“Doña Carlota!” he said, looking down at her dulled hazel eyes, that were fixed and unseeing: “Do not die with wrong words on your lips. If you are murdered, you have murdered yourself. You were never married to Ramón. You were married to your own way.”
He spoke fiercely, avengingly.
“Ah!” said the dying woman. “Ah! I never married Ramón. No! I never married him! How could I? He was not what I would have him be. How could I marry him? Ah! I thought I married him. Ah! I am so glad I didn’t—so glad.”
“You are glad! You are glad!” said Cipriano in anger, angry with the very ghost of the woman, talking to the ghost. “You are glad because you never poured the wine of your body into the mixing-bowl! Yet in your day you have drunk the wine of his body and been soothed with his oil. You are glad you kept yours back? You are glad you kept back the wine of your body and the secret oil of your soul? That you gave only the water of your charity? I tell you the water of charity, the hissing water of the spirit is bitter at last in the mouth and in the breast and in the belly, it puts out the fire. You would have put out the fire, Doña Carlota.—But you cannot. You shall not. You have been charitable and compassionless to the man you called your own. So you have put out your own fire.”
“Who is talking?” said the ghost of Carlota.
“I, Cipriano Viedma, am talking.”
“The oil and the wine! The oil and the wine and the bread! They are the sacrament! They are the body and the blessing of God! Where is the priest? I want the sacrament. Where is the priest? I want to confess, and take the sacrament, and have the peace of God,” said the ghost of Carlota.
“The priest is coming.—But you can take no sacrament, unless you give it. The oil and the wine and the bread! They are not for the priest to give. They are to be poured into the mixing-bowl, which Ramón calls the cup of the star. If you pour neither oil nor wine into the mixing-bowl, from the mixing-bowl you cannot drink. So you have no sacrament.”
“The sacrament! The bread!” said the ghost of Carlota.
“There is no bread. There is no body without blood and oil, as Shylock found out.”