CHAPTER VIII.

       MARÍA EGYPTIACA.

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      Several months had passed since that spring season by the sea; Leon Roch—on the appointed day, at the appointed hour, and in the appointed church—had been duly married, without any hindrance to the fulfilment of the plan he had made. His soul was full of the calm satisfaction which steals over it softly and silently like the breath of spring; a peace which brings refreshment and not intoxication, and which, as it is innocent of excess, never satiates the heart, and so leaves no aftertaste of tedium. Leon, as a philosopher and a student of nature, thought that nothing could be better and wished for nothing more. His wife’s beauty had improved wonderfully since her marriage and in these additional charms the husband discovered an appropriate tribute paid by nature to an union so judiciously planned in theory and wrought out in practice.

      “We form a compound being,” he would say, “each the complement of the other, and it is hard sometimes to say whether the image produced is mine or hers, our feelings are so intimately blended.”

      María’s affection for him, which at first had been bashful and cold as that of a well brought up Cupid who has just had his eyes unbandaged, was soon as ardent as he could wish. The passion, that at first had sat shyly behind a blind, soon peeped out, with its flaming torch, its ambrosial chalice and its chain of yearning anxieties, choking its victim with the pain of a too great happiness; so that for some time her husband forgot his educational schemes, though, in his more lucid moments, his common-sense reminded him that it would be needful to put them into practice and realise the effects of his very superior system. By degrees he recovered his habitual equanimity and his excited feelings subsided into the subordinate place which he had always assigned to them as compared with his intellect. At last he felt like a man who wakes from a long dream; he regarded his mind as a wide and fruitful territory which has been for a time drowned out by an inundation, and where, as the waters subside, at first the highest points become visible, then the hills and at last the plains.

      “This will pass away,” he said to himself, “it must. When the land is clear I will attack the dreaded subject and begin to mould”—he was fond of this form of speech—“to mould María’s character. It is of exquisite clay, but formless—almost formless.”

      Leon Roch’s young wife was slightly and elegantly-built, every part in such perfect proportion that a sculptor could have hoped for no better model. Her hair was black and her skin white with very little colour, giving such refinement to her grave, fervent expression that all her admirers were her lovers and envied her husband his happiness. It was not a face of Spanish type, and the outline of her profile was an uncommon one in our country, for it was that of the Athenian goddess, so rare here though occasionally met with, even in Madrid. Her eyes were large and open, of a sea-blue colour with changing tawny lights, and their gaze had a sentimental serenity which might have been thought insipid among a crowd of black eyes, firing endless volleys of flashing glances. But María’s looks gained her the reputation of being proud rather than stupid, her lips were brilliantly red, her throat slender, her figure round, and her hands small and “moulded of soft flesh” like those of Melibea. She spoke in measured tones with a sort of deliberate plaintiveness that went to the souls of her hearers; she laughed but little—so little that it added to her reputation of pride, and she was so reserved in her friendships that in fact she had no friends. Even while quite a child she had always been credited with so much good sense that her parents themselves regarded her as the choicest production of their illustrious race, throughout the whole course of its glorious existence. To this almost superhuman beauty—this woman, in whose form and face were combined, as in a perfect æsthetic union, all the charms of antique sculpture, Leon Roch, after ten months of a most platonic engagement, found himself married. Love at first sight had enslaved him: he had met her and spoken to her at a court ball, when she, having only recently been presented, was at that wondering and budding stage when a girl’s beauty still bears the stamp of innocence and still blushes with the reflection of the rosy dawn of infancy. Leon fell in love like a country swain, to his shame be it whispered, and he was himself astonished to find that his theodolite and his blow-pipe had turned to a shepherd’s crook and pipe in his hands. Did he see anything in his wife beyond her uncommon beauty? What share had his heart in this dream of ecstasy? It would be amusing indeed if he, whose boast it was that he was master of his imagination, should find that it had fairly run away with him.

      María had been brought up on an estate near Avila by her maternal grandmother, a woman of great tenacity and determination, who talked a great deal about her principles without ever defining what they were or in what they differed from those of her neighbours. Under the protection of this very superior woman, who, at the age of sixty, made up her mind to renounce the vanities of the world for the narrow life of a country house—fashion and society for the dull solitude of a desert—and the chronique scandaleuse of Madrid for the gossip of a village—María learnt her first lessons. She could read well, write badly and say her creed and catechism without missing a comma. Beyond a few notions of grammar and geography, which were infused by a governess of unusual learning, she knew nothing else whatever. However, as she grew older, María, as she turned over the leaves of the books she happened to meet with, gained some items of knowledge on such subjects as do not require any very high degree of intellect.

      Her companion during these years passed in the wilderness was her twin brother, Luis Gonzaga. Their grandmother worshipped them both and called them “her death sighs,” because she declared that at her last hour, if they could but stand by her side, she would be able to lift up her last thoughts to God with purer devotion.

      The two children were inseparable, sharing their games and their lessons, their bread and cheese at luncheon, and their grandmother’s caresses. They would walk arm-in-arm along the horrible lanes of Avila, and would sit at night, with their heads close together, to count the stars, which shine more brightly in that part of the country than anywhere else in the world. You might have heard them saying: “you must count on that side and I will count on this—you are not to come out of your piece of sky into mine—there, all on this side are mine—we can each have half