As has been said, María, when her husband was absent for ever felt a miserable void, anxiety and solitude. Where was he gone? She made various enquiries, but without betraying her disquietude. She profaned even her prayers by thinking of it—San Antonio! but this man was hers—her husband and should belong to no one else!
Logic of this kind comes with fulminating force sometimes to a half-demented brain; and the strange thing was that in spite of what she choose to call Leon’s atheism, she had always recognised in him a basis of honourable feeling in which she had perfect confidence. Still, so narrow was her apprehension, that she had never thought of setting that magnanimity against his disbelief. Why did she trust the honour of an atheist? She did not know, but that she did was beyond dispute. Now, when her husband, her mate, her companion, had left her, she was bereft of all trust. María was going through a strange experience. It seemed to be close to her, a monstrous and hideous presence that gazed at her, that haunted her, that glided with a cold and slimy touch up the pleats of her dress, looked into her heart with its wicked black eyes, poked in its taper head, and then drew in its long writhing body to the very tip of its slender tail—curled itself up in her heart where it lay coiled, radiating an intolerable heat but as still and motionless as death in the nest that it had made there.
CHAPTER III.
THE REVOLUTION.
The Marquesa de San Salomó was talking to María.
“My dear friend,” she began, “I would not be the last to come and condole with you.”
“To pray with me?”
“Yes, to pray; but also to sympathise. I did not see you in church. Padre Paoletti told me that you had come and gone early; and I quite understood it. I long to talk to you and comfort you....”
“Comfort me?” said María much puzzled, “for my loneliness, my solitude ... but I have suffered long in silence, and the Lord has not denied me sweet consolation. What are we here for but to suffer? We have only to get that well into our minds and then no grief can find us unprepared.”