have come to see you. I have chosen to come without him because my
farewell must be a serious, a solemn, perhaps a final one, and his will
naturally be of a very different character. My father will return to
the village in a few weeks; it is possible that I may never return to
it, and, if I do, it will be in a very different character from my
present one."
Pepita could not restrain herself. The happy future of which she had
dreamed vanished, at the words of Don Luis, into air. Her unalterable
resolution to vanquish, at whatever cost, this man, the only one she had
loved in her life, the only one she felt herself capable of loving,
seemed to have been made in vain. She felt herself condemned at twenty
years of age, with all her beauty, to perpetual widowhood, to solitude,
to an unrequited love--for any other love was impossible for her. The
character of Pepita, in whom obstacles only strengthened and kindled
afresh her desires, with whom a determination, once taken, carried
everything before it until it was fulfilled, showed itself now in all
its violence and without restraint. She must conquer, or die in the
attempt. Social considerations, the fixed habit of guarding and
concealing the feelings, acquired in the great world, which serve as a
restraint to the paroxysms of passion, and which veil in ambiguous
phrases, and dilute in circumlocutions, the most violent explosion of
undisciplined emotion, had no power with Pepita. She had had but little
intercourse with the world, she knew no middle way; her only rule of
conduct hitherto had been to obey blindly her mother and her husband
while they lived, and afterward to command despotically every other
human being. Thus it was that Pepita spoke her own thoughts on this
occasion, and showed herself such as she really was. Her soul, with all
the passion it contained, took sensible form in her words; and her
words, instead of serving to conceal her thoughts and her feelings, gave
them substance. She did not speak as a lady of our _salons_ would have
spoken, with circumlocutions and attenuations of expression, but with
that idyllic frankness with which Chloe spoke to Daphnis, and with the
humility and the complete self-abandonment with which the
daughter-in-law of Naomi offered herself to Boaz.
"Do you then persist in your purpose?" she asked. "Are you sure of your
vocation? Are you not afraid of being a bad priest? Don Luis, I am going
to make a supreme effort. I am going to forget that I am an uncultured
girl; I am going to dispense with all sentiment, and to reason as coldly
as if it were concerning the matter most indifferent to me. Things have
taken place that may be explained in two ways; both explanations do you
discredit. I will show you what my thoughts are. If the woman who, with
her coquetries--not very daring ones, in truth--almost without a word,
and but a few days after seeing and speaking to you for the first time,
has been able to provoke you, to move you to look at her with glances
that betokened a profane love, and has even obtained from you a proof of
that love that would be a fault, a sin, in any one, but is so especially
in a priest--if this woman be, as she indeed is, a simple country-girl,
without education, without talent, and without elegance, what is not to
be feared of you when in great cities you see and converse with other
women a thousand times more dangerous? Your head will be turned when you
are thrown into the society of the great ladies who dwell in palaces,
who tread on soft carpets, who dazzle the eye with their diamonds and
pearls, who are clad in silks and laces instead of muslin and percale,
who leave bare the white and well-formed throat instead of covering it
with a plebeian and modest handkerchief, who are adepts in all the arts
of coquetry, and who, by reason of the very ostentation, luxury, and
pomp that surround them, are all the more desirable for being apparently
more inaccessible; who discuss politics, philosophy, religion, and
literature; who sing like canaries, who are enveloped, as it were, in
clouds of incense, adoration and homage, set upon a pedestal of triumphs
and of victories, glorified by the prestige of an illustrious name,
enthroned in gilded saloons, or secluded in voluptuous boudoirs, where
enter only the blest ones of the earth, its titled ones, perhaps, who
only to their most intimate friends are "Pepita," "Antoñita," or
"Angelita," and to the rest of the world, "Her Grace the Duchess," or
"the Marchioness." If you have yielded to the arts of an uncultured
peasant when you were on the eve of being ordained, and in spite of all
the enthusiasm for your calling that you may naturally be supposed to
entertain--if you have thus yielded, urged by a passing impulse, am I
not right in foreseeing that you will make an abominable priest, impure,
worldly, and of evil influence, and that you will yield to temptation at
every step? On such a supposition as this, believe me, Don Luis--and do
not be offended with me for saying so--you are not even worthy to be the
husband of an honest woman. If, with all the ardor and tenderness of the
most passionate lover, you have pressed the hand of a woman, if you have
looked at one, with glances that foretold a heaven, an eternity of love,
if you have kissed a woman that inspired you with no other feeling than
one that for me has no name, then go, in God's name, and do not marry
her! If she is virtuous, she will not desire you for a husband, nor even
for a lover; but, for God's sake, do not become a priest either! The
Church needs men more serious, more capable of resisting temptation, as
ministers of the Most High.
