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“And yet I made a mistake.”

This he said to himself one night as he sat alone with his wife in the silent quietude of his home, at the hour when the mind wanders in the vague meditation that is the precursor of dreams, after recalling the facts of the past day which so lately were living realities and so soon may become a nightmare. Before him, already prepared to go to bed, sat the noble and beautiful Minerva-like figure. Her sea-blue eyes, by some unaccountable artistic blunder, were fixed on a book of devotions—one of the popular and commonplace manuals, full of magniloquent verbiage, and idle subtleties, devoid alike of piety, of style, of suggestiveness, of spiritual feeling and of evangelical truth—nothing but a monotonous jangle of words. But what did it matter? As she sat, nodding to sleep over this farrago, María was charming to look upon.

Leon had dropped his evening newspaper—no less a jangle in its kind, of broken strings, of tuneless bells, and the vacuous clack of rumour—and was gazing at his wife, raging inwardly at the hideous mockery of Fate. He—he who through all his early years had been absolute master of his fancy, had one day, all unconsciously, given it the reins, and then, cheated and betrayed, had allowed himself to be carried away by an illusion altogether unworthy of so sober a character. How could he have failed to see that between himself and this woman there could never be any community of ideas, nor that sweet union of minds that subsists even among fools? How could he be thus deluded by the witchery even of such perfect charms? How had he overlooked the wall of ice—high, dense, insuperable, which must stand for ever between them? Why had he failed to detect that recusant will, that deeply-rooted standard, that narrowness of purview, that absence of magnanimity, for all of which there was so little compensation in an over-wrought religious excitability? Why had he not foreseen the dulness, the emptiness of his home—lacking so much that was tender and attaching, lacking above all the tenderest and most attaching element of life: mutual confidence?

In a fit of desperate regret he raised his hand to his brow and clutched it convulsively, as if in malediction on the uselessness of learning. María did not notice the gesture, but kept her eyes fixed on her book.

“I fell in love like any idiot,” he thought, looking at her again, “but how could I help it?—she is lovely!”

All his efforts to form María’s character had been vain; at the earliest stage of her married life she had loved him with more passion than tenderness, but ere long, without ceasing to love him, she had begun to regard him as an erring soul—to be pitied but shunned. Leon had given her all liberty in the exercise of her religion, and at first she availed herself of it in moderation; but as he tried by degrees to influence her mind—not undermining her beliefs, as his detractors declared—but endeavouring to bring her intelligence as far as possible into harmony with his own, she abused the liberty he had granted and gave up almost all her time to her devotions. Not that she renounced all worldly pleasures and vanities; on the contrary, she enjoyed them keenly, though in due moderation. She went to theatres, except in Lent—she dressed well, frequented the fashionable promenades, and gave up part of the year to the excursions and country visits that became her position and fortune. She took great care of her personal appearance (for she liked to be admired by Leon), very little of her household, and none at all of her husband; the rest of her time and thoughts she devoted to the various pious meetings and benevolent dissipations to which she was carried off by her mother or her friends; in short, she served in the charmed ranks of fashionable religionism.

“And after all, is it not I who am the recalcitrant party?” Leon said to himself with crushed resignation. “Of what can I accuse her? Which of us is the believer? If I had faith we should be happy—why have I none?”

* * * * *

Then there was a third phase, during which María’s devotion to him was as great as ever, though still vehement rather than tender, and no more sympathetic than at first. At this time María would attack her husband with a mixture of human passion and mystic piety, which did not exclude each other because they reacted and complemented each other—trying to seduce him into the path of religion à la mode, faint with incense, splendid with tapers, gay with flowers, smoothed with suave sermons and graced with women of elegance and rank. Her fondest dream was to remain a bigot without forfeiting the man who had so completely realised the visions of her girlhood. To get him to church—that was the hard task she had set herself.

“Leave me—pray leave me,” Leon would say, tortured by regret. “Go and pray God for me.”

“But without you half of myself is wanting; I cannot feel as though I were good throughout, as I want to be.”

Then she would fly to him, clasp him in her arms and rest her head against the weary man’s breast, saying, with a sort of sob: “I love you so much!”

