Marianela

by Benito Pérez Galdós

[CHAPTER XVII.]
A FUGITIVE.

The wonderful good news flew through Socartes. Nothing else was talked of in the smelting-houses, in the workshops, in the washing-mills, on the tram-way, in the deepest diggings, and on the top of the hill, in the bowels of the earth or the open light of heaven. Various interesting commentaries were added: that in Aldeacorba it was thought for a moment that Don Francisco was out of his wits with joy; that Don Manuel meant to celebrate the happy event by giving a grand banquet to all the hands employed in the mines; and, finally, that Don Teodoro was a great man, whom all blind men, present or to come, might indeed esteem, "as the apple of their eye."

Nela could not venture to go to the house at Aldeacorba. A mysterious force seemed to hold her back. She wandered all day round and about the mines, gazing from afar at the Penáguilas' house, which in her eyes, looked transformed. Her spirit was full of a strange compound of the sincerest joy and an overwhelming shamefacedness, of noble devotion and with it the unendurable aching, so to speak, of an intensely sensitive self-consciousness.

She found some surcease from the turmoil of her brain in that motherly solitude which had contributed so largely to the formation of her character, and in dreaming over the beauty of Nature, which always lifted her soul to closer communion with the Divinity. The clouds in the sky and the flowers of the field affected her mind as others are affected by the pomp of altars, the eloquence of preachers and the study of the meditations of the mystics. In the solitude of the open country she thought and said a thousand things that she never dreamed were aspirations and prayers. She looked towards Aldeacorba, and said to herself:

"I will never go there again.—All is over and done.—Of what use can I be now?"

With all her ignorance she understood that the struggle in her soul arose from her incapacity to hate any one; on the contrary, she was constrained to love her friend and her enemy alike, and just as thistles turned into flowers under the miraculous touch of some Christian martyr, Nela perceived that her jealousy and aversion were graciously blossoming into admiration and gratitude. That which could undergo no change was the feeling we have described as self-conscious shame, and which urged her to keep herself quite apart from any events which might henceforth occur in Aldeacorba. It was a special aspect of the sentiment which in civilized and educated persons is called amour propre, which includes in itself the capacity for self-depreciation. The connection, however, between her feeling and that which has so large a share in the actions of cultivated persons, consisted in the fact that both were founded on a punctilious sense of dignity. If Marianela could have expressed herself in their language she would have said:

"My dignity will not allow me to submit to the horrible degradation you would put upon me. It is God's will that I should endure this humiliation—so be it; but I cannot stand by and see myself deposed and discrowned. May his blessings fall on the head of her who, by a law of nature, must fill the place I once occupied—but I have not the courage to put her there with my own hands."

But not being able to utter her pain in these words, she could only say: "I will never go to Aldeacorba again—I will never let him see me. I will run away with Celipin, or I will go to my mother. I am of no use now to any one."

Still, even while she said this, it struck her as very sad that she should have to give up the divine protection of that Heavenly Maiden who had appeared to her in the darkest hour of her life, and cast her sheltering mantle over her! To think that after seeing the vision realized which had so often appeared to her in dreams of thrilling beatitude, she must renounce it—to have heard herself called by a gentle voice, that offered her a sister's love, a happy home, position, a name, and a luxurious existence—and then be unable to obey the invitation with joy, alacrity and thankfulness—to reject the hand which would snatch her from a life of degradation and misery, and make a lady of the wretched vagabond, raising her from the rank of a domestic animal to that of a loved and respected woman!...