just contempt you will kill me more surely than with a dagger, and
without staining either your hands or your conscience with blood.
Farewell! I am about to free you from my odious presence. Farewell
forever!"
Having said this, Pepita rose from her seat, and, without looking at Don
Luis, her face bathed with tears, beside herself, rushed toward the door
that led to the inner apartment. An unconquerable tenderness, a fatal
pity, took possession of Don Luis. He feared Pepita would die. He
started forward to detain her, but it was too late. Pepita had crossed
the threshold. Her form disappeared in the obscurity within. Don Luis,
impelled by a superhuman power, drawn as by an invisible hand, followed
her into the darkened chamber.
* * * * *
The library remained deserted.
The servants' dance must have already terminated, for the only sound to
be heard was the murmur of the fountain in the garden below.
Not even a breath of wind troubled the stillness of the night and the
serenity of the air.
The perfume of the flowers and the light of the moon entered softly
through the open window. After a long interval, Don Luis made his
appearance, emerging from the darkness. Terror was depicted on his
countenance, mingled with despair--such despair as Judas may have felt
after he had betrayed his master.
He dropped into a chair and, burying his face in his hands, with his
elbows resting on his knees, he remained for more than half an hour
plunged in a sea of bitter reflections.
To see him thus, one might have supposed that he had just assassinated
Pepita.
Pepita, nevertheless, at last made her appearance. With slow step, with
an air of the deepest melancholy, with bent head, and glance directed to
the floor, she approached Don Luis and spoke.
"Now, indeed," said she, "though, alas! too late, I know all the
vileness of my heart and the iniquity of my conduct. I have nothing to
say in my own defense, but I would not have you think me more perverse
than I am. You must not think I have used any arts--that I have laid any
plans for your destruction. Yes; it is true that I have been guilty of
an atrocious crime, but an unpremeditated one; a crime inspired,
perhaps, by the spirit of evil that possesses me. Do not abandon
yourself to despair, do not torture yourself, for God's sake! You are
responsible for nothing. It was a frenzy, a madness that took possession
of your noble spirit. Your sin is a light one; mine is flagrant,
shameful, horrible. Now I am less worthy of you than ever. It is I who
ask you now to leave this place. Go; do penance. God will pardon you.
Go; a priest will give you absolution. Once cleansed from sin, carry out
your purpose, and become a minister of the Most High. Then, through the
holiness of your life, through your ceaseless labors, not only will you
efface from your soul the last traces of this fall, but you will obtain
for me, when you have pardoned me the evil I have done you, the pardon
of Heaven also. You are bound to me by no tie, and even if you were I
should loosen or break it. You are free. Let it suffice me that I have
taken captive by surprise the star of the morning. It is not my
desire--I neither can nor ought to seek to keep him in my power. I
divine it, I read it in your gesture, I am convinced of it--you despise
me more than before; and you are right in despising me. There is neither
honor, nor virtue, nor shame in me."
When she had thus spoken, Pepita, throwing herself on her knees, bowed
her face till her forehead touched the floor. Don Luis continued in the
same attitude as before. Thus, for some moments, they remained both
silent with the silence of despair.
In a stifled voice, and without raising her face from the floor, Pepita
after a time continued:
"Go now, Don Luis, and do not, through an insulting pity, remain any
longer at the side of so despicable a wretch as I. I shall have courage
to bear your indifference, your forgetfulness, your contempt, for I have
deserved them all. I shall always be your slave--but far from you, very
far from you, in order that nothing may recall to your memory the
infamy of this night."
Pepita's voice, as she ended, was choked with sobs.
Don Luis could restrain himself no longer. He arose, approached Pepita,
and, raising her in his arms from the floor, pressed her to his heart;
then, putting aside from her face the blond tresses that fell in
disorder over it, he covered it with passionate kisses.