Leon’s persistent refusal to take any part in her pious practices brought them at length to that chronic state of misunderstanding, or rather of moral divorce, in which we have seen them two years after their marriage. They had ceased to share their ideas or to consult each other on any opinion or plan; they never enjoyed that community of pleasures or of trouble which is the natural marriage of souls; they neither wept together nor rejoiced together—they did not even quarrel. They were like those stars which look as if they were but one, and which in reality are millions of miles apart. All their friends could see that Leon was wretched, and suffering deeply though in silence.

“He has set his heart on making his wife a rationalist,” they said, “and that is as absurd as a sanctimonious man would be.”

“That is just what I say,” another would reply, “belief and disbelief are a matter of sex.”

“The fact 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 felt a chill about his aching heart like the stab of cold steel.

“Nothing that is mine!” he murmured, and his gaze fell on the ground as though death were his only hope.

“Nothing that proceeds from your haughty and erring intellect,” said his wife, giving what she thought was a decisive thrust. “Nothing that can contaminate me with your diabolical philosophy.”

There was a pause, and then Leon, with a prolonged sigh, looked up at her, pale and anxious.

“And who has taught you to say all this?” he asked.

“That matters not,” replied María, also turning pale but without losing courage. “I have told you already that, as a devout Catholic, I do not feel bound to render an account to an atheist of all the secrets of my religious conscience or of what regards my devotional practice. You need only be certain that I am faithful to you, and that I have never been false to my marriage vows in act, intention or thought. That is enough—I fulfil my pledge and duty as a wife and this is all the confidence you need look for from me. As for that part of my conscience which concerns God alone, do not hope to read it—it is a sanctuary into which you have no right to enter. Do not ask me: ‘Who taught me to say this or that’—You have no right to an answer.”

“I do not require it,” he said. “I never took it into my head to be uneasy because my wife went to the confessional three or four times a year to make a clean breast of her shortcomings and crave absolution in accordance with her creed. At the same time the confessional has its abuses: it asserts its rights to spiritual control by devious and underhand means, by daily interference, by constant and secret discussion of details, fostered on one hand by the scruples of an innocent soul, and on the other by the prurient curiosity of a man who has no natural family ties.”

“Indeed!” said María sarcastically. “It would be better, no doubt, that I should seek rules of conscience from the spiritual direction of your atheistical friends! I am sickened as it is, by the flippancy with which some of them speak of sacred subjects. I have told you, before now, that the parties in our house were an ostentatious and scandalous parade of evil principles and the day will come when I shall resolutely refuse to countenance them. I do not deny, of course, that some of your visitors are highly respectable; but others are not—I know what opinions some of them hold.”

“And who has informed you?” asked Leon eagerly.

“Oh, I don’t know.—All I say is that I am tired of being civil to them, of concealing my disgust in the society of men who have written or who have said in public—or who have neither written nor spoken—but I know what their opinions are all the same; yes, I know....”

“Much indeed you know!—But you have pronounced sentence on our evening meetings, and that sentence will be followed by others.” And with the strange but natural revulsion of a dull persistent grief, that relieves itself by delusive flashes of bitter amusement, Leon laughed aloud.

“Indeed,” said María, a little abashed. “Your evenings are a constant vexation. They are very discreditable, for with all your discussions on politics, or music, or some invention, or perhaps on history, our house is a hotbed of atheism.”