"If, on the other hand, you have felt a noble passion for the woman of
whom we are speaking, although she be of little worth, why abandon and
deceive her with so much cruelty? However unworthy she may be, if she
has inspired this great passion, do you not suppose that she will share
it, and be the victim of it? For, when a love is great, elevated, and
passionate, does it ever fail to make its power felt? Does it not
tyrannize over and subjugate the beloved object irresistibly? By the
extent of your love for her you may measure that of her you love. And
how can you avoid fearing for her, if you abandon her? Has she the
masculine energy, the firmness of character produced by the wisdom
learned from books, the attraction of fame, the multitude of splendid
projects, and all the resources of your cultured and exalted intellect,
to distract her mind, and turn her away, without destructive violence,
from every other earthly affection? Can you not see that she will die of
grief, and that you, called by your destiny to offer up bloodless
sacrifices, will begin by pitilessly sacrificing her who most loves
you?"
"I too, madam," returned Don Luis, endeavoring to conquer his emotion,
and to speak with firmness--"I too, madam, am obliged to make a great
effort in order to answer you with the calmness necessary to one who
opposes argument to argument, as in a controversy; but your accusation
is supported by so many reasons, and you have invested those
reasons--pardon me for saying so--with so specious an appearance of
truth, that I have no choice left me but to disprove them by other
reasons. I had no thought of being placed in the necessity of
maintaining a discussion here, and of sharpening my poor wits for that
purpose; but you compel me to do so, unless I wish to pass for a
monster. I am going to reply to the two extremes of the cruel dilemma in
which you have placed me. Though it is true that my youth was passed in
my uncle's house and in the seminary, where I saw nothing of women, do
not therefore think me so ignorant, or possessed of so little
imagination, that I can not picture to myself how lovely, how seductive
they may be. My imagination, on the contrary, went far beyond the
reality. Excited by the reading of the sacred writers and of profane
poets, it pictured women more charming, more graceful, more intelligent,
than they are commonly to be found in real life. I knew then, and I even
exaggerated to myself, the cost of the sacrifice I was making, when I
renounced the love of those women for the purpose of elevating myself to
the dignity of the priesthood. I know well how much the charms of a
beautiful woman are enhanced by rich attire, by splendid jewels, by
being surrounded with all the arts of refined civilization, all the
objects of luxury produced by the indefatigable labor and the skill of
man. I knew well, too, how much the natural cleverness of a woman is
increased, how much her natural intelligence is sharpened, quickened,
and brightened by intercourse with scientific men, by the reading of
good books, even by the familiar spectacle of the wealth and splendor of
great cities, and of the monuments of the past that they contain. All
this I pictured to myself with so much vividness, my fancy painted it in
such glowing colors, that you need have no doubt that, should I be
thrown into the society of those women of whom you speak, far from
feeling the adoration and the transports you prophesy, I shall rather
experience a disenchantment on seeing how great a distance there is
between what I dreamed of and the truth, between the living reality and
the picture of it that my fancy drew."
"This is indeed specious reasoning," exclaimed Pepita. "How can I deny
that what you have pictured in your imagination is, in truth, more
beautiful than what exists in reality? but who will deny, either, that
the real possesses a more seductive charm than that which exists only in
the imagination? The vagueness and etherealness of a phantasm, however
beautiful it may be, can not compete with what is palpable and visible
to the senses. I can understand that holy images might exercise a more
powerful influence over your spirit than the pictures of mundane beauty
created by your fancy, but I fear that those holy images will not prove
equally powerful where mundane realities are concerned."