"Soul of my soul," he said at last, "life of my life, treasure of my
heart, light of my eyes, raise up your dejected brow, and do not
prostrate yourself any longer before me. The sinner, the vile wretch, he
who has shown himself weak of purpose, who has made himself the butt of
scorn and ridicule, is I, not you. Angels and devils alike must laugh at
me and mock me. I have clothed myself with a false sanctity. I was not
able to resist temptation, and to undeceive you in the beginning, as
would have been just, and now I am equally unable to show myself a
gentleman, a man of honor, or a tender lover who knows how to value the
favors of his mistress. I can not understand what it was you saw in me
to attract you. There never was in me any solid virtue--nothing but vain
show and the pedantry of a student who has read pious books as one reads
a novel, and on this foundation has based his foolish romance of a
future devoted to converting the heathen, and to pious meditations. If
there had been in me any solid virtue, I should have undeceived you in
time, and neither you nor I would have sinned. True virtue is not so
easily vanquished. Notwithstanding your beauty, notwithstanding your
intelligence, notwithstanding your love for me, I should not have fallen
if I had been in reality virtuous, if I had had a true vocation. God, to
whom all things are possible, would have bestowed his grace upon me. It
would have needed nothing less than a miracle, or some other
supernatural event, to have enabled me to resist your love, but God
would have wrought the miracle, and I should have been worthy of it, and
a motive sufficient for its being wrought. You are wrong to counsel me
to become a priest. I know my own unworthiness. It was only pride that
actuated me in my desire to be one. It was a worldly ambition, like any
other. What do I say--like any other? It was worse than any other; it
was a hypocritical, a sacrilegious, a simoniacal ambition."
"Do not judge yourself so harshly," said Pepita, now more tranquil, and
smiling through her tears. "I do not want you to judge yourself thus,
not even for the purpose of making me appear less unworthy to be your
companion. No; I would have you choose me through love--freely; not to
repair a fault, not because you have fallen into the snares you perhaps
think I have perfidiously spread for you. If you do not love me, if you
distrust me, if you do not esteem me, then go. My lips shall not breathe
a single complaint, if you should abandon me forever, and never think of
me again."
To answer this fittingly, our poor and beggarly human speech was
insufficient for Don Luis. He cut short Pepita's words by pressing his
lips to hers, and again clasping her to his heart.
* * * * *
Some time afterward, with much previous coughing and shuffling of the
feet, Antoñona entered the library with the words:
"What a long talk you must have had! The sermon our student has been
preaching this time can not have been that of the _seven words_--it came
very near being that of the _forty hours_. It is time you should go now,
Don Luis; it is almost two o'clock in the morning."
"Very well," answered Pepita, "he will go directly."
Antoñona left the library again, and waited outside.
Pepita was like one transformed. One might suppose that the joys she had
missed in her childhood, the happiness and contentment she had failed to
taste in her early youth, the gay activity and sprightliness that a
harsh mother and an old husband had repressed, and, as it were, crushed
within her, had suddenly burst into life in her soul, like the green
leaves of the trees, whose germination has been retarded by the snows
and frosts of a long and severe winter.
A city-bred lady, familiar with what we call social conventionalities,
may find something strange, and even worthy of censure, in what I am
about to relate of Pepita. But Pepita, although refined by instinct, was
a being in whom every feeling was spontaneous, and in whose nature there
was no room for the affected sedateness and circumspection that are
customary in the great world. Thus it was that, seeing the obstacles
removed that had stood in the way of her happiness, and Don Luis
conquered, holding his voluntary promise that he would make her his
wife, and believing herself, with justice, to be loved, nay, worshiped
by him whom she too loved and worshiped, she danced and laughed, and
gave way to other manifestations of joy that had in them, after all,
something childlike and innocent.
But it was necessary that Don Luis should now depart. Pepita took a comb
and smoothed his hair lovingly, and kissed him. She then rearranged his
neck-tie.
"Farewell, lord of my life," she said, "dear sovereign of my soul. I
will tell your father everything if you fear to do. He is good, and he
will forgive us."
At last the lovers separated.
