“To me? nothing,” said the marquis a little awkwardly. “Nothing but what you heard.”
“She whispered something.”
“No—at least I do not remember it. The reconciliation of our friend Leon with poor María seems to be a settled thing—that was all. I am glad, for it is altogether wrong that two persons of the highest character—a good husband and a good wife—should quarrel about a Mass more or less. It is perfect insanity.—Good-bye sweet-heart.”
“Reconciliation!” exclaimed Pepa with flashing eyes.
The marquis, who did not happen to see her at this instant, took a few steps towards the door.
“Let us be thankful that those who are good can be brought together again,” he murmured as he left the room. “But for the wicked there can be neither peace nor pardon.—May God forgive him!”
Pepa was about to speak, but the words on her lips were so tempestuous that she restrained herself. She sat a long time without stirring. Then she grew restless, walked up and down the room, called her maid, gave some orders, contradicted them, scolded the nurse, and wandered aimlessly about the house.
When Monina was fairly asleep Pepa locked herself into her own room: beyond a doubt some mystery was in the air, filling it with an electric tension that could be felt though not seen. But every human soul tormented by a crushing grief is disposed to imagine that the unknown woes of others must be of a similar character, and Pepa believed that her father’s uneasiness must be in some way akin to her own sorrows, or at any rate that their griefs had a common origin. The magnitude of her own misery blinded her to every other; she could not think that any living soul could be troubled by another cause than this dreaded truce between Leon and María which had been so abruptly announced.
No arguments to prove that the source of our anguish may be a lie have any effect in extracting the sting; on the contrary, a syllogism is the worst forceps in the world and when it is applied to extract only a thorn it seems to increase the smart a hundred-fold. Pepa, when she tried to convince herself that Pilar’s information was a fiction, only tortured herself the more. This reconciliation racked her as though a harrow were being dragged over her bleeding heart.
It was growing late, and Don Pedro, she knew, would not come till morning. His benevolence and liberality maintained more than one house in Madrid besides his own.