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.