts of him; the blessed patriarch Saint Joseph assures me of it—my friend and intercessor, my most loving, most tender and most pitiful patron,” and she spoke the canting superlatives with honeyed unction. “O Lord!” she went on, raising her eyes and crossing her hands, no longer marked by the refined cleanliness of former times, “save him, snatch him from the pestilent and atheistic set among which he has fallen, raise him up to thy glory and make him abhor these damnable doctrines!” Then she remained absorbed in muttered prayer, presently however she laid one hand on his shoulder, and raising the other with a gesture of threatening admonition, she went on in a low voice:

“The day will come when you will crave my pardon on your knees, when you will entreat me with tears to teach you how to pray; when you will fling yourself, like me, at the foot of dusty altars caring not that your hands should be dirty; when you will dress in sackcloth; live, like me, in perpetual fear of your conscience; feel that a smile, a glance, a frivolous thought is a sin; renounce all the joys of the world and find delight in incessant prayer and unwearied worship, neglecting all outward things, contemning all care of your body in perpetual penance. Ah! yes, you must save your soul; my patron saints cannot do less than grant me this; they will intercede to God for you, and God will forgive you and call you to himself, with me for your guide! What a triumph, what a victory that will be!”

She took her stand in the middle of the room in a dramatic attitude, with her hand raised, her eyes fixed, and her head thrown back, and exclaimed:

“Wretched atheist, I will save you in spite of yourself!”

Leon watched her in silence as she left the room. Long endurance had made him stoical; she had hammered so long and so constantly on his heart that it seemed to have turned to a dead cold anvil. But he let his fist fall on the arm of his chair with such force that the very floor trembled. It was as much as to say: “No more, no more of this!”