“And it would be a hotbed of virtue if we danced and talked gossip?—No, in my drawing-room no one has ever discussed atheism nor anything approaching it. Your pure and childlike conscience may rest easy! Do not let that distress your happy and innocent soul, if you believe that you have accomplished every duty by carrying the external practice of religion to the verge of folly and by worshipping words, symbols, dogma and routine with superstitious fervency, while your spirit lies cold and torpid, devoid of joy or sorrow, of struggle or of victory, lulled to sleep by the drone of sermons, the braying of organs, and the rustle of silken vestments! You believe yourself to be perfection, and you have not even the grace of a wavering spirit held firm, of doubts sternly silenced, of temptation resisted, or of contentment sacrificed. How easy, how accommodating is the piety of our day! Formerly, to dedicate yourself to the faith meant the total renunciation of every pleasure, the abdication of self-will, hatred of the pomps and vanity of this world, contempt for riches, luxury and comfort, so as to cast off the flesh and spiritualise the soul and meditate more freely on heavenly things; it meant living only the spiritual life to the highest pitch of rapture, of frenzy even—the rich emulating the poor, the healthy praying God for chastening disease, and the clean craving to be covered with foulness. It was an aberration, no doubt; but it was a sublime one, for self-sacrifice and abasement are of all virtues those which least lose their merit by excess. It was suicide, but it was guiltless suicide, since it was the very madness of self-abandonment! While now....” and Leon fixed on his wife a gaze fired with enthusiasm and scorn—“now the rules of piety demand constant oblations and a positive competition in the matter of ostentatious services; still, every one is dealt with according to his rank, the poor—as being poor, and the rich as being rich; provided, that is to say, that they do not refuse to contribute in due proportion. The devout women of the present day attend Mass, mortify themselves in comfortable chairs, pray kneeling upon cushions, and sweep the dust of the sanctuary with their trains. This only occupies their mornings; in the evening they are free to dance, to go to the play, to cover themselves with jewels and finery, to meet at the tables of the rich—though they may be Jews or heretics, to display themselves in promenades, and enhance or improve their charms to captivate men!—After all, what is the harm? The devil is in his dotage—he has come to terms—he is grown old and has forgotten his business!”

“Your jest is a coarse one,” exclaimed María in some confusion. “According to that I am in mortal sin because I dress well and go to the theatre.—You are talking of what you do not understand; you atheists are the maddest souls that live.”

She was not angry, and to prove it she coaxingly stroked her husband’s face. “Do you think your eloquence has brought me to nought, my dearest?” she went on. “But when you see that I dress carefully and go to the theatre, you must know that I have got leave to do it, and so can please myself without staining my soul. Nay, who has been more anxious to set me at rest on this point than yourself; for you have always said that, as a married woman, I have no right to break the ties that hold me to society.”

“Yes, that is the right thing to say, I know!” said Leon laughing. “Amuse yourself as much as you can, so long as....”

“Your reservations are blasphemy—say no more, foolish man. Sooner or later I shall yet succeed in proving to you that all your wisdom is mere foolishness!”

“Foolishness?” said Leon, putting his hand under his wife’s chin—soft, round and delicate.

“Think how I shall laugh at you when, at length, by the efficacy of my prayers, of my faith, and of my piety.... You smile? Nay do not smile; some wonderful cases have been seen—some of the instances I could tell you of would astonish you.”

“Then do not tell me of them,” said Leon, turning his wife’s face from side to side, as he still held her chin between his finger and thumb.

“Yes, cases that seem incredible—cases of wicked men who have been converted;—and you are not wicked.”

“Then I have not been denounced as a reprobate yet? Make yourself easy my dear, all in good time. Thanks for your friends’ good opinion of me—while it lasts!”

María threw her arms round him, and clasping his head to her bosom, kissed his forehead.

“You will come to me yet,” she said, “you will be a devout Catholic and be one with me in the practice of my beautiful religion....”

“I!”

“Yes, you. You will come to my arms!—How happy we may be then—I love you; you know how I love you!”

And how handsome, how lovely she was! Leon could not but feel the irresistible charm of such perfect beauty of face and form—of eyes whose depths seemed as translucent and as mysterious as the sea when we peer into the waters to find some lost treasure at the bottom.

María went across the room and stood in front of a mirror, raising her hands to let down her hair. The black tresses fell on her shoulders, which could not in justice be compared to cold hard marble since they were of the tenderest texture; but there is Parian flesh, though mysticism calls it clay, and the Divine Artificer has used it to form some few human statues which hardly seem to need a soul to give them life and beauty.

“She is lovely!” Leon exclaimed, as he sat sunk in his arm-chair, gazing like a simpleton. “Lovelier every day!”

After making various little arrangements at the glass, María went into her alcove. Leon’s head sank between his hands, and he remained for a long time lost in thought. He was in a fever. At length he rose—angry with himself or with some one else. “I am a fool!” he said. “I wanted a Christian wife and not a hypocritical odalisque.”