After once looking at her, and the first shock of reverence and pain over, he remained gazing thus; hearing the throbbing in his own temples and the rush of the blood in his veins, like the roar of an internal tide.
She was covered with a white robe, laid over her limbs by pious friends, with severe purity. Ample folds lay in straight lines from her neck to her feet, broken only by the marble hands which held a crucifix. A semi-transparent veil was over her face, neither concealing it nor too plainly revealing the outline, but letting it be seen vaguely, remotely as it were, through a mist of clouds, like the image that survives from a dream in eyes but half-awake. He would have liked to see more clearly what remained of her unequalled beauty, which, under the hand of death, was fading like some withered violet-tinted flower. In that face, blind and dead as it was, there was still some trace of expression. Leon found himself gazing into the depths of that vacant mystery, made deeper by the clouds of gauze, and recognised the look he had last seen on her features—a look less of love than of irony.
His brain was busy with all the solemn thoughts that besiege a man in the great crises of life: he reflected on the wide distance that divides us from true happiness—a distance that mind cannot measure, and that man has no means of shortening. Suddenly his meditations were interrupted by a commonplace and intrusive sound—a cough. He looked round. He and the dead were not alone. In a corner of the chapel sat a watcher. It was the little priest, seated on a bench with his eyes fixed on his prayer-book. Leon could not help admiring the fidelity of the spiritual friend who, having been her guide during life, had constituted himself her guardian in death. Without lifting his head, the Italian raised his eyes and looked for a few seconds at Leon fixedly—very fixedly. Then he looked down again and went on reading. This simple, calm drooping of the eyes was expressive of the most sovereign contempt imaginable. Paoletti murmured on, as though not a soul were present: “Ego sum vermis et non homo, opprobium hominum et abjectio plebis.”
Why was it that, as he left the chapel—no less reverently than he had entered it—Leon felt in his soul a soothing sense of consolation?—He had seen, face to face the worst terrors of the moral and physical world, and the struggle to which the contemplation had given rise had left his soul surrounded by melancholy ruins. Impavidum ferient ruinae, as a heathen said! But though he was crushed, alone, exiled and injustly judged, what could he care while his conscience was free in the sunshine that brightens it when it is sure of having acted rightly.
On returning to his empty house he found his servant busy packing in obedience to his orders given a few hours since. The man expressed great joy at seeing him, and when Leon enquired as to the cause of his eager satisfaction, the faithful fellow replied:
“At the Señora Marquesa’s, and in all the houses where you are known, they said you would be brought home with a bullet through your brains to-night. They were so sure of it that I could not help crying.”
Leon smiled sadly.
“And so, when I came in to pack, the first thing I did was to hide your pistols, in case you should kill yourself here if you had not done it before.”
“Where have you put them? Are they loaded?” said Leon hastily.