When Pepita found herself alone, her restless gayety disappeared, and
her countenance assumed a grave and thoughtful expression.
Two thoughts now presented themselves to her mind, both equally serious;
the one possessing a merely mundane interest, the other an interest of a
higher nature. The first thought was that her conduct to-night--the
delirium of passion once past--might prejudice her in the opinion of Don
Luis; but, finding, after a severe examination of her conscience, that
neither premeditation nor artifice had had any part in her actions,
which were the offspring of an irresistible love, and of impulses noble
in themselves, she came to the conclusion that Don Luis could not
despise her for it, and she therefore made her mind easy on that point.
Nevertheless, although her frank confession that she was unable to
comprehend a love that was purely spiritual, and her taking refuge
afterward in the obscurity of her chamber--without foreseeing
consequences--were both the result of an impulse innocent enough in
itself, Pepita did not seek to deny in her own mind that she had sinned
against God, and on this point she could find for herself no excuse.
She commended herself with all her heart, therefore, to the Virgin,
entreating her forgiveness. She vowed to the image of Our Lady of
Solitude, in the convent of the nuns, seven beautiful golden swords of
the finest and most elaborate workmanship, to adorn her breast, and
determined to go to confess herself on the following day to the vicar,
and to submit herself to the harshest penance he should choose to impose
upon her, in order to merit the absolution of those sins by means of
which she had vanquished the obstinacy of Don Luis, who, but for them,
would without a doubt have become a priest.
While Pepita was engaged in these reflections, and while she was
arranging with so much discretion the affairs of her soul, Don Luis had
descended to the hall below, accompanied by Antoñona.
Before taking his leave, Don Luis, without preface or circumlocution,
spoke thus:
"Antoñona, tell me, you who are acquainted with everything, who is the
Count of Genazahar, and what has he had to do with your mistress?
"You begin to be jealous very soon."
"It is not jealousy that makes me ask this, it is simply curiosity."
"So much the better. There is nothing more tiresome than jealousy. Well,
I will try to satisfy your curiosity. This same count has given room
enough for talk. He is a dissipated fellow, a gambler, and a man of no
principle whatever, but he has more vanity than Don Roderick on the
gallows. He made up his mind that my mistress should fall in love with
him and marry him, and, as she has refused him a thousand times, he is
mad enough to be tied. This does not prevent him, however, from keeping
in his money-chest more than a thousand dollars that Don Gumersindo lent
him years ago, without any more security than a bit of paper, through
the fault and at the entreaty of Pepita, who is better than bread. The
fool of a count thought, no doubt, that Pepita, who was so good to him
as a wife that she persuaded her husband to lend him money, would be so
much better to him as a widow that she would consent to marry him. He
was soon undeceived, however, and then he became furious."
"Good-by, Antoñona," said Don Luis, as, now grave and thoughtful, he
left the house.
The lights of the shops and of the booths in the fair were now
extinguished, and everybody was going home to bed, with the exception of
the owners of the toy-shops, and other poor hucksters, who slept beside
their wares in the open air.
In some of the grated windows were still to be seen lovers, wrapped in
their cloaks, and chatting with their sweethearts. Almost every one else
had disappeared.
Don Luis, once out of sight of Antoñona, gave a loose rein to his
thoughts. His resolution was taken, and all his reflections tended to
confirm this resolution. The sincerity and ardor of the passion with
which he had inspired Pepita; her beauty; the youthful grace of her
person, and the fresh exuberance of her soul, presented themselves to
his imagination, and rendered him happy.
Notwithstanding this, however, he could not but reflect with mortified
vanity on the change that had been wrought in himself. What would the
dean think? How great would be the horror the bishop! And, above all,
how serious were the grounds for complaint he had given his father! The
displeasure of the latter, his anger when he should know of the bond
that bound his son to Pepita, caused him infinite disquietude.
