He went closer to her, attracted by her eyes which had opened a little wider; he looked at the soft, almost invisible down that shaded her lip, the bright light in her eye, with its tawny hazel iris; he felt the warmth of her breath—now scarcely perceptible.—Poor soul, poor soul! There are no words to describe the pathos which she could not utter in words, but only by the last gleam of those eyes that were almost extinct.
Behind the external calmness of her attitude and the steady gaze of her eye, who knows what anxieties, what torments, nay what petty worries may not have been racking her and dull jealousies vaguely stirring in the depths of her dying soul—since there was no physical means of giving them utterance! but the surface betrayed nothing, just as the frozen surface of a river prevents our hearing the swift and noisy flow of the deeper current.
Leon understood this. He saw a tear glittering in each of María’s eyes: the last and only means of expression for the one surviving human feeling of her soul, brought from the unsounded depths to which the world still clung by a slender root of desire. Two half-formed tears, that did not overflow, were all that came to light from that hidden fount. Leon bent down and pressed his lips firmly to her cold forehead; as he did so he heard a sigh of satisfied longing. A strong shudder ran through her frame and in a steady voice she said: “Ah! Thanks!”
There was silence—an awful silence, while María Egyptiaca was tossing on the threshold of the invisible land, like a grain of sand flung up by the waves on to a shore where human ken cannot penetrate. The bystanders murmured with a sigh that she was dead—they might speak aloud now. Leon closed her eyes with a timid hand—he was afraid of hurting her.
The priest on his knees prayed in silence, his eyes tightly shut, like a prisoner whose dungeon windows are closed with double shutters. Leon stood for a few minutes, gazing at the remains of one of the most beautiful women of her day—with the added reputation of being the most saintly of her native city; and he shuddered with grief as he remembered the past, and realized what his present feelings were. How sad was the stillness of those limbs not yet cold, of the features in which beauty so masked death, that it would not have been hard to call death life and life death.
Deeply agitated, and with his heart oppressed with intense pity, he quitted the room, feeling as if he had left his youth behind him. The devout watchers and some of the servants remained there; Paoletti withdrew to the chapel. The news flew through the house; there was a sound of weeping, the bustle of attendants rushing for restoratives, the sighs and lamentations of friends coming and going. Leon took refuge in the hall of Hymen, where he threw himself on a couch and lay staring at an antique clock, which bore an inscription on a semicircle above the dial, like a frowning brow: Vulnerant omnes, ultima necat.
CHAPTER XX.
IN THE INCROYABLE DRAWING-ROOM.
He called together the servants and a few faithful friends, and having made all the necessary arrangements he withdrew to the end of the house nearest to his own room. He felt he must be alone. In the midst of his regrets he felt a certain satisfaction in having fulfilled his duty to his wife to the last hour of her life. He ordered his servant on no account to allow any one to disturb him, and he locked himself in the Incroyable drawing-room.