"Have no such fear, madam," returned Don Luis. "My fancy possesses, by
its own creations, more power over my spirit than does the whole
universe--only excepting yourself--by what it transmits to it through
the senses."
"And why except me? Such an exception gives room to the suspicion that
the idea you have of me, the idea which you love, may be but the
creation of this potent fancy of yours, and an illusion that resembles
me in nothing."
"No, this is not the case. You may be assured that this idea resembles
you in everything. It may be that it is innate in my soul, that it has
existed in it since it was created by God, that it is a part of its
essence, the best and purest part of its being, as the perfume is of the
flower."
"This is what I had feared, and now you confess it to me. You do not
love me. What you love is the essence, the fragrance, the purest part of
your own soul, that has assumed a form resembling mine."
"No, Pepita; do not seek to amuse yourself in tormenting me. What I love
is you--and you such as you really are; but what I love is also so
beautiful, so pure, so delicate that I can not understand how it should
have reached my mind, in a material manner, through the senses. I take
it for granted, then, and it is my firm belief, that it must have had an
innate existence there. It is like the idea of God that is inborn in my
soul, that has unfolded and developed itself within my soul, and that
has, nevertheless, its counterpart in reality, superior, infinitely
superior to the idea. As I believe that God exists, so do I believe that
you exist, and that you are a thousand times superior to the idea that I
have formed of you."
"Still, I have a doubt left. May it not be woman in general, and not I,
solely and exclusively, that has awakened this idea?"
"No, Pepita; before I saw you, I had felt in imagination what might be
the magic power, the fascination of a woman, beautiful of soul and
graceful in person. There is no duchess or marchioness in Madrid, no
empress in all the world, no queen or princess on the face of the globe,
to be compared to the ideals and fantastic creations with whom I have
lived. These were inhabitants of the castles and boudoirs, marvels of
luxury and taste, that I pleased myself in boyhood by erecting in my
fancy, and that I afterward gave as dwelling-places to my Lauras,
Beatrices, Juliets, Marguerites, and Leonoras; to my Cynthias, Glyceras,
and Lesbias. Them I crowned in my imagination with coronets and Oriental
diadems; I clothed them in mantles of purple and gold, and surrounded
them with regal pomp like Esther and Vashti; I endowed them, like
Rebekah and the Shulamite, with the bucolic simplicity of the
patriarchal age; I bestowed on them the sweet humility and the devotion
of Ruth; I listened to them discoursing like Aspasia, or Hypatia,
mistresses of eloquence; I enthroned them in luxurious drawing-rooms,
and cast over them the splendor of noble blood and illustrious lineage,
as if they had been the proudest and noblest of patrician maidens of
ancient Rome; I beheld them graceful, coquettish, gay, full of
aristocratic ease and manner, like the ladies of the time of Louis XIV,
in Versailles; and I adorned them, now with the modest _stola_, that
inspired veneration and respect; now with diaphanous tunics and
_peplums_, through whose airy folds were revealed all the plastic
perfections of their graceful forms; now with the transparent _coa_, of
the beautiful courtesans of Athens and Corinth, showing the white and
roseate hues of the finely molded forms that glowed beneath their
vaporous covering. But what are the joys of the senses, what the glory
and magnificence of the world, to a soul that burns with and consumes
itself in Divine love, as I believed mine, perhaps with too much
arrogance, to burn and consume itself? As volcanic fires, when they
burst into flame, send flying into air, shattered in a thousand
fragments, the solid rocks, the mountain-side itself, that obstruct
their passage, so, or with even greater force, did my spirit cast from
itself the whole weight of the universe and of created beauty that lay
upon it and imprisoned it, preventing it from soaring up to God, as the
center of its aspirations. No; I have rejected no delight, no sweetness,
no glory, through ignorance. I knew them all, and valued them all at
more than their worth, when I rejected them all for a greater delight, a
greater sweetness, a greater glory. The profane love of woman presented
itself to my fancy, clothed, not only with all its own charms, but with
the sovereign and almost irresistible charms of the most dangerous of
all temptations--of that which the moralists call virginal
temptation--when the mind, not yet undeceived by experience and by sin,
pictures to itself in the transports of love a supreme and ineffable
delight immeasurably superior to all reality. Ever since I reached
manhood--that is to say, for many years past, for my youth was short--I
have scorned those delights and that beauty that were but the shadow and
the reflex of the archetypal beauty of which I was enamored, of the
supreme delight for which I longed. I have sought to die to myself, in
order to live in the beloved object, to free, not only my senses, but
even my soul itself, from every earthly affection, from illusions and
imaginings, in order to be able to say with truth that it is not I who
live, but Christ who lives in me. It may be, nay, it must be, that in
this I sinned through arrogance and self-confidence, and that God has
therefore wished to chastise me; and you came across my path, and
tempted me, and led me astray. Now you upbraid me, you deride me, you
accuse me of levity and of yielding easily to temptation; but in
upbraiding me and deriding me you insult yourself, for you thus imply
that any other woman might have had equal power over me. I do not wish,
when I ought to be humble, to fall into the sin of pride, by trying to
justify my fault. If God, in chastisement of my pride, has let me fall
from his grace, it is possible that any temptation, however slight,
might have made me waver and fall. Yet I confess that I do not think so.
