He sat down again, coming quite close to the gardener's widow, so as to speak in a very low voice.
"You know my past better than anyone; I have such great confidence in you that I have told you everything. Besides, you are very quick, and if I had not told you, you would have guessed. You know what Visitacion is to me, and most certainly you are aware of what those wretches say about her. Do not play the fool; everyone inside and outside the Cathedral listens to these calumnies and believes them. You are the only one who does not credit them because you know the truth. But ay! the truth cannot be told, I cannot proclaim it, these robes forbid me."
And he seized a handful of his cassock with his clenched fingers as if he would rend it.
A long silence followed. Don Sebastian looked fixedly at the ground, clutching with his hands as though he were trying to grasp invisible enemies; every now and then he felt a stab of pain and sighed uneasily.
"Why do you think about these things?" said the gardener's widow; "they only make you ill, and you ought not to have disturbed yourself to come and see me, you would have done better to remain in the palace."
"No, you distract my mind from them, it is a great comfort to tell you of my troubles. Up there I feel in despair, and have to exert all my self-command to suppress my anger. I do not wish my servants to understand, for they are quite capable of laughing at me, neither do I wish poor Visitacion to know anything. I cannot dissimulate. I cannot feign happiness when I am so irritated! What a hell I suffer! I cannot say that I have been a man, and that I have been weak as the flesh of which I am made, that I have with me the fruit of my faults, and that I will not separate myself from them, though persecuted by calumny. Every man acts as he is able, and I wish to be good in spite of my faults. I might have separated from my children, I might have deserted them, as others have done to preserve their reputation as saints, but I am a man, and I am proud of them; I am a man with all his defects and all his virtues, neither greater nor less than the general run of humanity. The feeling of paternity is so deeply rooted in me that I would sooner lose my mitre than abandon my children. You remember when Juanito's father, who passed as my nephew, died, how deeply I felt it, I thought I should have died also. Such a fine, handsome man, and with such a brilliant future before him! I would have made him a magistrate, president of the supreme court, minister, anything I wished! And in twenty-four hours he was dead as though Heaven wished to punish me. It is true I have my grandson remaining, but this Juanito in no way resembles his father, and I confess it to you, I do not care much for him. I can only see in him the most distant reflection of my poor son. Of my past, of that time which was the happiest of my life, all I have left me is Visitacion. She is the living image of the poor dead one. I worship her! and this feeble ray of happiness these wretched people disturb with their calumnies. It is enough to make one kill them!"
Overcome by the happy recollection of the spring-time which had flowered during the first years of his episcopate, far away in an Andalusian diocese, he repeated once again to Tomasa the tale of his relations with a certain devout lady, who from her childhood had felt a horror of the world. Devotion had drawn them together, but life was not long in asserting her rights, opening herself a way by their almost mystical relations, and finally uniting them in a carnal embrace. They had lived faithful to each other in the secrecy of ecclesiastical life, loving each other with scrupulous prudence, so that no rumour of their relations had ever publicly transpired, until she died, leaving two children. Don Sebastian, a man of strong passions, was almost vehement in his paternal feelings—those two beings were the image of the poor dead woman, the remembrance of the only idyll which had softened a life wholly given over to ambition, and the calumnies circulated by his enemies, founded on the presence of his daughter in the archiepiscopal palace nearly drove him mad.
"They believe her to be my mistress!" he said angrily. "My poor Visitacion, so good, so affectionate, so gentle to all, changed to a courtesan by these wretches! A sweetheart that I have taken for my amusement from the college of Noble Ladies! As if I, old and infirm, were able to think of such things! Brutes! wretches! Crimes have been committed for less!"
"Let them say on. God is in heaven and sees us all."
"I know it, but this is not enough to quiet me. You have children, Tomasa, and you know what it is to love them. It is not only what is done against them that wounds us, but what is said. What days of suffering I endure! You know since my boyhood all my dreams have been to rise to where I am. I used to look at the throne in the choir and think how comfortable I should be in it—of the immense happiness of being a prince of the Church. Well, now I am on the throne. I have spent half a century removing the stones from my path, leaving my skin and even my flesh on the brambles of the hillside. I only know how I was able to rise from the black mass and obtain a bishopric! Afterwards—now I am an archbishop! now I am a cardinal! At last I can rise no higher! And what is it all? Happiness always floats before us like the cloud of light which guided the Israelites. We see it, we almost touch it, but it never lets itself be caught. I am more unhappy now than in the days when I struggled to rise, and thought myself the most unfortunate of men. I am no longer young; the height on which I stand draws all eyes to me and prevents me defending myself. Ay, Tomasa! pity me, for I am worthy of compassion! To be a father and to be obliged to hide it as a crime! To love my daughter with an affection which increases more and more as I draw nearer to death, and have to endure that people should imagine this pure affection to be something so repugnant!"