“Wait,” said María following him; but then, as though she repented of the impulse, she folded her hands and raised those sea-blue eyes to the ceiling.
“O Lord!—Blessed Virgin!—Luis, my brother! inspire me rightly; tell me what I ought to do.”
Leon waited; they looked at each other in silence. Then, yielding to some instinct, he went up to her and took her hand with tender respect, saying as he did so:
“María, is it possible that I count for nothing in your memory, in your heart? My name that you bear—my person as your husband—do these not appeal to you? Does my presence rouse no feeling in you, no echo of the past even? Has fanaticism crushed every faintest thrill of human feeling in your soul—even pity and charity? Has it extinguished every glimmer of duty and fitness?”
María covered her eyes with her hands as though in contemplation of some mental vision. “Answer me this last question: do you not love me?” María looked up; her eyes were red but not moist, and she gave him a cold grudging glance, as we bestow a penny on a beggar to be rid of him. Then she said in a dull dry voice:
“Wretched infidel, my God commands me to say: No.”
Leon turned away without a word and went to his room. He remained up all night arranging his things and packing books, clothes and papers. The next morning he left the house, not without looking back at it for the last time; it was not merely a home closed against him; it was hope deceived, an ideal life blasted and wrecked, like a cathedral that has been destroyed by an earthquake. There was still a fibre in his heart that attached him to that cherished ruin, but he wrenched it out and flung it from him.
CHAPTER XXX.
AN IRRUPTION OF THE BARBARIANS; ALARIC, ATTILA, AND OMAR.