Leon Roch. Benito Pérez Galdós
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voice from a window behind them. “Now, my pretties, come in to supper, it is getting late.”
Their only reading in that remote spot consisted in the Lives of the Saints, and the two children took the amazing narrative so deeply to heart, with its tales of suffering, toil, and death, that all they themselves learned to long for was to be martyrs too; and they were possessed by the same idea that mastered St. Theresa in her infancy, when she and her brother discussed the possibility of travelling all over the infidel world that they might at last have their heads cut off.
María and Luisito set out one morning for those heathen lands, fully determined not to return—not to stop, till they should fall in with a troop of Moors who should hew them in pieces. They lay down to sleep that evening under shelter of a rock, where the God who protects the innocent softly kissed their baby lips, and—betrayed them into the hands of the night-patrol, who recognised the pair and took them home.
That home was in a very remote spot from the rest of humanity. The parish priest used to call them “the children of the wilderness” and he would seat them on his knees to amuse himself with their baby games: they would stick up their little fingers and call each by a name, performing a kind of drama with them, known to the children of most lands: the middle finger is a friar who comes to the door of a convent and calls in a big voice, and the third finger answers in a feeble squeak:
“Rat, tat!”
“Who is there?”
“Your brother, who wants to be let in.” And the end of the story is that friar Pedro is sent off with a flea in his ear, the nuns thrashing him with sticks, and he disappears grumbling.
At this the twins would still laugh with glee at an age when most children begin to crave for better playthings than their own fingers; but, as they grew up, their games lost their primitive simplicity and their reading and their characters became more serious. Luis Gonzaga was the delight of his seniors from his quiet good sense and his incapacity for getting into mischief; the only fault to be found with him was his love of solitary wanderings among the rocks, breathing the keen and bracing air that perpetually fans our granite ramparts, which look like the ruins of some cyclopean fortress, or the broken teeth of a giant’s jaws from which the flesh has long since disappeared. He delighted in being alone, and his chief ambition was to be a goat-herd and follow the kids that spring from peak to peak in that dead and dessicated arcadia; he heeded neither cold nor heat.
One day he was discovered lying at the foot of a pine-tree, the solitary specimen of vegetable life within sight, that stood melancholy, senile and leafless, as though in dismal warning, like the motto on a tombstone: “we all must die.” The boy was writing “something” on a scrap of paper with a black lead pencil which he frequently moistened by putting in his mouth. It was the priest who found him, and who took possession of the manuscript, which consisted of a number of lines without rhyme or rhythm, devoid alike of grammar and spelling, which made the worthy man laugh heartily—for he knew something, if not much, of the humanities.
“This is neither verse nor prose,” he said.
No, it was neither verse nor prose; but it was poetry. These were stanzas on the model of verses from the Bible expressing the feelings of a contemplative nature. How the priest laughed as he read:
“When the darkness of night falls, the flocks of Heaven are scattered over the vast blue field and watched over by the gentle angels.—
“The Lord passed by yesterday in a chariot of thunder drawn by lightning which cast down hail and sweated rain; I trembled like a flame in the wind and my mind was tossed like a pebble carried away by a flood.
“I am like dried flax that catches fire, and turning to smoke, rises from the ashes and ascends to Heaven.”
One day their grandmother rose much later than usual, her face was flushed, her speech slow and strange, while her eyes glistened like two old metal buttons that have been rubbed very bright. All the servants observed to their great consternation that their mistress talked a great deal of nonsense—not that this in itself was an alarming novelty—but she repeated the same thing again and again, without any interval of better sense. When the priest felt her pulse, the good lady grasped his arm and throwing a cloak over her shoulders exclaimed with a wild laugh:
“Let us dance, Señor Cura—come dance with me!” She dragged him round two or three times and then suddenly fell senseless.
She only lived long enough to receive Extreme Unction.
When their grandmother was dead and buried the twins went home to their parents, who at that time were in extremely narrow circumstances. The boy was sent to a seminary and from thence to France, while María, whose country manners distressed them greatly, was sent to a college for girls. At the end of two years she emerged from this retreat with the polish acquired in such establishments and her mother introduced her to her circle of friends; a favourable turn in their fortunes had now given the family of Tellería a chance of rising from the depths of poverty and obscurity; at length the marquesa was able to quit the apartments she so sincerely detested, and for some time the mother and daughter were to be met constantly in various fashionable circles. Their names were familiar on the lips of María’s admirers and to the pens of the fashionable chronicler; they were on view at the play and out driving; they disappeared in the Spring to reappear with revived brilliancy in the Winter season. Then at last came the longed-for day when María was married.
This match was regarded as a great stroke of fortune for the whole Tellería family, whose nobility was not of the highest rank and whose wealth was not such as to justify any extreme fastidiousness in the selection of a son-in-law. In spite of all that may be said to the contrary, the aristocracy of the present day have no blind reverence for their pedigrees, and if we except half a dozen names which, besides their historical glory, have a spotless descent, our nobles do not hesitate to accept an alliance of which the honours are merely substantial and to bolster up their pride by the aid of a fine fortune; thus we see every day damsels of high degree giving their hands—and giving them willingly—to nobles of very recent creation; to marquisés all hot from the mint as it were; to colonial counts, to adventurous politicians, distinguished officers and even to the sons of industry. Modern society is blessed with a short memory; low or inferior birth is soon a buried part of the buried past. Personal merit in some cases, and fortune in others, effect the levelling process with irresistible force, and society progresses with giant steps towards equality. There is no country in the civilised world more nearly bereft of a real aristocracy than Spain; trade, on one hand, which marks every one plebeian, and the government, on the other, which makes every one noble, are gradually doing away with it.
The happiness of the two young people was undisturbed for the first few months, excepting by the shadow cast over it occasionally by María’s relations. After a time however Leon began to think that his wife’s anxious and suspicious affection had lasted longer than was reasonable. This would not have been alarming but that it was allied with an iron resistance to some of her husband’s views and feelings, and it troubled him greatly to perceive that, without ceasing to be devoted to him, María showed not the slightest disposition to yield to his doctrines—not religious doctrines in any sense, for he respected his wife’s conscience. It was a puzzling disappointment; hers was not an embryonic nature, but a formed and stubborn character; not a flexible wire ready to take and keep the form given to it by a skilful manipulator, but hard set bronze which hurt his fingers and never bent under them.
One evening, about a year after their marriage, they were together in María’s sitting-room; they had been talking long and affectionately on the conformity of ideas which alone can form the solid foundation of a happy marriage; the subject being exhausted, he had opened a book and was turning over the pages by the fire, and she had taken her beads to pray. Suddenly she rose from her knees and coming up to her husband she laid her hand on his shoulder.
“I have an idea,” she said, fixing her mystical gaze on his face, and her eyes, with their strange greenish and tawny lights were curiously soft—perhaps because they had just been raised to God—“I have an idea that fills me with pride, Leon!”
Leon read on for a moment,