VULNERANT OMNES, ULTIMA NECAT.
The ceremony took place at dusk with great pomp and unction. The
palatial house of Suertebella was admirably suited to the ostentatious
display of a splendid ceremonial, the tribute of worldly wealth to an
august mystery. Exquisite flowers, and tapers innumerable are thought
the most proper offerings to do honour to the Lord of Lords. Amid such
dazzling accessories even the works of human hands showed to greater
advantage; as though they too borrowed a reflection of glory from the
presence of the Deity. The sounds of weeping which were audible here
and there--in a corner of the Chinese boudoir, or from behind some
Greek statue, whose majestic features looked like an embodiment of the
perfect balance of spirit and matter--added to the melancholy solemnity
of the scene. Piety and dread, the one founded on reverence and the
other on the approach of Death, were blended into a single emotion.
The priest of Polvoranca brought the sacred Host from the church in
a carriage sent for the purpose and followed by a long train in slow
procession. The very horses seemed to understand that they ought to
make no noise and step quietly. The portico was crowded with people,
under the ruddy glare of the torches they held, in liveries and in
plain dress--masters and servants, all alike on their knees.
The little bell with its mysterious sound of consolation and awe,
echoes through the long corridors rousing the marble figures from
their stony dreams. Comic or grave, the works of art seem to put on
a semblance of Christian reverence; the polished floors reflect the
gleam of tapers; flowers and tapestries seem to bow in silent worship.
Footsteps sound heavily on the boards; they might be the distant
roll of muffled funeral drums. Presently they fall more dully on the
carpets, suggesting a subterranean procession. At last they come to
a standstill--there is silence as of the grave: the procession has
reached the chamber of death. Then for a while the whole house is
deserted; all the inhabitants have collected in the immediate vicinity
of the closing scene. Those who cannot actually witness it can fancy
themselves in that room, filled with light and suffering, and they
sob and revel in the picture, imagining what they cannot see. It is
easily conjured up, and their spirits quake before it. In the halls and
passages, all deserted and all blazing with tapers, the still air gives
an impression of suspended breath, speechless and awe-stricken. There
is not a sound--except that in some remote corner there is a rustle--as
it were a whisper--of a woman’s dress that stealthily hastens by and is
lost in the distance.
Time goes on. Then at first a murmuring drone is heard, steps
again--the servants reappear with their heavy tapers--the noise grows
louder--the shadows of the living fall on the painted figures on the
walls and across the waxed floors--the procession closes with a gaudy
array of liveries and dresses of every colour, men and women of every
degree; some quite callous faces, others really sad or pitiful--the
whole with its accompaniment of prayer and response from the priest
and his acolytes. This procession, in which some walk with a sort of
rapture of grief while others are chilled with dread, makes its way
to the sound of a bell rung by a boy--the very boy known to Monina as
Guru--and goes out again through the hall and portico where some kneel
to see it depart and others still follow with bared heads.--Within,
the scent of the flowers hangs about the house as though it were the
mysterious breath of the invisible Guest who has passed through it.
“I am the Way and the Life and the Truth.”
* * * * *
All the family had been present; the marquesa prostrate on the floor
in her anguish, unable even to kneel, while her husband and sons
were bitterly and sincerely grieved. When the Sacrament was ended
they separated, all closely attended by their most intimate friends.
Milagros entirely lost consciousness; she was carried to a sofa in the
Chinese room where her kind friends plied her with restoratives and
sought to give her consolation. The marquis, forgetting his interest
in the art and curiosities of the house, fled from his importunate
comforters, and begged to be left alone. He buried himself in a recess
in the tapestried room, behind a marble Satyr, and gave himself up to
meditations on the vanity of human grandeur. Gustavo devoted himself
to his mother and submitted to the jeremiades of the poet of “pious
raptures” and “white souls.” Leopoldo did nothing but sigh; he was
nervous and tremulous, for the cold hand of death had come so near to
him that he fancied he could feel its touch.
Numbers of visitors were departing, and in the park stood rows of
carriages, the coachmen addressing each other by their master’s name:
“Garellano! You there?”--“Cerinola, you’re wanted.”--“Lepanto, move on
a little.”
It was a beautiful night, calm and clear, lighted by a pallid, full
moon; the distant horizon looked deceptively like a calm sea. The
smaller stars sank into insignificance, but the larger ones shone
brightly, trembling rather than twinkling. Nature was lovely and seemed
to breathe forth peace and love. It was an hour to be born in, rather
than to die in.
Nothing can make man feel so dwarfed as the contemplation of the
sublime indifference of the skies to all the woes of earth. The most
disastrous moral revolution could never give rise to the tiniest film
of cloud. All the tears of weeping humanity will never form a single
drop of water in infinite space.
Leon came out of his wife’s room to express his thanks to the master of
the house.
“My dear friend,” said Fúcar, wringing his hands, “accept the sincere
condolences of a much troubled man. I myself am the victim of a very
serious misfortune.”
“Is any one ill?”
“No, no; we will discuss it another day--this is not the time.--Nay,
nay, you have nothing to thank me for; it was no more than my duty. As
you see I ordered them to decorate the house properly--suitably for
so solemn a ceremony, and as befits my firm religious convictions. I
had all the camellias brought in from the green-house, and all the
rhododendrons and orange-trees in those heavy wooden tubs ... but there
are occasions when I grow reckless, when I think even exaggeration is
not out of place.... You shall know all in good time ... we will talk
it over....”
