“It was through no fault of his. There was no other house within reach where you could have the requisite medical attendance and be properly taken care of. I entirely approve of your having been brought here. A life in imminent peril is not a thing to be lifted and carried about like a sack. The best thing that could happen to you was to be here.”
“And I dreamed it—and when I woke they denied it.” She was too weak to speak more than a few words at a time, and it is impossible to give any idea of the feeble, extinct, quavering tones of her voice. It was like that of a forsaken child, wearied out with calling and crying for its mother.
“And my husband and that woman,” she went on, “will meet hour after hour in this house to embrace and to count ...” again her voice failed her, and Paoletti himself felt a lump rising in his throat.
“To count the minutes I have left to live—as I count the beads of my rosary.”
There was a pause, during which the confessor tried to regain his composure.
“My dearest friend in the Lord,” he began, “this is really a monstrous invention of your fancy. Listen to me while I tell you the exact facts, the truth to which I bear witness as a servant of God. The truth can do no harm to a noble soul like yours; a conscience so brave and so blameless will not be unhinged by a revelation of human weakness which cannot in any way affect it, any more than the dust blown up from the highway can affect the purity and whiteness of the clouds in the sky. You shall hear the whole truth, with nothing kept back and nothing added. Don Leon, it is true, loves this lady; he himself owned as much to me; and as he did not tell me under the seal of confession, I may and ought to tell you. But at the same time, I solemnly declare to you that the lady is not now at Suertebella, but that your husband himself begged and desired her to leave. Decency I may say required it, which is the outward sign of the grace of modesty. Your unhappy husband is, of course, incapable of any moral feeling; but, thanks to a cultivated mind, he has the religion of appearances, and can always assume that superficial guise of virtue which we term chivalry.”
María made no reply. Her white hand, which had not, during her brief illness, had time to grow thin and retained its delicate roundness, was playing with the fringe of the counterpane. Not far from this restless hand was the small bullet-head of the Italian; his face pale and lifeless when he sat with his eyes cast down, though, when he looked up, they glittered with a flash that suggested the sparkling of fireworks.
“I cannot believe,” said the priest fixing María with the fascination of that glance, “that a spirit so fortified by divine love as yours is, can allow these facts to disturb it. I know you well, and I cannot imagine that beautiful soul fettered and dragged down by trivial anxieties like any ordinary woman, or detaching its thoughts from the sublime ideal spheres to wander through the murky paths of worldly disputations, like idle minds that find time too long. Am I right my beloved daughter? Am I mistaken in thinking that those eyes, accustomed to the splendours of Heaven, can no longer deign to look down on the feebler lights of earth?”
“I am jealous,” said María the tone in which we state a pathetic truth. And just as the centurion gave the Redeemer a sponge dipped in vinegar for refreshment when he was athirst, the priest poured honey and vinegar into María’s parched soul.
“Jealous!” he said. “Jealous, when you have fired your heart with the love that is never unrequited! Unless I have failed to enter into the feelings of my illustrious penitent, she must have fortitude, and grace, and a sense of divine love which will raise her above such base anxieties. Jealous—of whom? Of another woman, and for the sake of a man; jealous, of nothing in a creature who is nothing and who is worth nothing!—Some radical change must have taken place in your mind, my dear daughter. What has occasioned it?”