REASON _VERSUS_ PASSION.
The following day Leon had visitors; two friends who gave him some
information which, though certainly interesting, was far from
pleasing to him, and he spent the day in agitations and the night
without sleep. Early in the morning he called Facunda and told her
that he was going away; then an hour later he said to himself: “No I
must stay--I ought to stay.”
In the afternoon he rode out, and on his return sent a message to
Pepa saying that he wished to speak with her.
Since the day when the news of Cimarra’s death had reached them,
Leon had hardly seen her; a feeling of delicacy had kept him from
repeating his visits to Suertebella.
Pepa received him in the evening in Monina’s nursery, where he had
seen the little girl suffering and dying. This evening the saucy
baby, lying half-uncovered on the bed, was rebellious to the law
which sends children to sleep betimes. Kicking and tossing between
the sheets she was chattering to herself, relating scraps of all the
stories she knew, full of fun and impudence; beginning long speeches
that ended in nothing, punishing her doll after she had fed it,
sitting up in bed to bow like a gentleman, and making a peep-hole
with her tiny fingers to imitate the Baron de Soligny’s eye-glass.
After much ado, between laughter and a pretence of severity, Pepa
succeeded in making her kneel up and repeat a _pater noster_ with a
very bad grace and a great many yawns. This she followed up with a
baby hymn and, as though this innocent litany had a soporific virtue,
Monina dropped upon the pillow and her eyelids closed over her
unwilling eyes while she was still murmuring the last words of the
verse.
They stood watching her for some time in silence, and then Leon,
bending down to kiss her, said:
“Good-bye, little pet,” in a tremulous voice.
“Why good-bye?” asked Pepa anxiously. “Are you going away?”
“Yes.”
“You sent word that you wanted to see me?”
“To take leave.”
“Are you not happy here?”
“Immensely happy--but I must not stay.”
“I do not understand; have you made it up with your wife?”
“No.”
“You are going abroad?”
“Perhaps.”
“Where to?”
“I have not made up my mind.”
“But you will let us know; you will write?”
“Nay; perhaps not even that.”
Pepa looked steadily at the floor.
“It is folly that you and I should talk in riddles and beat about the
bush,” said Leon. “For some months we have always used vague phrases,
as if we had something to hide. If there is any guilt in our souls it
had better be plainly uttered than hypocritically concealed. In fact
I must speak out.
“After I had so completely lost every dream of domestic happiness
I became a constant visitor at your house. Perhaps--nay indeed,
certainly--I went there too often. My loneliness, my dulness, my
longing for some of the pleasures of a home life, led me there in
search of that comfort which is as necessary to the human soul as
equilibrium is to the body. I was perishing of cold; what wonder then
that I went where I found warmth? I began by amusing myself with
Monina, I ended by worshipping her, for I felt not merely a want
but the maddest craving to love and be loved. It is so easy to win
a child’s love. I had a wild desire to revel in childish things, to
lay my heart, empty and void as it was, at her baby feet for her to
stamp upon it--I do not know how else to express it--but you will
understand. I always fancy you can read my soul since yours is no
secret to me. I feel as though for a long time we had been acting a
comedy....”
“I never act!” interrupted Pepa.
“No, no, nor I, but listen. I was alone; at home, in the street, in
the turmoil of society everywhere; always alone except when I was
by your side. A fatality ... nay, I will not give that conventional
name to the consequences of our own errors and want of foresight....
I will say the situation in which we had placed ourselves forbid our
declaring honestly the feelings of our hearts. We were both married.”
“Yes,” said Pepa calmly and steadily, as having often made the same
reflection, and said the same thing to herself, having contemplated
the fact many times and from every possible point of view.
“Now, to be sure, you are free, but I am not. The situation is not
materially altered; but the fact that you are a widow is maddening
me.--I ought not to be here at this moment--and yet here I am! When
I see you and Monina dressed in black I am filled with a ferment of
sacrilegious passion; I struggle to quell it and be silent, but you
yourself drag me on with irresistible force and compel me.... Well,
there is but one way of saying it ... to tell you that I love you;
that I have loved you for a long time. I cannot find courage or words
to curse this passion, which in me is the outcome of my banishment
from all happiness, and in you of ... I don’t know what.”
“It was born with me,” said Pepa under her breath. “You have told
me what my heart knew already.... But to hear you say it ... with
your own lips ... here, to my face.... Here, where only God and I can
hear....”
