Pepita Ximenez

by Juan Valera

"So much the better. There is nothing more tiresome than jealousy. Well, I will try to satisfy your curiosity. This same count has given room enough for talk. He is a dissipated fellow, a gambler, and a man of no principle whatever, but he has more vanity than Don Roderick on the gallows. He made up his mind that my mistress should fall in love with him and marry him, and, as she has refused him a thousand times, he is mad enough to be tied. This does not prevent him, however, from keeping in his money-chest more than a thousand dollars that Don Gumersindo lent him years ago, without any more security than a bit of paper, through the fault and at the entreaty of Pepita, who is better than bread. The fool of a count thought, no doubt, that Pepita, who was so good to him as a wife that she persuaded her husband to lend him money, would be so much better to him as a widow that she would consent to marry him. He was soon undeceived, however, and then he became furious."

"Good-by, Antoñona," said Don Luis, as, now grave and thoughtful, he left the house.

The lights of the shops and of the booths in the fair were now extinguished, and everybody was going home to bed, with the exception of the owners of the toy-shops, and other poor hucksters, who slept beside their wares in the open air.

In some of the grated windows were still to be seen lovers, wrapped in their cloaks, and chatting with their sweethearts. Almost every one else had disappeared.

Don Luis, once out of sight of Antoñona, gave a loose rein to his thoughts. His resolution was taken, and all his reflections tended to confirm this resolution. The sincerity and ardor of the passion with which he had inspired Pepita; her beauty; the youthful grace of her person, and the fresh exuberance of her soul, presented themselves to his imagination, and rendered him happy.

Notwithstanding this, however, he could not but reflect with mortified vanity on the change that had been wrought in himself. What would the dean think? How great would be the horror the bishop! And, above all, how serious were the grounds for complaint he had given his father! The displeasure of the latter, his anger when he should know of the bond that bound his son to Pepita, caused him infinite disquietude.

As for what—before he fell—he had called his fall it must be confessed that, after he had fallen, it did not seem to him either so very serious or so very reprehensible. His spiritual-mindedness, viewed in the light that had just dawned upon him, he fancied to have had neither reality nor consistency; to have been but the vain and artificial product of his reading, of his boyish arrogance, of his aimless tenderness in the innocent days of his college life. When he remembered that he had at times thought himself the recipient of supernatural gifts and graces, that he heard mystic whisperings, that his spirit held communion with superior beings; when he remembered that he had fancied himself almost beginning to tread the path that leads to spiritual unity, through contemplation of the Divine, penetrating into the recesses of the soul, and mounting up to the region of pure intelligence, he smiled to himself, and began to suspect that during the period in question he had not been altogether in his right mind. It had all been simply the result of his own arrogance. He had neither done penance, nor passed long years in meditation; he did not possess, nor had he ever possessed, sufficient merits for God to favor him with privileges like these. The greatest proof he could give himself of the truth of this, the greatest certainty he could possess that the supernatural favors he had enjoyed were spurious; mere recollections of the authors he had read, was that not one of them had ever given him the rapture of Pepita's "I love you," or of the soft touch of her hand caressing his dark locks.

Don Luis had recourse to another species of Christian humility to justify in his eyes what he now no longer called his fall, but his change of purpose. He confessed himself unworthy to be a priest; he reconciled himself to being a commonplace married man, a good sort of country gentleman, like any other, taking care of his vines and olives, and bringing up his children—for he now desired to have children—and to being a model husband at the side of his Pepita.

Here I think myself again in the necessity—responsible as I am for the publication and divulgation of this history—of interpolating various reflections and explanations of my own.

I said at the beginning of the story that I was inclined to think that the narrative part, or paralipomena, was composed by the reverend dean for the purpose of completing the story, and supplying incidents not related in the letters; but I had not at that time read the manuscript with attention. Now, on observing the freedom with which certain matters are treated, and the indulgence with which certain frailties are regarded by the author, I am compelled to ask whether the reverend dean, with the severity of whose morals I am well acquainted, would have spent his time in writing what we have just read.