“Laugh—laugh away—I am not surprised at that. I am well aware of the audacious cynicism which lies hidden behind that mask of philosophical virtue. Your whole moral nature is like an artificial plant, which it is easy to strip of the flowers and leaves which have given it a semblance of life. That is what your moral theories are: artificial flowers; for natural flowers which have perfume and colour cannot bloom in an empty vessel, or grow from a soil of mathematical formulas and barren science. And to think that I could defend you against the accusations of my family! that I could ever have believed in your honour! Good Heavens! how could I be so deceived.”
“But are you perfectly certain that I did meet Pepa while my wife was asleep?” asked Leon in a sarcastic tone which conveyed his sovereign contempt. “Did you see it? There are eyes that see falsehoods.”
“I saw it. I was sitting with my mother, who, whatever her faults may be as a woman, is a tender and loving parent, and who could not tear herself away from this house where her only daughter is suffering. Not being able to see her, in consequence of your cruel and selfish prohibition, she resigned herself to weep and watch from a distance the door of María’s room. I sat with her all night, to share her grief, while my father—whose weakness in the most critical circumstances is really inexcusable—took a lamp and went to inspect a collection of curiosities to which only men are admitted by special permission from Fúcar. Polito had drunk too much, with his friend Perico Nules, and was rather noisy. He began by wandering about the passages and annoying the maid servants, till I went after him, and succeeded in locking him up,—by midnight he was sleeping like a drunken angel. My mother and I were making up accounts in the Chinese boudoir and trying to arrange our disordered affairs; afterwards she said her prayers, and I, after searching the house in vain for a book to read, also gave myself up to my devotions. Within these magnificent walls, where so many marvels are collected, where copies from the antique alternate with monstrosities of gaudy taste, representative of modern art, there is everything that man can ask for, excepting a library. Since, on entering this house one must leave one’s intelligence on the doorstep, it is as well perhaps that one’s senses should be kept alive to make it easier!—My mother was tired of praying but was not sleepy; she was thinking of our dear María and of some way of cheating you and seeing her daughter. She would not go to bed and treading on tiptoe, she took to wandering through the rooms. As she approached the Incroyable room she thought she heard voices. She called me, and I hastened to join her; we went forward together and listened. The first sounds we heard were sobs, as we thought, but we at once understood that they were in fact passionate kisses. It was you—and she.—We hid behind the group of Meleager and Atalanta in the corridor and heard her open the door into the museum; we afterwards heard you pass through the room, returning to hide your disgraced head, crowned, as I may say, with laurels of infamy, on the pillow of your martyred wife. The woman who was with you was Pepa; and to remove every doubt my father can confirm it, for he met her as he was returning with the lamp in his hand from the cabinet of curiosities he had been inspecting.”
“And is that all?” said Leon calmly. “Has your espionage discovered no more than that? There are creatures who cannot breathe without exhaling slander!”
“Slander! What next? Of course I know that you can give the facts an interpretation favourable to yourself. You are never at a loss for sophistries to defend yourself.”
“I, defend myself! I, condescend to touch the dirt-heap of your foul suspicions, to argue about a fact that you and your mother have seen through the jaundiced spectrum of your impure imaginations!—Never!”
“The device is an ingenious one, but it fails of its effect. I am not convinced.”
“I do not want to convince either you or her,” said Leon with vehement fury. “Your opinion is to me so absolutely worthless that I positively feel a certain satisfaction in leaving you in your mistake. Your infernal nimbus of evil thoughts becomes you so amazingly. Do you think that I flatter myself that I can change the baseness of your souls, or by any waste of words create an idea of purity and honour in a mind tainted with the leprosy of chronic sin? Your opinions, and the opinions of all your execrable family, who repay solid benefits with slander, are to me no more than the rain which wets us but cannot blacken us. Do we quarrel with the coach-wheel which splashes us with mud? And you—the political and religious moralist, always preaching party-sermons; you—a machine for grinding out ready-made morality; you—who pound up ‘laws human and divine’ into a patent lozenge, to cram the world with an anodyne of sophistry and piety flavoured to each man’s taste—you cannot dose me with morality packed into a sugar-plum! My faults may perhaps serve your turn as virtues, and the base sentiments that I disown and cast out, you may, if you please, pick out of the dirt and make the pride and boast of your conscience. Before preaching to me why do you not look at home? If you study yourself you must surely see that your life, your fame, and your credit would vanish like smoke if San Salomó were a man instead of a puppet.”