It may be that I err in my judgment that this is but the consequence of
my undisciplined pride, but, I repeat, I do not think so. I can not
succeed in persuading myself that the cause of my fall had in it
anything either mean or base. Above all the dreams of my youthful
imagination, the reality, such as I beheld it in you, enthroned itself.
Above all the nymphs, queens, and goddesses of my fancy, you towered.
Above the ruins of my ideal creations, overthrown and shattered by
Divine love, there arose in my soul the faithful image, the exact
reproduction of the living beauty that adorns, that is the essence of
that body and of that soul. There may be even something mysterious,
something supernatural in this; for I loved you from the moment I first
saw you--almost before I saw you. Long before I was conscious of loving
you, I loved you. It would seem as if there were some fatality in
this--that it was decreed, that it was a predestination."
"And if it were predestined, if it be decreed," said Pepita, "why not
submit to Fate, why still resist? Sacrifice your purpose to our love.
Have not I sacrificed much? Am I not now sacrificing my pride, my
decorum, my reserve, in supplicating you thus, in making this effort to
overcome your scorn? I too believe that I loved you before I saw you.
Now I love you with my whole heart, and without you there is no
happiness for me. It is true indeed that in my humble intelligence you
can find no rival so powerful as that which I have in yours. Neither
with the understanding, nor the will, nor the affections, can I raise
myself all at once up to God. Neither by nature nor by grace do I mount
or desire to mount up to such exalted spheres. My soul, nevertheless, is
full of religious devotion, and I know and love and adore God; but I
only behold his omnipotence and admire his goodness in the works that
have proceeded from his hands. Nor can I, with the imagination, weave
those visions that you tell me of. Yet I too dreamed of some one nobler,
more intelligent, more poetic, and more enamored, than the men who have
thus far sought my hand; of a lover more distinguished and accomplished
than any of my adorers of this and the neighboring villages, who should
love me, and whom I should love, and to whose will I should blindly
surrender mine. This some one was you. I had a presentiment of it when
they told me that you had arrived at the village. When I saw you for the
first time, I knew it. But, as my imagination is so sterile, the picture
I had formed of you in my mind was not to be compared, even in the most
remote degree, to the reality. I too have read something of romances and
poetry. But from all that my memory retained of them, I was unable to
form a picture that was not far inferior in merit to what I see and
divine in you since I have known you. Thus it is that from the moment I
saw you I was vanquished and undone. If love is, as you say, to die to
self, in order to live in the beloved object, then is my love genuine
and legitimate, for I have died to myself, and live only in you and for
you. I have tried to cast this love away from me, deeming it
ill-requited, and I have not been able to succeed in doing so. I have
prayed to God with fervor to take away from me this love, or else to
kill me, and God has not deigned to hear me. I have prayed to the
Virgin Mary to blot your image from my soul, and my prayer has been in
vain. I have made vows to my patron saint to the end that he would
enable me to think of you only as he thought of his blessed spouse, and
my patron saint has not succored me. Seeing all this, I have had the
audacity to ask of Heaven that you would allow yourself to be
vanquished, that you would cease to desire to be a priest, that there
might spring up in your soul a love as profound as that which is in my
heart. Don Luis, tell me frankly, has Heaven been deaf to this last
prayer also? Or is it, perchance, that to subjugate a soul as weak, as
wretched, and as petty as mine, a petty love is sufficient, while to
master yours, protected and guarded as it is by vigorous and lofty
thoughts, a more powerful love than mine is necessary, a love that I am
neither worthy of inspiring, nor capable of sharing, nor even able to
understand?"