Her voice failed her and she turned as pale as death: she could
find no utterance for the feelings that crowded on her soul, but
she seized one of Leon’s hands and kissed it again and again with
passionate tenderness.
“We are in a very difficult position,” he said. “We must face it
together.”
“A difficult position!” repeated Pepa with candid surprise, as though
to her it seemed a very simple matter.
“Yes, for at this moment we are both the victims of calumny.”
Pepa shrugged her shoulders as much as to say: “What do I care for
calumny?”
“You will feel with me that I made a great mistake in coming to live
so near you.”
“A mistake! In coming to Carabanchel!” she exclaimed in an accent
that conveyed that if that was a mistake, then so was the daily
rising of the sun.
“Yes, a great mistake. But indeed I, who am regarded by a good many
people as a man of sense, am always making mistakes in matters of
conduct.” Pepa thought that possible. “My last blunder has given
a pretext to scandal. My poor darling, do you know that they say
in Madrid that within two months of your husband’s death you have
encouraged a lover; that I am that lover; and that we are living
in open defiance of all decency and morality. Not content with
this they have chosen to invent a piece of retrospective slander,
supporting it by what passes for substantial evidence.”
“And what is that?”
“Monina is said to be my child.”
For a minute Pepa stood bewildered; but the terrible charge had made
no very deep impression on her mind. By a rapid and inexplicable
process of logic she said:
“The calumny is so preposterous, so absurd, that we need not let it
distress us.”
“Do you know of any shield against which the arrows of calumny are
shattered?” said Leon. “There is but one and that is innocence. Our
innocence, Pepa, is not immaculate. The slander that is directed
against us is not without foundation; it is mistaken only as to the
facts. It is false when it asserts that I am your favoured lover, but
it is true when it says that I love you--it lies when it says that
Monina is my child, but it is true--” Pepa did not let him finish the
sentence.
“But it is true that you love her as if she were!” she exclaimed with
joyous haste.
“Calumny may be wrong as to the facts, but failing facts she has
intentions, desires, hopes to go upon. Answer me, can you say that we
are innocent?”
“No. I, at any rate, am not. The scandal that has dragged my name in
the mud is a just punishment,” said Pepa sadly. “And if I think of
it with less horror than I ought to feel, it is because there is
so much, so very much to excuse part--most--the foundation of the
report. You are upright, honest, steadfast--I am not. I have allowed
myself to cherish feelings in my heart in opposition to my duty; I am
a wicked woman, Leon; I do not deserve your love; I am guilty, and I
cannot feel that delicate horror of calumny you feel.”
“Pepa, Pepa, do not talk so,” said Leon grasping her hand. “It is
not thus that I have seen you, dreamed of, as, by degrees, you have
conquered my heart and become sovereign of my affections.”
“But if you cannot love me as I am,” she said, her words almost
choked with grief and bitterness, “why did you not come in time? Oh!
if you had come when I wanted you, you might have found me lofty and
pure! What a high and holy devotion--worthy of you indeed--you would
have found under the childish follies which were nothing but the
mad outbursts of an oppressed heart and a fevered fancy, if you had
come in time and vouchsafed a loving word to the wilful girl, mad
and foolish as she was, what a treasure of devotion would have been
yours!--it was reserved for you, and in your hands it would have been
refined and purified. I was a rough ore, apparently of no value--nay,
I might have been a misfortune to the owner--you thought so? But all
I needed was to fall into hands that were not put out to take me; I
was an instrument that could yield no music excepting in the hands
for which I was born, and without my natural master all was jangling
discord. Do not complain then if you now find me somewhat wanting in
principles and moral sense. I have suffered much; I have led a life
of constant and fearful struggle with myself, my life has been passed
in utter disharmony with those I have had to live with; I felt myself
scorned and misunderstood and that has always weighed upon my soul;
it made me unreasonable and perverse and so, by degrees, I lost that
purity of soul which once I cherished for you--you who would not have
it as a gift! I am not so strict as you are; my conscience is less
sensitive, and I have no courage left for further sacrifices, for my
heart is weary and as full of wounds as a madman who tries to kill
himself. I cannot admit that the world has the right to require me
to torture myself any more; it has imposed sufferings enough upon
me--and so I dare to ask you too to be less severely strong, to
ignore the moral susceptibilities of society, to make some concession
to feeling, to remain here and see me every day, to pay me some
portion of the debt you owe me--by loving a little.”
She could not command her voice to the end of her speech and burst
into tears.
“It was my idiotic pride,” said Leon, more ready to accuse than to
defend himself, “that has brought misery on us both. May the scorn of
which you speak be visited on my own head and all the evil wrought by
my mistake be mine to suffer!”
“Nay, you need no more disasters; you have had enough to go through!
The fault was not all yours. I had no other merit than that of
loving you; I was wilful, violent and spoilt; I quite understand
your preference for ... her; and she was so handsome; I was never
good-looking.... And now, now after so many years, you come to me
... and now....” She could not say it; her brow was contracted with
despair, at length, with a gesture of horror, as if she saw some
terrific vision she said hoarsely: “You have a wife.”
Leon could say nothing in reply to the appalling eloquence of this
fact. He bent his head in silence. “A wife! handsome, saintly,
impeccable!” Pepa went on. “But even so, have I not triumphed? You
have left her and come to me.” And she looked up radiantly.
“No, no,” said Leon eagerly. “It is she who has left me. I loved her
and did all in my power to prevent the rupture of the sacred tie that
binds us; I have kept my marriage vows faithfully ... till now, when
I have broken them.”
“And they are better broken!” exclaimed Pepa vehemently. “Why should
you respect the judgment of fools? Why should the image of your wife
come between you and me?”
“Pepa, my dearest, be calm for pity’s sake; your wild words alarm me.”
“But I tell you I have no moral sense; I lost it--you took it with
my last hopes. When one is hopeless is that not the same as being
wicked? I have been wicked ever since that evening when my last hope
died out of me as though it had been my very soul, and left me rigid
and cold--as if really and truly mad. From that moment I have gone
wrong in everything; I married just as I might have flung myself into
the sea; I married as a substitute for suicide. I did not know what I
was doing, but there was a seed of evil in me that I actually tried
to foster into growth. If only I had been well educated! but I had no
education; I was a savage, and I loved to display my riches, social
advantages and pinchbeck splendour,--just as the Caffirs display
feathers and beads. And bitter pique rankled in my heart and made
me resolve that I would give to the least worthy suitor what I had
intended for the most worthy. If I could not have the best I would
take the worst! Do you remember my throwing out my jewels on the
dust-heap? I wanted to do the same with myself. Of what use was I if
no one loved me? How could I marry a good and worthy man? It would
have been folly ... no, no, I wanted to hate some one--to hate the
man who was nearest to me--whom the world would call my other half,
and the church pronounce my mate. You see I longed to be wicked! In
our rank of life, you know, when a girl of base instincts craves for
liberty, marriage is a wide and open door. In my madness I said to
myself: ‘I am rich; I will marry a fool and I shall be free;’ and I
never thought of my poor father. Oh yes, I have been very wicked!
“Well, many a girl has done the same, though not with such fatal
consequences. I married, and every conceivable misfortune fell
upon me and mine ... I was free--but you were as far off as ever.
Your very virtue enraged me, though it gave me much to think of.
Would you believe that I was quite humiliated by it, and at times
flattered my fancy by dreams of being virtuous too? God knows what
the end might have been! He saved me by giving me my child. Her birth
brought an interval of peace which till then I had not known; as
Monina grew under my eyes I seemed to become miraculously gifted with
intelligence, prudence, a love of order, and common-sense. I was a
different creature, I became what I should have been if, instead of
the torments of rejected love, I had lived in peace under the yoke of
your authority.
“Now I am cured of those vagaries which made me notorious; I am not
as good as I ought to be; I do not fear God as I ought; I cannot feel
ready to sacrifice my feelings to the laws to which I have been a
martyr; I see now that I have been living in a world of empty dogmas,
where fine words are more plentiful than good deeds, and so I say: ‘I
am free, you are free....’”
“I?”
“Yes, you. For a man is free who breaks his chains. Did you not say
that she had left you?”
“Yes!” A pained and doubting expression came over Leon’s features.
“No! I see that it is I--always I--who am really abandoned!” cried
Pepa. “Well, so be it!”
“Abandoned, no. But there is a moral impossibility which neither you
nor I can fail to see. As for me, I am in the most desperate and
wretched dilemma that any man ever had to face.”
Pepa looked straight into his eyes in agonised expectation of what he
might say next.
“I am married; I do not love my wife, nor does she love me. We are
incompatible natures; there is a gulf between us. We are separated
by utter antipathy, as strong in her as in me. But why did my wife
become alienated from me? She was faithful and virtuous, she brought
no dishonour on my name--if she had I would have killed her! As it is
I cannot kill her--nor divorce her; even a legal separation is out of
the question. The only crime that has come between us is religion.
Of what do I accuse her? Of being a bigot, a fanatic. And is that a
fault?... Who can decide? Now and then with shameful sophistry it has
occurred to me that I might accuse her of insanity; horrible thought!
And what right have I to call any excess of pious practices insane?
God alone can read hearts and determine the boundary line between
piety and fanaticism. In my own soul I can declare that my wife is a
fanatic; but I have no right to accuse her before all the world.”
Leon spoke calmly and judicially as he uttered these questions and
answers. As though he were pleading and arguing for and against a
criminal.
“My wife has sinned against love, which is as much a law of marriage
as fidelity,” he went on. “But she has done nothing to disgrace me;
is there then sufficient cause for me to pronounce myself free?”
“Yes, if your wife has ceased to love you; she has annulled the
marriage.”
“She has annulled it by her fanatical religion. But I look into my
conscience and say: ‘Am I not as guilty as she is?’ For if she has a
form of fanaticism that impels her to abhor me, have I not a kindred
fanaticism which makes me abhor her? She holds a scheme of belief
that parts her from me; I too have a scheme of belief that drives me
from her. Am I not perhaps a bigot too?”
“You, no! It is she, it is she.”
“At the stage which we have reached, which of us is the more to
blame? Fanatical she is, no doubt; but she has a thoroughly good and
upright nature. María is incapable of a dishonourable action; she is
a bigot and narrow-minded, but she is honest. She does not love me,
but she loves no one else. Am I not perhaps the guilty one ... I who
love another?” He passed his hand across his aching brow and paused
to consider the desperate case.
“Even if I should decide that I would be free,” he said at last. “I
could marry no one else. I could not dream of founding another home;
neither law nor conscience would admit of it. I must abide by the
consequences of my errors. I am not, and I never can be, one of the
crowd who acknowledge no law human or divine; I cannot do as those do
who have a moral code for their public acts but whose private life is
corrupt, whose thoughts are evil. My family, if I had one would be
illegitimate, my children would be bastards and nameless, we should
breathe an atmosphere of disgrace. Do not suppose that in speaking
thus and in flying from the situation in which we find ourselves, I
am surrendering to the gossip of Madrid; nor even that, in speaking
of the illegitimacy of such ties, I am bowing to the decisions of the
law which is impotent to decide the right and wrong of this vital
question on moral grounds. I am simply obeying my conscience, which
makes itself heard above all the other voices of my heart. Appeal to
your own conscience....”
Pepa drooped sadly as though she were falling to the ground, but
putting her hand to her head she murmured:
“My conscience is love.”
There was something deeply pathetic in this declaration from a woman
who for long years had been storing up treasures of affection without
knowing on whom to bestow them and who now saw herself condemned to
lavish them as best she might on the images of a joyless and fevered
fancy.
“But picture to yourself,” said Leon, “all the odious and
disreputable conditions of an illegitimate, or I would rather say an
immoral, family. The children without a name--the ever-present image
of the absent wife....”
“Do not name her; I tell you not to name her,” cried Pepa, making
an effort not to be too vehement. “Her mad fanaticism excludes her
altogether!”
“But if I am no less fanatical?”
“No, that makes no difference!”
“Well, there is one remedy for the state of mind from which you and I
are doomed to suffer.”
“What is that?”
“Hope.”
“Hope!” murmured Pepa, shaking her head; the word found a melancholy
echo in her brain. “Hope! that is my fate, there are lives in which
hope is a torment and not a comfort.”
“Look at that little angel,” said Leon, pointing to Monina who slept
in blissful ignorance at the storm that was rolling over her innocent
dreams; “there is your true conscience. When all this agitation is
over if your bitterness still survives and your sad memories prompt
you to wander from the right path, let your thoughts dwell upon your
child. You will find that act like a magic charm. A hundred sermons,
and all the logic in the world, could not teach you what you will
learn from one smile of that tiny creature, whose innocence hardly
seems of the earth; and in her eyes you will read perfect truth.”
“You are right, you are right,” cried Pepa bursting into tears.
“Her eyes are like a mirror in which if you can read it rightly you
may see something of the future. Think of your child as grown up, as
a woman fifteen years hence; how could you bear that some malignant
tongue should whisper in her ear shameful tales of her mother’s
disgrace? Think of your feelings if some one were to say to her:
‘your mother, before she had been a widow two months, had taken for
her lover a married man, the husband of a faithful wife.’”
“Oh, no!” cried Pepa with a flash of indignation, “that they shall
never say!”
“But they will say so; why not? If they are ready to say what is
not true, why should they not say what is? You must think of the
fateful and inevitable influence that a parent’s actions have on the
children. There is certain tradition of morality which is a great
protection against disaster and dishonour.”
“I implore you not even to suggest that my child can ever be anything
but innocence itself!” exclaimed Pepa, drowned in tears.
Then they were both silent; they sat on Ramona’s bed, arm in arm,
with their faces very near together, wrapped, as it were, in an
atmosphere of tenderness that breathed from them both, gazing in
loving contemplation of the child’s happy slumbers. Deep, very deep,
down in her heart Pepa was thinking: “child of my body and soul, I
can be happy so long as I feel that you are mine, and fancy that I
can bestow you on some one I can trust.”
Presently they rose from their place side by side and Pepa seated
herself in a dim corner.
“I must be going,” said Leon.
“Already!” said Pepa in dismay and looking up at him imploringly.
Leon was about to answer when they heard footsteps and the marquis
came into the room; he was in the habit of coming to bid his daughter
good-night before he retired for the evening. He was surprised to see
Leon, though there was nothing unusual in the hour for a visit.
“What is the matter? Is Monina ill?”
“No, Papa, she is quite well.”
“Ah. I fancied--” and the marquis kissed his daughter. “I am glad to
see you here,” he said kindly to Leon.
“I came to say good-bye to Pepa and to you.”
“You are going on a journey? Well, it is the best thing you can do.
And where are you going?”
“I have not made up my mind.”
“And you start....”
“To-morrow.”
“If you go to Paris I will give you a commission. I will go to your
lodgings early in the morning; just now I am going to bed, I have a
headache.”
Leon saw that he must leave at once.
“Good-bye, good-bye,” he said grasping Pepa’s hands. Their eyes
met with a keen glance; she was disappointed at this abrupt
leave-taking. Leon looked at the sleeping child and then, with calm
self-possession, he went out. He felt a stranger in the suites of
rooms as he passed through them; but the pretty nest he had just
left was so intimately part of his life that he could hardly forbear
from turning back to breathe once more in that atmosphere of peace
and contentment--an atmosphere full of the delicious sense of home,
hallowed by a woman’s love and a child’s slumbers.
As they parted Don Pedro said:
“I am very uneasy at having heard no details of Federico’s death.”
Leon made no reply; he went out into the garden. There, so many
remembrances appealed to his affections that at every step he paused
to sigh and dream. He had reached the avenue that led from the
gardens to the stables when he heard himself called, with a shrill
“_hist_” that came on his ear as sharp as a dart. He turned and saw
Pepa, wrapped in a shawl with her head uncovered, coming towards him
in breathless haste. She eagerly grasped his hand.
“I could not bear that we should part like this,” she said, “it is
too hard!”
“It is as it ought to be,” replied Leon greatly disturbed. “And what
does it matter? I shall come in to-morrow for a moment.”
“For a moment!” cried Pepa in pathetic reproach. “Think what it is to
have given years--long years--as long as centuries, and to be repaid
with moments!”
Leon took both her hands firmly in his.
“My dearest,” he said, “one of us must yield to the other. I know,
and I tell you, that if I allow myself to be dragged away by you our
ruin is complete. Then let yourself be guided--not dragged away--by
me and save our souls alive.”
“And then--but I know what you will say: Hope! Every madman has his
hobby!” and she smiled, a heart-rending smile of self-pity that might
have drawn tears from a stone. “Hope! and if I die first?”
“No, no, you will not die ...” Leon murmured, taking her head between
his hands as if she had been a child and kissing her.
“I am but a helpless thing,” stammered Pepa, who could hardly
command her voice, “you can do what you will with me; but you are
cruel.”
“And you will obey?”
“Nay, you need not ask; I have long obeyed you in intention. I used
to dream that you came to see me, when you had in fact forgotten
my very existence; that you commanded me to break with every duty,
and I obeyed you with all the force of my will and desires. This
submission was my only joy--a melancholy one! Do not blame me for the
aberrations of a broken heart--I only tell you that you may see that
if I would follow you to any crime, I shall not refuse to follow you
when you lead me to do right.”
“Where would you have me lead you?” muttered Leon clasping his brow.
“Tell me, if I were to say ...”
“What?” asked Pepa quickly and catching at his idea as a bird catches
a seed before it can fall to the ground.
“The idea of flight has passed through your mind?“
“Oh! every idea in turn has passed through my mind.”
“So that if I were to say ...”
“If you say ‘come,’ I am ready.“
“Now?”
“This very minute. I would take my baby in my arms....“
Pepa, vehement in her devotions, looked first at the house and then
in his face; forgetful of every other consideration, she could think
of nothing but the two beings she loved. Leon was going through a
brief but agonising struggle. He stamped with his foot like the
Warlocks of old when they wanted to call up a familiar spirit.
“But I must bid you let me go alone, and wait, and hope,” he said at
length, with a firmness that was almost heroic, and Pepa bowed her
head with resignation. “I say it because I love you--out of a certain
selfishness too, for I cannot bear to destroy a beautiful dream.”
“I submit,” said Pepa, but the word was hardly more than a moan, and
hiding her face on his breast, she sobbed aloud. Then she added: “but
you will fix a time. If I were to die before....”
This idea of an early death was fixed in her mind like a sinister
star that nothing could eclipse.
“Yes, I will fix a time. I promise that.”
“And when it comes....”
“When it comes--” echoed Leon who could hardly breathe; some demon
seemed to have flung a rope round his neck and to be tightening the
noose.
“Supposing that God does not open the way....”
“But He will.”
“And if He does not.”
“But He will.”
“But, I say if He does not?”
“You will see He will.”
“Your conviction makes me believe it, but I do not know why,” said
Pepa, turning her head on his shoulder as though it were a pillow
on which she might fall asleep. “Now, if you want me to go home
satisfied, tell me that you love me very much.” Her eagerness had
taken a childish tone.
“You know it.”
“That you will love me always--always.”
“That in fact I loved you when we played together and stained our
faces with blackberries,” added Leon, stroking the golden head.
“What days those were!” said Pepa, smiling like a soul in bliss, “we
could talk for hours of those recollections, taking the words out
of each other’s mouth. Ah! our life then was what life ought to be.
Really life; not these horribly short moments and sudden changes. If
only we might chatter, laugh, remember, talk nonsense and read each
other’s thoughts and wishes!”
“If we could...!”
“But we must live apart. We have lived apart all our lives, and yet
I feel as if I were saying good-bye for the first time. You go to an
inn and I to a palace.”
“Take care of your child for me.”
“Oh! there is one terrible thought: if it is long before you come
again she will not know you, she will be afraid of you.”
“She will soon get over that.”
“But are you not coming again to-morrow morning?”
“What for? That we may have another and more cruel parting? If I
were to see you again my courage might fail me.”
“I will send Monina to see you.”
“Yes, send her,” and Leon coughed.
“Mercy!” exclaimed Pepa anxiously, and turning up the collar of his
coat. “You are catching cold! it is chilly--take care of yourself ...
so--”
“Thank you, my darling; I am cold, I confess.”
“Well, then, we part now?”
“Yes,” said Roch, “now or never.”
The words: “then never!” were on Pepa’s lips, but she dared not utter
them.
“And you will write to me very often, like a good boy?“
“Yes, every week.”
“Long, long letters?”
“As long and as full as the thoughts of a man that waits in hope.”
“And where shall I write to you?”
“I will let you know. Let us walk towards the house; you must not go
back alone. We will part there.”
“Come as far as the door of the museum; I came out there and can get
in again.”
They walked on; Leon with his right arm round Pepa and holding both
her hands in his left.
“It is a dark night,” observed Pepa, with that inexplicable impulse
to speak of trivial things which comes over us when the mind is fully
occupied with a fixed train of ideas.
“Are you happy?” asked Leon trying to speak lightly.
“How should I be when you are going away? And yet I am, glad of all
you have said to me. It is a mixture of pain and gladness. First I
say to myself: ‘what joy!’ and then I feel that I shall die of grief.”
“And I feel just the same,” said Leon gloomily. They were at the door
of the museum.
“Good-bye, good-bye,” she said, “remember, you are mine.”
“_Au revoir_,” said Leon in a choked voice, and he kissed her twice.
“This one for Monina, and this for her mother.”
