“I do not kill—for that.”
“For what then? Nay, you kill for everything. There are other ways of killing besides blows; grief kills too.”
“If grief could kill, María, I should by this time be dead and buried. This infernal torture by a slow fire, this incessant discussion and recrimination arising from the radical opposition of our views on the things of the next world—and indeed of this—are a constant succession of blows that kill ... aye more surely than steel or lead! Ah! the misery of two beings, together and yet apart; of feeling that two souls that ought to be one are growing further and further asunder, each on its own side.... For all this I grieve bitterly, bitterly, child—and then to find a cold and lonely hearth where the wife I loved once sat—to be isolated and abandoned....” And Leon, deeply agitated, broke down and was silent.
“And in this separation,” said María, “who is to blame but you? You, who by nature are obdurate to all arguments, blindly obstinate in your atheism and materialism. What have I done constantly, repeatedly, but offer terms of peace and union?”
“What can you have to offer but thorns, bitterness and repulsion? What peace but that of the grave, the peace of a perfunctory, absurd and debasing formalism. You have no genuine feelings—nothing but capricious terrors, horrible stubbornness, a barren and morose mysticism which excludes all genuine love. Nay, do not talk to me of peace, you who have turned against me, doing all you can to vex and gnaw my heart with the fangs of ferocious fanaticism; to me you are like a harpy who calls your venom by the name of Faith, and who have poisoned me with that diabolical secretion.”
“Nay,” cried María with the air of a martyr, “abuse and insult me as much as you will, but do not attack my faith; that is blasphemy.”
“It is not blasphemy; I only tell you that you, and you alone, have made our marriage tie a chain of bondage. You, María you! When we married you had your beliefs and I had mine, and my respect for every man’s conscience is so great that I never thought of trying to eradicate your faith; I gave you complete liberty; I never interfered with your devotions, even when they were so excessive as to mar the happiness of our home. Then there came a day when you went mad—I can find no other word to describe the terrific exaggeration of your bigotry since, six months ago, here in my garden, your hapless brother died in your arms. Since then you have not been a woman but a monster of bitterness and vexatiousness; an incarnation of the inquisition in the form of a woman. You have not merely tormented me by ceasing to be in any way amiable and by your odious assumption of sanctity, but you have persecuted me with attempts to make of me too a hypocritical and ridiculous bigot. I have tried to make you give up your monomania; I have even tried giving way to some extent to your earnest entreaties; but you asked too much. It is impossible, utterly impossible, that I should lend myself to the sanctimonious farce, when I thought the moment propitious for acting with determination I have made superhuman efforts to free you from your own fanaticism, but, as you know, it has proved impossible. I have fought for it desperately, have tried every means, every argument of reason, of affection, of command—all in vain. Your spirit has succumbed to some irresistible power, and you live under the dominion of dark influences which I cannot defy. There are some invisible meshes, inscrutable ties, bonds that unite and shears that divide, without my seeing how or when. Against these I am impotent. María, I am defeated—I acknowledge it. I can have nothing more to say to you but a sad farewell, and to remind you that you once loved me—that we have been for a time happy together. It is a sad, a very sad, end; it leaves no room for hope!”
María was so impatient to be heard that she hardly waited for him to cease before she broke in:
“I too have my bill of indictment, and it is a heavy one. I was brought up in our holy faith and taught to put my faith into practice in all sincerity and truth. I married you—I loved you, I believed you to be good, kind, honourable, and did not understand the hideous void in your soul; I loved you—and I love you still, for it is my duty to love and respect you; but I soon began to see that in loving you I followed the promptings of a worldly passion, and that my choice was a fatal mistake; that my soul was in the utmost peril of contamination; that we could never come to an agreement; that your learning was of a most pernicious character; that I, as your wife and influenced by your reprobate ideas, might fall into the depths and lose my faith.—I was on my guard. I fully admit that you were tolerant and lenient, that you did not abuse my devotions, nor mock at religion as you have done since. But you cannot deny that there was a certain amount of contempt in the facilities you granted me; you had a particular smile when I spoke to you of such subjects.—However, we got on very well. Then one day it struck me: ‘I am a fool if I do not convert him. Why should I not light the lamp of faith in that darkened soul?’ But you gave me to understand that I was mad, that all believers were mad; and you smiled—how you smiled—and with what affectation of good humour you would laugh at all our sacred dogmas. ‘Let things alone,’ you said, ‘let every man save his soul in his own way.’ This made me miserable, for there is but one—if I repeat it a thousand times—there is but one way of being saved. Then came those dreadful days, that I can only call my sainted brother’s Holy Week—the days of agony of that angelic being, whom God vouchsafed to send to me that he might direct my steps into the right road—I see that the recollection of them vexes you. You cannot forget the bitter humiliation of your spirit in those days when the mere presence of my brother was a constant ground of remorse to you.”
Leon made no reply, he did not even look at his wife. There was something so repellent in her appearance that it vexed his sight as much as her words revolted his feelings.