MARÍA EGYPTIACA.
Several months had passed since that spring season by the sea; Leon
Roch--on the appointed day, at the appointed hour, and in the
appointed church--had been duly married, without any hindrance to the
fulfilment of the plan he had made. His soul was full of the calm
satisfaction which steals over it softly and silently like the breath
of spring; a peace which brings refreshment and not intoxication,
and which, as it is innocent of excess, never satiates the heart,
and so leaves no aftertaste of tedium. Leon, as a philosopher and a
student of nature, thought that nothing could be better and wished
for nothing more. His wife’s beauty had improved wonderfully since
her marriage and in these additional charms the husband discovered an
appropriate tribute paid by nature to an union so judiciously planned
in theory and wrought out in practice.
“We form a compound being,” he would say, “each the complement of the
other, and it is hard sometimes to say whether the image produced is
mine or hers, our feelings are so intimately blended.”
María’s affection for him, which at first had been bashful and
cold as that of a well brought up Cupid who has just had his eyes
unbandaged, was soon as ardent as he could wish. The passion, that at
first had sat shyly behind a blind, soon peeped out, with its flaming
torch, its ambrosial chalice and its chain of yearning anxieties,
choking its victim with the pain of a too great happiness; so that
for some time her husband forgot his educational schemes, though, in
his more lucid moments, his common-sense reminded him that it would
be needful to put them into practice and realise the effects of his
very superior system. By degrees he recovered his habitual equanimity
and his excited feelings subsided into the subordinate place which he
had always assigned to them as compared with his intellect. At last
he felt like a man who wakes from a long dream; he regarded his mind
as a wide and fruitful territory which has been for a time drowned
out by an inundation, and where, as the waters subside, at first the
highest points become visible, then the hills and at last the plains.
“This will pass away,” he said to himself, “it must. When the land is
clear I will attack the dreaded subject and begin to mould”--he was
fond of this form of speech--“to mould María’s character. It is of
exquisite clay, but formless--almost formless.”
Leon Roch’s young wife was slightly and elegantly-built, every part
in such perfect proportion that a sculptor could have hoped for no
better model. Her hair was black and her skin white with very little
colour, giving such refinement to her grave, fervent expression
that all her admirers were her lovers and envied her husband his
happiness. It was not a face of Spanish type, and the outline of her
profile was an uncommon one in our country, for it was that of the
Athenian goddess, so rare here though occasionally met with, even
in Madrid. Her eyes were large and open, of a sea-blue colour with
changing tawny lights, and their gaze had a sentimental serenity
which might have been thought insipid among a crowd of black eyes,
firing endless volleys of flashing glances. But María’s looks gained
her the reputation of being proud rather than stupid, her lips were
brilliantly red, her throat slender, her figure round, and her hands
small and “moulded of soft flesh” like those of Melibea. She spoke
in measured tones with a sort of deliberate plaintiveness that went
to the souls of her hearers; she laughed but little--so little that
it added to her reputation of pride, and she was so reserved in
her friendships that in fact she had no friends. Even while quite
a child she had always been credited with so much good sense that
her parents themselves regarded her as the choicest production of
their illustrious race, throughout the whole course of its glorious
existence. To this almost superhuman beauty--this woman, in whose
form and face were combined, as in a perfect æsthetic union, all the
charms of antique sculpture, Leon Roch, after ten months of a most
platonic engagement, found himself married. Love at first sight had
enslaved him: he had met her and spoken to her at a court ball, when
she, having only recently been presented, was at that wondering and
budding stage when a girl’s beauty still bears the stamp of innocence
and still blushes with the reflection of the rosy dawn of infancy.
Leon fell in love like a country swain, to his shame be it whispered,
and he was himself astonished to find that his theodolite and his
blow-pipe had turned to a shepherd’s crook and pipe in his hands. Did
he see anything in his wife beyond her uncommon beauty? What share
had his heart in this dream of ecstasy? It would be amusing indeed if
he, whose boast it was that he was master of his imagination, should
find that it had fairly run away with him.
María had been brought up on an estate near Avila by her maternal
grandmother, a woman of great tenacity and determination, who talked
a great deal about her principles without ever defining what they
were or in what they differed from those of her neighbours. Under the
protection of this very superior woman, who, at the age of sixty,
made up her mind to renounce the vanities of the world for the narrow
life of a country house--fashion and society for the dull solitude of
a desert--and the _chronique scandaleuse_ of Madrid for the gossip
of a village--María learnt her first lessons. She could read well,
write badly and say her creed and catechism without missing a comma.
Beyond a few notions of grammar and geography, which were infused
by a governess of unusual learning, she knew nothing else whatever.