As for what--before he fell--he had called his fall it must be confessed
that, after he had fallen, it did not seem to him either so very serious
or so very reprehensible. His spiritual-mindedness, viewed in the light
that had just dawned upon him, he fancied to have had neither reality
nor consistency; to have been but the vain and artificial product of his
reading, of his boyish arrogance, of his aimless tenderness in the
innocent days of his college life. When he remembered that he had at
times thought himself the recipient of supernatural gifts and graces,
that he heard mystic whisperings, that his spirit held communion with
superior beings; when he remembered that he had fancied himself almost
beginning to tread the path that leads to spiritual unity, through
contemplation of the Divine, penetrating into the recesses of the soul,
and mounting up to the region of pure intelligence, he smiled to
himself, and began to suspect that during the period in question he had
not been altogether in his right mind. It had all been simply the result
of his own arrogance. He had neither done penance, nor passed long years
in meditation; he did not possess, nor had he ever possessed, sufficient
merits for God to favor him with privileges like these. The greatest
proof he could give himself of the truth of this, the greatest certainty
he could possess that the supernatural favors he had enjoyed were
spurious; mere recollections of the authors he had read, was that not
one of them had ever given him the rapture of Pepita's "I love you," or
of the soft touch of her hand caressing his dark locks.
Don Luis had recourse to another species of Christian humility to
justify in his eyes what he now no longer called his fall, but his
change of purpose. He confessed himself unworthy to be a priest; he
reconciled himself to being a commonplace married man, a good sort of
country gentleman, like any other, taking care of his vines and olives,
and bringing up his children--for he now desired to have children--and
to being a model husband at the side of his Pepita.
* * * * *
Here I think myself again in the necessity--responsible as I am for the
publication and divulgation of this history--of interpolating various
reflections and explanations of my own.
I said at the beginning of the story that I was inclined to think that
the narrative part, or _paralipomena_, was composed by the reverend dean
for the purpose of completing the story, and supplying incidents not
related in the letters; but I had not at that time read the manuscript
with attention. Now, on observing the freedom with which certain matters
are treated, and the indulgence with which certain frailties are
regarded by the author, I am compelled to ask whether the reverend dean,
with the severity of whose morals I am well acquainted, would have spent
his time in writing what we have just read.
There are not sufficient grounds, however, for denying positively that
the reverend dean was the author of these _paralipomena_. The question,
therefore, may still be left in doubt, as in substance they contain
nothing opposed to Catholic doctrine or to Christian morality. On the
contrary, if we examine them carefully, we shall see that they contain a
lesson to pride and arrogance, in the person of Don Luis. This history
might easily serve as an appendix to the "Spiritual Disillusions" of
Father Arbiol.
As for the opinion entertained by two or three ingenious friends of mine
that the reverend dean, if he were the author, would have used a
different style in his narration, saying "my nephew" in speaking of Don
Luis, and interposing, from time to time, moral reflections of his own,
I do not think it an argument of any great weight. The reverend dean
proposed to himself to tell what had taken place, without seeking to
prove any thesis, and he acted with judgment in narrating things as they
were, without analyzing motives or moralizing. He did not do ill,
either, in my opinion, in concealing his personality, and in avoiding
the use of the word _I_, which is a proof, not only of his humility and
modesty, but of his literary taste also, for the epic poets and
historians who should serve us as models, do not say _I_, even when
speaking of themselves, and are themselves the heroes of the events they
relate. The Athenian Xenophon, to cite an instance, does not say _I_ in
his "Anabasis" but speaks of himself in the third person, when
necessary, as if the historian of those exploits were one person, and
the hero of them another. And there are whole chapters in which no
mention at all is made of Xenophon. Only a little before the famous
battle in which the youthful Cyrus met his death, while this prince was
reviewing the Greeks and barbarians who formed his army, and when that
of his brother Artaxerxes was already near, having been descried on the
broad, treeless plain afar off, first as a little white cloud, then as a
black spot, and, finally, clearly and distinctly--the neighing of the