"Pepita," returned Don Luis, "it is not that your soul is less than
mine, but that it is free from obligations, and mine is not. The love
you have inspired me with is profound, but my obligations, my vows, the
purpose of my whole life so near to its realization, contend against it.
Why should I not say it without fearing to offend you? If you succeed in
making me love you, you do not humiliate yourself. If I succumb to your
love, I humiliate and abase myself. I leave the Creator for the
creature. I renounce the unwavering purpose of my life, I break the
image of Christ that was in my soul; and the new man, that I had created
in myself at such cost, disappears, that the old man may come to life
again. Instead of my lowering myself to the earth, to the impurity of
the world that I have hitherto despised, why do not you rather elevate
yourself to me by virtue of that very love you entertain for me, freeing
it from every earthly alloy? Why should we not love each other then
without shame, and without sin, and without dishonor? God penetrates
holy souls with the pure and refulgent fire of his love, and fills them
with it, so that, like a metal fresh from the forge, that, without
ceasing to be a metal, shines and glitters and is all fire, these souls
fill themselves with joy, and are in all things God, penetrated by God
in every part, through the grace of the Divine love. These souls then
love and enjoy each other, as if they loved and enjoyed God, loving and
enjoying him in truth, because they are God. Let us mount together in
spirit this steep and mystical ladder. Let our souls ascend, side by
side, to this bliss, which even in this mortal life is possible; but to
do this we must separate in the body; it is essential that I should go
whither I am called by my duty, my vow, and the voice of the Most High,
who disposes of his servant, and has destined him to the service of his
altar."
"Ah, Don Luis," replied Pepita, full of sorrow and contrition, "now
indeed I see how vile is the metal I am made of, and how unworthy I am
that the Divine fire should penetrate and transform me. I will confess
everything, casting away even shame: I am a vile sinner; my rude and
uncultured understanding can not grasp these subtleties, these
distinctions, these refinements of love. My rebellious will refuses what
you propose. I can not even conceive of you but as yourself. For me you
are your mouth, your eyes, your dark locks that I desire to caress with
my hands, your sweet voice, the pleasing sound of your words that fall
upon my ears, and charm them through the senses; your whole bodily form,
in a word that charms and seduces me, and through which, and only
through which, I perceive the invisible spirit, vague and full of
mystery. My soul, stubborn, and incapable of these mysterious raptures,
will never be able to follow you to those regions whither you would take
it. If you soar up to them, I shall remain alone, abandoned, plunged in
the deepest affliction. I prefer to die; I deserve death; I desire it.
It may be that after death my soul, loosening or breaking the vile bonds
that chain it here, will be able to understand the love with which you
desire we should be united. Kill me, then, in order that we may thus
love each other; kill me, and then my spirit, set free, will follow you
whithersoever you may go, and will journey invisible by your side,
watching over your steps, contemplating you with ravishment, penetrating
your most secret thoughts, beholding your soul as it is, without the
intervention of the senses. But in this life it can not be. I love in
you, not only the soul, but the body, and the shadow cast by the body,
and the reflection of the body in the mirror and in the water, and the
Christian name, and the surname, and the blood, and all that goes to
make you such as you are, Don Luis de Vargas; the sound of your voice,
your gesture, your gait, and I know not what else besides. I repeat that
you must kill me. Kill me without compassion. No, I am not a Christian;
I am a material idolater."
Here Pepita made a long pause. Don Luis knew not what to say, and was
silent. Tears bathed the cheeks of Pepita, who continued, sobbing: