“Of what good are your moral laws and your interpretation of the human conscience? A beautiful thing indeed is your reverence for tradition. Why! I was such a fool as to endure for four years a life of mental asphyxia in a world where everything is dogma and formula! Morality, religion, honour!—Words! mere words! Wealth even is an empty mockery; the very laws are mere formula—made brand-new every day and never obeyed; the whole thing is a miserable farce—a stage, where the actors are never weary of cheating each other and the rest of the world in their lying parts, and making believe to be virtuous, pious, or noble. This is your model society, worthy to be preserved intact to all futurity!... No one must lay a finger on it, or even find fault with it. I, you say have failed in respect to that herd of hypocrites who succeed in hiding their depravity from the million, and are clever enough to pass for creatures with a soul and conscience—I, who have seen and suffered, and said nothing, not even in opposition to the aberrations of a wife, who, though less guilty, is more fanatical than most—I, you say, have broken the laws of morality! How and in what respect I ask you?
“Nay, but I will tell you. I have been such a fool as to yield to the contemptible formulas which in your world pass for principles; I have looked on in silence and been content to screen vice and extravagance, supplying money to a spendthrift father, and wasteful mother, and libertine sons. I have encouraged dissolute living, have lent support to every vice—nay even to crime. These sins I have committed, and I own them to my shame!”
Provoked at first, and lashing his fury with his own words, Leon struck the table, threatened his father-in-law with his fist, till the old man shrank almost to nothing as he sat through this philippic with his eyes fixed on a water-jar that stood on the table, wondering whether it were large enough for him to hide in.
Monina and Tachana, terrified by Leon’s vehemence, gathered up their paper playthings and, daring neither to laugh nor to cry, crept silently away into a corner of the room.
“I only spoke as a father,” said the marquis in so faint a voice that it might really have come from the bottom of the vase.
“And I spoke as a man wounded in his tenderest feelings, a husband exiled from his hearth by a cruel inquisition, and cast into the loneliness of practical celibacy by gross fanaticism and heartless bigotry. Those moral laws of which you talk so much condemn me, I know, for what they most absurdly call my atheism; but the true atheist, the hardened materialist, are those who trick themselves out in borrowed robes to be my accusers, and who would be just as ready to dress themselves up as harlequins to dance at a fancy ball. But though I should scorn to defend myself before them, I would have them know that I am the victim and not the executioner, and that I have quite made up my mind henceforth to defy the censure of hypocrites and the attacks of detractors. I mean to go my own way; I know where to find truth and the really immutable laws. I can scorn dogmas and traditions! It will be a pleasure to me to show my contempt, not in secret but publicly, for a tribunal that deserves no veneration, and a verdict pronounced in accordance with the clamour of a crowd devoid of all moral sense. Composed of agitators, hypocrites, rakes, idlers and bigots; of antiquated fops and decrepit youth, of foolish women and men who traffic in public moneys and private consciences; of would-be authorities who are but apes, of men who would sell everything—even their honour—and others who would sell themselves, but that no one will buy them; of worldlings who put on an air of sanctity—mere bags of rottenness with human faces; of cowards, sneaks and renegades; of all in short who would like to constitute the basis of society and who do not hesitate to insist that all mankind ought to be moulded after their image and likeness. Well! let them stay where they are! I will withdraw—I have withdrawn—leaving my hapless wife behind me, by her desire, not my own, I can look on from afar at the edifying spectacle. They understand each other—they live from day to day, spending what is not their own; paying for church ceremonies, and encouraging vice; dividing their inheritance between sacristans and ballet-girls. Families are either dying out, or perpetuated by generations of unhealthy descendants; the most serious facts and laws of life are laughed to scorn; virtue and true piety are contemned, while they preach in bombastic rhetoric a scheme of morality of which they are utterly ignorant and a God whose laws they have not studied. They, indeed, are atheists, a thousand times over, who measure the sublime purposes of the Almighty by the puny standard of their mean and selfish souls!”
The burning words had parched his lips; he took the jar from the table and drank some water. His hapless opponent had shrunk so completely into nothingness that he had ceased to think of the vase as a conceivable hiding-place; his eyes now rested on a match-box as though to say: “How happy should I be if only I might disappear into that!”
Being a man of the world with a multitude of commonplaces at his command, even on the most critical occasions, Tellería was trying to find some words that might release him from the present dilemma, or at any rate cover his discomfiture.
“I will not attempt to imitate you,” he began, pulling himself together and clearing his throat. “I shall indulge in no violent language. I have appealed to the laws of morality and to them I still appeal. You have sinned against my daughter and against society at large ... that is how I feel it, and how I must continue to speak of it. I go back to the insult you have offered to María, who is a faithful and blameless wife, and to the underhand manner of your separation. In short, I do not believe that it was María’s bigotry that moved you to it, I strongly suspect ...”
But the marquis did not finish his sentence. Tachana was heard crying. She and Monina had crept behind a chair and had been peeping through the bars in great alarm at the two men who were arguing so fiercely. Tired at last of this amusement they had begun to quarrel; Ramona had slapped her companion.