The door opened on a dark staircase; Leon gently pushed Pepa in and
hurried away; she reappeared for a moment and he waved his hand.
In a few minutes he had reached his lodgings; crushed with grief
he threw himself into his study chair, not knowing whether to find
relief in tears or in dumb despair. His heart was broken; and yet the
deep and spacious reservoir of sorrow and passion had not yet poured
the whole of its crushing contents on his devoted head.
END OF VOL. I.
=GLORIA.=--A NOVEL, by =B. Pérez Galdós=, from the Spanish by Clara
Bell, in two vols. Paper, $1.00, Cloth, $1.75.
“B. Pérez Galdós is like a whirlwind, resistless as he sweeps
everything before him, while beneath, the waters of passion foam and
heave and are stirred to their depths. Some chapters of this novel
are absolutely agonizing in their intensity of passion, and the surge
and rush of words bears the reader along breathless and terrified,
till he finds himself almost ready to cry out. In others, the storm
is lulled and the plash of waves is as musical as the author’s native
tongue. In others still, he drones through the lazy summer day, and
the reader goes to sleep. However, the story as a whole is stormy,
and the end tragic; yet we are lost in wonder at the man who can so
charm us.
“It is throughout a terrible impeachment of religious intolerance.
If it had been written for a people possessing the temper of
Englishmen or of Americans we should say that it must mark an epoch
in the political and religious history of the country. Even written
as it is by a Spaniard, and for Spaniards, allowing as we must for
Spanish impulsiveness and grandiloquence, which says a great deal
to express a very little, we cannot but believe that the work is
deeply significant. It is written by a young man and one who is
rapidly rising in power and influence; and when he speaks it is with
a vehement earnestness which thrills one with the conviction that
Spain is awaking. ‘Fresh air,’ cries he, of Spain, ‘open air, free
exercise under every wind that blows above or below; freedom to be
dragged and buffeted, helped or hindered, by all the forces that are
abroad. Let her tear off her mendicant’s hood, her grave-clothes and
winding-sheet, and stand forth in the bracing storms of the century.
Spain is like a man who is ill from sheer apprehension, and cannot
stir for blisters, plasters, bandages and wraps. Away with all this
paraphernalia, and the body will recover its tone and vigor.’ Again:
‘Rebel, rebel, your intelligence is your strength. Rise, assert
yourself; purge your eyes of the dust which darkens them, and look
at truth face to face.’ Strange language this for Spain of the
Inquisition, for bigoted, unprogressive, Catholic Spain. The author
goes to the root of Spanish decadence; he fearlessly exposes her
degradation and declares its cause. All students of Spanish history
will find here much that is interesting besides the story.”--_The
Yale Literary Magazine_.
_William S. Gottsberger, Publisher, New York._
=MARIANELA.=--By =B. Pérez Galdós=, from the Spanish by Clara Bell,
in one vol. Paper, 50 cts. Cloth, 90 cts.
“Galdós is not a novelist, in the sense that now attaches to that
much-abused word, but a romancer, pure and simple, as much so as
Hawthorne was, though his intentions are less spiritual, and his
methods more material. Marianela is the story of a poor, neglected
outcast of a girl, an orphan who is tolerated by a family of miners,
as if she were a dog or a cat; who is fed when the humor takes them
and there is any food that can be spared, and who is looked down upon
by everybody; and a boy Pablo, who is older than she, the son of a
well-to-do landed proprietor, whose misfortune it is (the boy’s, we
mean) that he was born blind. His deprivation of sight is almost
supplied by the eyes of Marianela, who waits upon him, and goes with
him in his daily wanderings about the mining country of Socartes,
until he knows the whole country by heart and can when need is find
his way everywhere alone. As beautiful as she is homely, he forms an
ideal of her looks, based upon her devotion to him, colored by his
sensitive, spiritual nature, and he loves her, or what he imagines
she is, and she returns his love--with fear and trembling, for
ignorant as she is she knows that she is not what he believes her to
be. They love as two children might, naturally, fervently, entirely.