horses, the creaking of the war-chariots armed with formidable scythes,
the cries of the elephants and the sound of warlike instruments reaching
the ears of the spectators, and the glitter of the brass and gold of the
weapons, irradiated by the sun, striking their eyes--only at that
moment, I repeat, and not before, does Xenophon appear in his own
person; then he emerges from the ranks to speak with Cyrus, and explains
to him the cry that ran from Greek to Greek; it was no other than what
in our day we call the watchword; and on that occasion it was "_Jupiter
the Savior, and victory!_"
The reverend dean, who was a man of taste, and very well versed in the
classics, would not be likely to fall into the error of introducing
himself into the narrative, and mixing himself up with it, under pretext
of being the uncle or tutor of the hero; and of vexing the reader by
coming out at every step a little difficult or slippery, with a "Stop
there!" or "What are you about to do?" or, "Take care you do not fall,
unhappy boy!" or other warnings of a like sort. Not to open his lips,
on the other hand, or manifest disapprobation in any way whatever, he
being present at least in spirit, would, in the case of some of the
incidents related, have been but little becoming. In view of these
facts, the reverend dean, with the discretion which was characteristic
of him, may possibly have composed the _paralipomena_, without
disclosing his identity to the reader. This much is certain, however--he
added notes and comments of an edifying and profitable character, where
such or such a passage seemed to require them. But these I have
suppressed, for the reason that notes and comments are now out of
fashion, and because this little book would be beyond measure voluminous
if it were printed with these additions.
I shall insert here, however, in the body of the text, the comment of
the reverend dean on the rapid transformation of Don Luis from
spiritual-mindedness to the reverse, as it is curious and throws much
light on the whole matter.
"This change of purpose of my nephew," he says, "does not disappoint me.
I foresaw it from the time he wrote me his first letters. I was deceived
in regard to Luisito in the beginning. I believed him to have a true
religious vocation; but I soon recognized the fact that his was a vain
poetic spirit. Mysticism was the form his poetic imaginings took, only
until a more adequate form presented itself.
"Praised be God, who has willed that Luisito should be undeceived in
time! A bad priest he would have made, if Pepita Ximenez had not so
opportunely presented herself. His very impatience to attain to
perfection at a single bound would have caused me to suspect something
if I had not been blinded by the affection of an uncle. What! are the
favors of Heaven thus obtained all at once? Is it only necessary to
present one's self in order to triumph? A friend of mine, a naval
officer, used to relate that, when he was in certain cities of America,
being then very young, he sought to gain favor with the ladies with too
much precipitation, and that they would say to him in their languid
American accent: 'You have but just presented yourself, and you already
want to be loved. Do something to deserve it, if you are able.' If these
ladies answered thus, what answer will not Heaven give to those who hope
to gain it without merit, and in the twinkling of an eye? Many efforts
must be made, much purification is needed, much penance must be done, in
order to begin to stand well in the sight of God, and to enjoy his
favors. Even in those vain and false philosophies that have in them
anything of mysticism, no supernatural gift or grace is received without
a powerful effort and a costly sacrifice. Iamblichus was not given
power to evoke the genii, and cause them to emerge from the fountain of
Gadara, without first spending days and nights in study, and mortifying
the body with privations and abstinences. Apollonius of Tyana is thought
to have mortified himself finely before performing his false miracles.
And in our own day the Krausists, who behold God, as they affirm, with
corporeal vision, are forced to read and learn beforehand the whole
"Analytics" of Sanz del Río, which is a much harder task and a greater
proof of patience and endurance than to flagellate the body until it
looks like a ripe fig. My nephew desired, without effort or merit, to be
a perfect man, and--see how it has ended! The important thing now is
that he shall make a good husband, and that, since he is unsuited for
great things, he may be fit for smaller ones--for domestic life, and to
make Pepita happy, whose only fault, after all, is to have fallen madly
in love with him, with all the ingenuousness and violence of an untamed
creature."
* * * * *
Thus far the comments of the reverend dean, written with easy
familiarity, as if for himself alone; for the good man was far from
suspecting that I would play him the trick of giving them to the public.
* * * * *