However, as she grew older, María, as she turned over the leaves of
the books she happened to meet with, gained some items of knowledge
on such subjects as do not require any very high degree of intellect.
Her companion during these years passed in the wilderness was her
twin brother, Luis Gonzaga. Their grandmother worshipped them both
and called them “her death sighs,” because she declared that at her
last hour, if they could but stand by her side, she would be able to
lift up her last thoughts to God with purer devotion.
The two children were inseparable, sharing their games and their
lessons, their bread and cheese at luncheon, and their grandmother’s
caresses. They would walk arm-in-arm along the horrible lanes of
Avila, and would sit at night, with their heads close together,
to count the stars, which shine more brightly in that part of the
country than anywhere else in the world. You might have heard them
saying: “you must count on that side and I will count on this--you
are not to come out of your piece of sky into mine--there, all on
this side are mine--we can each have half the sky.”
“No, no, it is all for you both,” said a clacking voice from a window
behind them. “Now, my pretties, come in to supper, it is getting
late.”
Their only reading in that remote spot consisted in the Lives of the
Saints, and the two children took the amazing narrative so deeply to
heart, with its tales of suffering, toil, and death, that all they
themselves learned to long for was to be martyrs too; and they were
possessed by the same idea that mastered St. Theresa in her infancy,
when she and her brother discussed the possibility of travelling all
over the infidel world that they might at last have their heads cut
off.
María and Luisito set out one morning for those heathen lands, fully
determined not to return--not to stop, till they should fall in
with a troop of Moors who should hew them in pieces. They lay down
to sleep that evening under shelter of a rock, where the God who
protects the innocent softly kissed their baby lips, and--betrayed
them into the hands of the night-patrol, who recognised the pair and
took them home.
That home was in a very remote spot from the rest of humanity. The
parish priest used to call them “the children of the wilderness” and
he would seat them on his knees to amuse himself with their baby
games: they would stick up their little fingers and call each by a
name, performing a kind of drama with them, known to the children of
most lands: the middle finger is a friar who comes to the door of a
convent and calls in a big voice, and the third finger answers in a
feeble squeak:
“Rat, tat!”
“Who is there?”
“Your brother, who wants to be let in.” And the end of the story
is that friar Pedro is sent off with a flea in his ear, the nuns
thrashing him with sticks, and he disappears grumbling.
At this the twins would still laugh with glee at an age when most
children begin to crave for better playthings than their own fingers;
but, as they grew up, their games lost their primitive simplicity and
their reading and their characters became more serious. Luis Gonzaga
was the delight of his seniors from his quiet good sense and his
incapacity for getting into mischief; the only fault to be found with
him was his love of solitary wanderings among the rocks, breathing
the keen and bracing air that perpetually fans our granite ramparts,
which look like the ruins of some cyclopean fortress, or the broken
teeth of a giant’s jaws from which the flesh has long since
disappeared. He delighted in being alone, and his chief ambition was
to be a goat-herd and follow the kids that spring from peak to peak
in that dead and dessicated arcadia; he heeded neither cold nor heat.
One day he was discovered lying at the foot of a pine-tree, the
solitary specimen of vegetable life within sight, that stood
melancholy, senile and leafless, as though in dismal warning, like
the motto on a tombstone: “we all must die.” The boy was writing
“something” on a scrap of paper with a black lead pencil which he
frequently moistened by putting in his mouth. It was the priest who
found him, and who took possession of the manuscript, which consisted
of a number of lines without rhyme or rhythm, devoid alike of grammar
and spelling, which made the worthy man laugh heartily--for he knew
something, if not much, of the humanities.
“This is neither verse nor prose,” he said.
No, it was neither verse nor prose; but it was poetry. These were
stanzas on the model of verses from the Bible expressing the feelings
of a contemplative nature. How the priest laughed as he read:
“When the darkness of night falls, the flocks of Heaven are scattered
over the vast blue field and watched over by the gentle angels.--
“The Lord passed by yesterday in a chariot of thunder drawn by
lightning which cast down hail and sweated rain; I trembled like a
flame in the wind and my mind was tossed like a pebble carried away
by a flood.
“I am like dried flax that catches fire, and turning to smoke, rises
from the ashes and ascends to Heaven.”
One day their grandmother rose much later than usual, her face was
flushed, her speech slow and strange, while her eyes glistened like
two old metal buttons that have been rubbed very bright. All the
servants observed to their great consternation that their mistress
talked a great deal of nonsense--not that this in itself was an
alarming novelty--but she repeated the same thing again and again,
without any interval of better sense. When the priest felt her pulse,
the good lady grasped his arm and throwing a cloak over her shoulders
exclaimed with a wild laugh:
“Let us dance, Señor Cura--come dance with me!” She dragged him round
two or three times and then suddenly fell senseless.