The world contains no woman so beautiful as she, and he will marry
her. The idyl of this young love is prettily told, with simplicity,
freshness, and something which, if not poetry, is yet poetic. While
the course of true love is running smooth with them (for it does
sometimes in spite of Shakespeare) there appears upon the scene
a brother of the chief engineer of the Socartes mines who is an
oculist, and he, after a careful examination of the blind eyes of
Pablo, undertakes to perform an operation upon them which he thinks
may enable the lad to see. About this time there also comes upon
the scene a brother of Pablo’s father, accompanied by his daughter,
who is very beautiful. The operation is successful, and Pablo is
made to see. He is enchanted with the loveliness of his cousin, and
disenchanted of his ideal of Marianela, who dies heart-broken at
the fate which she knew would be hers if he was permitted to see
her as she was. This is the story of Marianela, which would have
grown into a poetic romance under the creative mind and shaping hand
of Hawthorne, and which, as conceived and managed by Galdós, is a
realistic one of considerable grace and pathos. It possesses the
charm of directness and simplicity of narrative, is written with
great picturesqueness, and is colored throughout with impressions of
Spanish country life.”--_The Mail and Express, New York, Thursday,
April 12, 1883_.
_William S. Gottsberger, Publisher, New York._
=TRAFALGAR.=--A Tale, by =B. Pérez Galdós=, from the Spanish by Clara
Bell, in one vol. Paper, 50 cents. Cloth, 90 cents.
“This is the third story by Galdós in this series, and it is not
inferior to those which have preceded it, although it differs from
them in many particulars, as it does from most European stories
with which we are acquainted, its interest rather depending upon
the action with which it deals than upon the actors therein. To
subordinate men to events is a new practice in art, and if Galdós
had not succeeded we should have said that success therein was
impossible. He has succeeded doubly, first as a historian, and then
as a novelist, for while the main interest of his story centres in
the great sea-fight which it depicts--the greatest in which the
might of England has figured since her destruction of the Grand
Armada--there is no lack of interest in the characters of his story,
who are sharply individualized, and painted in strong colors. Don
Alonso and his wife Doña Francisca--a simple-minded but heroic old
sea-captain, and a sharp-minded, shrewish lady, with a tongue of her
own, fairly stand out on the canvas. Never before have the danger and
the doom of battle been handled with such force as in this spirited
and picturesque tale. It is thoroughly characteristic of the writer
and of his nationality.”--_The Mail and Express, New York_.
_William S. Gottsberger, Publisher, New York._
=THE MARTYR OF GOLGOTHA=, by =Enrique Pérez Escrich=, from the
Spanish by Adèle Josephine Godoy, in two volumes. Price, paper
covers, $1.00. Cloth binding, $1.75.
“There must always be some difference of opinion concerning the
right of the romancer to treat of sacred events and to introduce
sacred personages into his story. Some hold that any attempt to
embody an idea of our Saviour’s character, experiences, sayings and
teachings in the form of fiction must have the effect of lowering
our imaginative ideal, and rendering trivial and commonplace that
which in the real Gospel is spontaneous, inspired and sublime. But to
others an historical novel like the ‘Martyr of Golgotha’ comes like
a revelation, opening fresh vistas of thought, filling out blanks
and making clear what had hitherto been vague and unsatisfactory,
quickening insight and sympathy, and actually heightening the
conception of divine traits. The author gives also a wide survey of
the general history of the epoch and shows the various shaping causes
which were influencing the rise and development of the new religion
in Palestine. There is, indeed, an astonishing vitality and movement
throughout the work, and, elaborate though the plot is, with all
varieties and all contrasts of people and conditions, with constant
shiftings of the scene, the story yet moves, and moves the interest
of the reader too, along the rapid current of events towards the
powerful culmination. The writer uses the Catholic traditions, and in
many points interprets the story in a way which differs altogether
from that familiar to Protestants: for example, making Mary Magdalen
the same Mary who was the sister of Lazarus and Martha, and who sat
listening at the Saviour’s feet. But in general, although there is
a free use made of Catholic legends and traditions, their effort
is natural and pleasing. The romance shows a degree of a southern
fervor which is foreign to English habit, but the flowery, poetic
style--although it at first repels the reader--is so individual, so
much a part of the author, that it is soon accepted as the naive
expression of a mind kindled and carried away by its subject. Spanish
literature has of late given us a variety of novels and romances,
all of which are in their way so good that we must believe that
there is a new generation of writers in Spain who are discarding
the worn-out forms and traditions, and are putting fresh life and
energy into works which will give pleasure to the whole world of
readers.”--_Philadelphia American, March 5, 1887_.
William S. Gottsberger, Publisher, New York.
End of Project Gutenberg's Leon Roch (vol. 1 of 2), by Benito Pérez Galdós