He went off to Madrid in his carriage, reflecting on the catastrophe
in his house, on the bad government of a nation which, the day after
issuing one loan, found it necessary to start another.
Leon went back to his wife’s room. The end was at hand. Rafaela,
Paoletti, Moreno Rubio and himself gathered round María who, since the
last words of confession she had uttered had been rapidly sinking,
and looked every moment more like death. Her face, which nature had
moulded on a type of ideal beauty, looked even more perfect at this
moment, when physical vitality was almost extinct; and its fixity
and whiteness, the immobility of that calm repose on the pillow, the
sculpturesque stillness of every feature and muscle betraying no sign
of suffering, made her look like some marble image of Death--noble and
dignified, with nothing vulgar in its details--aristocratic, if so to
speak, and wrought to grace the monument of some great lady. She lay
motionless; she was privileged to enter the dark realm with tranquil
deliberation and free from bodily pain, as we pass from one scene to
another in the varying phases of a dream.
Her half-closed eyes, under their black lashes, were fixed on her
husband’s gloomy and rigid face. Leon stood by the bed, gazing sadly
at the loveliness to which Death was lending a sublimer beauty, and
reflecting in a vein of sentimental philosophy on this transformation
of his wife into a statue. The solemnity of the scene, the silence,
broken only by her breathing which grew more difficult every moment,
the sad fixity of those dying eyes, fastened on him like a mysterious
tendril that could not be torn away, filled his brain with thoughts of
himself and of her,--two beings who called themselves husband and wife,
and between whom there was no link but that gaze. He sounded the depths
of his soul, trying to find in it some faded remnant of love, that he
might offer it as a last blossom of conjugal devotion to the woman who
lay there dying in the cold solitude of mysticism; but he sought in
vain--he could find none. All the wealth of love and regard that his
heart had once contained had been diverted from its legitimate centre,
and been stored and hidden in another part of his nature.
But though he found no affection, the beautiful creature who had been
the pride of his earlier life filled him with such deep and keen pity
that he could, in that hour of grief, have mistaken it for love. As he
watched the ebb of that life which might have been the crown and joy
of his own, Leon felt the tears rise to his eyes and a tight grip on
his heart. “Unhappy woman!” he thought to himself. “May God forgive you
for all the ill you have done me; I mourn for you as if I had loved
you; and I pity you,--not so much for dying young but for the cruel
disappointment in store for you when you learn--and you must learn it
soon--that the love of God is only a sublimer development of love for
those whom he has created!”
He went closer to her, attracted by her eyes which had opened a little
wider; he looked at the soft, almost invisible down that shaded her
lip, the bright light in her eye, with its tawny hazel iris; he felt
the warmth of her breath--now scarcely perceptible.--Poor soul, poor
soul! There are no words to describe the pathos which she could not
utter in words, but only by the last gleam of those eyes that were
almost extinct.
Behind the external calmness of her attitude and the steady gaze of her
eye, who knows what anxieties, what torments, nay what petty worries
may not have been racking her and dull jealousies vaguely stirring in
the depths of her dying soul--since there was no physical means of
giving them utterance! but the surface betrayed nothing, just as the
frozen surface of a river prevents our hearing the swift and noisy flow
of the deeper current.
Leon understood this. He saw a tear glittering in each of María’s
eyes: the last and only means of expression for the one surviving human
feeling of her soul, brought from the unsounded depths to which the
world still clung by a slender root of desire. Two half-formed tears,
that did not overflow, were all that came to light from that hidden
fount. Leon bent down and pressed his lips firmly to her cold forehead;
as he did so he heard a sigh of satisfied longing. A strong shudder ran
through her frame and in a steady voice she said: “Ah! Thanks!”
There was silence--an awful silence, while María Egyptiaca was tossing
on the threshold of the invisible land, like a grain of sand flung
up by the waves on to a shore where human ken cannot penetrate. The
bystanders murmured with a sigh that she was dead--they might speak
aloud now. Leon closed her eyes with a timid hand--he was afraid of
hurting her.
The priest on his knees prayed in silence, his eyes tightly shut, like
a prisoner whose dungeon windows are closed with double shutters. Leon
stood for a few minutes, gazing at the remains of one of the most
beautiful women of her day--with the added reputation of being the
most saintly of her native city; and he shuddered with grief as he
remembered the past, and realized what his present feelings were. How
sad was the stillness of those limbs not yet cold, of the features in
which beauty so masked death, that it would not have been hard to call
death life and life death.
Deeply agitated, and with his heart oppressed with intense pity, he
quitted the room, feeling as if he had left his youth behind him.
The devout watchers and some of the servants remained there; Paoletti
withdrew to the chapel. The news flew through the house; there was a
sound of weeping, the bustle of attendants rushing for restoratives,
the sighs and lamentations of friends coming and going. Leon took
refuge in the hall of Hymen, where he threw himself on a couch and lay
staring at an antique clock, which bore an inscription on a semicircle
above the dial, like a frowning brow: _Vulnerant omnes, ultima necat._