It was a beautiful night, calm and clear, lighted by a pallid, full moon; the distant horizon looked deceptively like a calm sea. The smaller stars sank into insignificance, but the larger ones shone brightly, trembling rather than twinkling. Nature was lovely and seemed to breathe forth peace and love. It was an hour to be born in, rather than to die in.
Nothing can make man feel so dwarfed as the contemplation of the sublime indifference of the skies to all the woes of earth. The most disastrous moral revolution could never give rise to the tiniest film of cloud. All the tears of weeping humanity will never form a single drop of water in infinite space.
Leon came out of his wife’s room to express his thanks to the master of the house.
“My dear friend,” said Fúcar, wringing his hands, “accept the sincere condolences of a much troubled man. I myself am the victim of a very serious misfortune.”
“Is any one ill?”
“No, no; we will discuss it another day—this is not the time.—Nay, nay, you have nothing to thank me for; it was no more than my duty. As you see I ordered them to decorate the house properly—suitably for so solemn a ceremony, and as befits my firm religious convictions. I had all the camellias brought in from the green-house, and all the rhododendrons and orange-trees in those heavy wooden tubs ... but there are occasions when I grow reckless, when I think even exaggeration is not out of place.... You shall know all in good time ... we will talk it over....”
He went off to Madrid in his carriage, reflecting on the catastrophe in his house, on the bad government of a nation which, the day after issuing one loan, found it necessary to start another.
Leon went back to his wife’s room. The end was at hand. Rafaela, Paoletti, Moreno Rubio and himself gathered round María who, since the last words of confession she had uttered had been rapidly sinking, and looked every moment more like death. Her face, which nature had moulded on a type of ideal beauty, looked even more perfect at this moment, when physical vitality was almost extinct; and its fixity and whiteness, the immobility of that calm repose on the pillow, the sculpturesque stillness of every feature and muscle betraying no sign of suffering, made her look like some marble image of Death—noble and dignified, with nothing vulgar in its details—aristocratic, if so to speak, and wrought to grace the monument of some great lady. She lay motionless; she was privileged to enter the dark realm with tranquil deliberation and free from bodily pain, as we pass from one scene to another in the varying phases of a dream.
Her half-closed eyes, under their black lashes, were fixed on her husband’s gloomy and rigid face. Leon stood by the bed, gazing sadly at the loveliness to which Death was lending a sublimer beauty, and reflecting in a vein of sentimental philosophy on this transformation of his wife into a statue. The solemnity of the scene, the silence, broken only by her breathing which grew more difficult every moment, the sad fixity of those dying eyes, fastened on him like a mysterious tendril that could not be torn away, filled his brain with thoughts of himself and of her,—two beings who called themselves husband and wife, and between whom there was no link but that gaze. He sounded the depths of his soul, trying to find in it some faded remnant of love, that he might offer it as a last blossom of conjugal devotion to the woman who lay there dying in the cold solitude of mysticism; but he sought in vain—he could find none. All the wealth of love and regard that his heart had once contained had been diverted from its legitimate centre, and been stored and hidden in another part of his nature.
But though he found no affection, the beautiful creature who had been the pride of his earlier life filled him with such deep and keen pity that he could, in that hour of grief, have mistaken it for love. As he watched the ebb of that life which might have been the crown and joy of his own, Leon felt the tears rise to his eyes and a tight grip on his heart. “Unhappy woman!” he thought to himself. “May God forgive you for all the ill you have done me; I mourn for you as if I had loved you; and I pity you,—not so much for dying young but for the cruel disappointment in store for you when you learn—and you must learn it soon—that the love of God is only a sublimer development of love for those whom he has created!”