She only lived long enough to receive Extreme Unction.
When their grandmother was dead and buried the twins went home
to their parents, who at that time were in extremely narrow
circumstances. The boy was sent to a seminary and from thence to
France, while María, whose country manners distressed them greatly,
was sent to a college for girls. At the end of two years she emerged
from this retreat with the polish acquired in such establishments
and her mother introduced her to her circle of friends; a favourable
turn in their fortunes had now given the family of Tellería a chance
of rising from the depths of poverty and obscurity; at length the
marquesa was able to quit the apartments she so sincerely detested,
and for some time the mother and daughter were to be met constantly
in various fashionable circles. Their names were familiar on the lips
of María’s admirers and to the pens of the fashionable chronicler;
they were on view at the play and out driving; they disappeared in
the Spring to reappear with revived brilliancy in the Winter season.
Then at last came the longed-for day when María was married.
This match was regarded as a great stroke of fortune for the whole
Tellería family, whose nobility was not of the highest rank and
whose wealth was not such as to justify any extreme fastidiousness
in the selection of a son-in-law. In spite of all that may be said
to the contrary, the aristocracy of the present day have no blind
reverence for their pedigrees, and if we except half a dozen names
which, besides their historical glory, have a spotless descent, our
nobles do not hesitate to accept an alliance of which the honours are
merely substantial and to bolster up their pride by the aid of a fine
fortune; thus we see every day damsels of high degree giving their
hands--and giving them willingly--to nobles of very recent creation;
to marquisés all hot from the mint as it were; to colonial counts,
to adventurous politicians, distinguished officers and even to the
sons of industry. Modern society is blessed with a short memory; low
or inferior birth is soon a buried part of the buried past. Personal
merit in some cases, and fortune in others, effect the levelling
process with irresistible force, and society progresses with giant
steps towards equality. There is no country in the civilised world
more nearly bereft of a real aristocracy than Spain; trade, on one
hand, which marks every one plebeian, and the government, on the
other, which makes every one noble, are gradually doing away with it.
The happiness of the two young people was undisturbed for the first
few months, excepting by the shadow cast over it occasionally by
María’s relations. After a time however Leon began to think that his
wife’s anxious and suspicious affection had lasted longer than was
reasonable. This would not have been alarming but that it was allied
with an iron resistance to some of her husband’s views and feelings,
and it troubled him greatly to perceive that, without ceasing to
be devoted to him, María showed not the slightest disposition to
yield to his doctrines--not religious doctrines in any sense, for he
respected his wife’s conscience. It was a puzzling disappointment;
hers was not an embryonic nature, but a formed and stubborn
character; not a flexible wire ready to take and keep the form given
to it by a skilful manipulator, but hard set bronze which hurt his
fingers and never bent under them.
One evening, about a year after their marriage, they were together in
María’s sitting-room; they had been talking long and affectionately
on the conformity of ideas which alone can form the solid foundation
of a happy marriage; the subject being exhausted, he had opened a
book and was turning over the pages by the fire, and she had taken
her beads to pray. Suddenly she rose from her knees and coming up to
her husband she laid her hand on his shoulder.
“I have an idea,” she said, fixing her mystical gaze on his face, and
her eyes, with their strange greenish and tawny lights were curiously
soft--perhaps because they had just been raised to God--“I have an
idea that fills me with pride, Leon!”
Leon read on for a moment, finishing a paragraph, and then he turned
to his wife.
“I will tell you what it is,” she went on. “I, a mere weak woman,
utterly your inferior in many things and above all in learning, will
achieve a triumph which, you with all your superiority, can never
attain.”
Leon took her hand and kissed it three times, saying: “I am no one’s
superior, and your’s, least of all.”
“But indeed you are; and it is that which adds to my satisfaction in
my purpose.... You, you believe yourself so strong that your judgment
can radically change my character. I ... I, with only my love that is
stronger than the wisest intellect, propose to conquer your judgment
and mould it after my own image and likeness. How great a battle and
how grand a victory!”
“And how will you set to work?” asked Leon smiling, as he put his arm
round her.
“I hardly know whether to begin quite gently, by degrees ... or so,”
and as she said “so” she violently snatched the book out of her
husband’s hands and flung it in the fire which was blazing brightly.
“María!” cried Leon, startled and disconcerted, and he put out his
hand to rescue the hapless heretic. But she clung closely to his arms
so as to prevent his moving; then, kissing his forehead, she went
back to her _prie dieu_ and returned to her devotions. What was there
in his book? What in her prayers?