“Faith! it is you who do not understand. I have none—I can have none such as you require. Indeed and if I had, your conduct and your way of carrying out your religious duties would cure me of it. I may tell you, once for all, that in your actions and your fevered excitement about sacred things I see nothing that becomes a Christian wife. My house is not a home, and my wife is no more than a beautiful dream, as remote as she is fair. This, I tell you is not marriage—you are not my wife nor I your husband.”
“And whose fault is that but yours?” she exclaimed eagerly. “If harmony and confidence are absent, who is to blame?—Your atheism, your infidelity, your separation from the Holy Church! I stand safely within the pale of matrimony—it is you who are outside. I call you, I invite you to enter with open arms and you will not come—Coward!”
And she stretched them to him, but Leon made no attempt to throw himself into them.
“I should come,” he said, “come with rapture, if I saw in you the faith which regards religion as the purest form of love. I should admire and respect your faith, and only wish that I could share it—but as it is I do not—I cannot—wish to follow.”
“You are mad, utterly mad! What is it that you do wish? That I should deny God and the Church, that I should turn rationalist like you, that I should read your books full of lies, that I should believe that we are all apes, that materialism is truth, that Nature is the only God, or that there is no God—all your hideous mass of heresies? Happily I have been able to escape falling into that abyss. I am pious and can believe all I ought to believe; I worship sincerely and constantly, for that is the best means of keeping faith alive and active, and of closing the soul against the entrance of any false doctrine.—I go to church too often? I am unreasonably particular in my attention to the rules of the Church? I am extravagant in the services I pay for? I listen every day to the Word of God? I pray night and morning?—This is the old story—is it not? I know I am looked upon as a fanatic. Well, there is a reason for everything. Do you suppose that I should cling so passionately to the Cross if I had not you for my husband—you—an atheist; if I were not—as I am—in constant peril of contamination by your views, and by my daily intercourse with you, nay, by my very love for you? No—if you were not so far from devout I should be less so. If you were a sincere Catholic I should not be a bigot—I should fulfil the most necessary duties but nothing more. It is like this Leon—supposing two men are out together in a small boat on a stormy sea; if both row with equal strength they will easily reach the shore; but no—one only lifts his oar, and does not pull at all. Must not the other work twice as hard or else they perish? Understand that clearly my dear—one oar must save us both.”
“That figure of speech is not of your invention,” said Leon, who knew full well the extent of his wife’s rhetorical powers. “Whose is it, pray?”
“Whether it is mine or not can be of no importance to you,” retorted María with contemptuous asperity. “The important point is that it covers an indisputable fact. Do you wish me to learn the truth from your miserable books?”
“No, no—I do not ask that,” said Leon sadly. “But wicked as I may be—reprobate as you believe me, do you think I am so bad as to deserve that you should not accept a single idea from me, and that you must always conceal and reserve your own, and keep yourself as far away from me as possible?”
“Nay—I accept your love which I believe to be sincere, and your respect for my beliefs which I feel to be honest, and your personal protection—but your views, your opinions....”