"I don't know—God, perhaps, if he exists. Life, against which I have sinned—Love, that I have wronged—myself—myself especially: I need to earn forgiveness from myself!"
And slowly, wonderingly, but inevitably, Monsalvat found her lips. She was answered!
"Your life is mine, Fernando," she said gently, and Monsalvat knew from her voice that she was smiling. "Your suffering is my suffering, your joy my joy! Only death can part us."
And on those blind eyes a great light descended, infinite, filling the world; and he knew that some of this radiance sprang from the depths of his own soul, glorifying the years that lay before him, and before all his suffering, hungering, striving human brothers....
EPILOGUE
Two years had passed since their marriage. Nacha had taken up the management of her mother's house, and was proving skillful at a task which her sister's flight to a distant province with her new husband greatly simplified for her.
For Monsalvat her devotion knew no bounds. With Nacha beside him he scarcely needed eyes; but he could not reconcile himself to his uselessness. If he had only been able at least to go on working for the poor and the oppressed! He had to content himself with gathering together the children of the neighborhood and teaching them whatever he could, without the use of his sight. It annoyed him not to be able to teach them to read; for he believed that if ever the world was to be made new it would be through love, and through books! Of these last he gave as many as he could afford to the boys and girls who showed promise of making good use of what he taught them.
The presence of this blind man was a strange note in the little middle class boarding house. The students all felt a deep and affectionate veneration for him. Many of them became his friends, and not a few his true disciples. They read to him, and together they discussed articles and books; but these young people liked best to hear him talk of that vision which never ceased to shine in his darkness. At times his words flamed with the passion for justice within him. At others they seemed to pour out quietly and evenly like so many beams of that light in which, to his listeners, beauty and truth was revealed.
Since he had come there to live, gross words and vulgar anecdotes had vanished as if by magic. At the long dinner-table there seemed now always to be something to talk about; for the students shared their day's experiences and discoveries with Don Fernando, and the ideas they had found interesting grew and became animate as they discussed them with their blind host.