CHAPTER XIV.

       HUSBAND AND WIFE.

       Table of Contents

      “And yet I made a mistake.”

      This he said to himself one night as he sat alone with his wife in the silent quietude of his home, at the hour when the mind wanders in the vague meditation that is the precursor of dreams, after recalling the facts of the past day which so lately were living realities and so soon may become a nightmare. Before him, already prepared to go to bed, sat the noble and beautiful Minerva-like figure. Her sea-blue eyes, by some unaccountable artistic blunder, were fixed on a book of devotions—one of the popular and commonplace manuals, full of magniloquent verbiage, and idle subtleties, devoid alike of piety, of style, of suggestiveness, of spiritual feeling and of evangelical truth—nothing but a monotonous jangle of words. But what did it matter? As she sat, nodding to sleep over this farrago, María was charming to look upon.

      Leon had dropped his evening newspaper—no less a jangle in its kind, of broken strings, of tuneless bells, and the vacuous clack of rumour—and was gazing at his wife, raging inwardly at the hideous mockery of Fate. He—he who through all his early years had been absolute master of his fancy, had one day, all unconsciously, given it the reins, and then, cheated and betrayed, had allowed himself to be carried away by an illusion altogether unworthy of so sober a character. How could he have failed to see that between himself and this woman there could never be any community of ideas, nor that sweet union of minds that subsists even among fools? How could he be thus deluded by the witchery even of such perfect charms? How had he overlooked the wall of ice—high, dense, insuperable, which must stand for ever between them? Why had he failed to detect that recusant will, that deeply-rooted standard, that narrowness of purview, that absence of magnanimity, for all of which there was so little compensation in an over-wrought religious excitability? Why had he not foreseen the dulness, the emptiness of his home—lacking so much that was tender and attaching, lacking above all the tenderest and most attaching element of life: mutual confidence?

      In a fit of desperate regret he raised his hand to his brow and clutched it convulsively, as if in malediction on the uselessness of learning. María did not notice the gesture, but kept her eyes fixed on her book.

      “I fell in love like any idiot,” he thought, looking at her again, “but how could I help it?—she is lovely!”

      All his efforts to form María’s character had been vain; at the earliest stage of her married life she had loved him with more passion than tenderness, but ere long, without ceasing to love him, she had begun to regard him as an erring soul—to be pitied but shunned. Leon had given her all liberty in the exercise of her religion, and at first she availed herself of it in moderation; but as he tried by degrees to influence her mind—not undermining her beliefs, as his detractors declared—but endeavouring to bring her intelligence as far as possible into harmony with his own, she abused the liberty he had granted and gave up almost all her time to her devotions. Not that she renounced all worldly pleasures and vanities; on the contrary, she enjoyed them keenly, though in due moderation. She went to theatres, except in Lent—she dressed well, frequented the fashionable promenades, and gave up part of the year to the excursions and country visits that became her position and fortune. She took great care of her personal appearance (for she liked to be admired by Leon), very little of her household, and none at all of her husband; the rest of her time and thoughts she devoted to the various pious meetings and benevolent dissipations to which she was carried off by her mother or her friends; in short, she served in the charmed ranks of fashionable religionism.

      “And after all, is it not I who am the recalcitrant party?” Leon said to himself with crushed resignation. “Of what can I accuse her? Which of us is the believer? If I had faith we should be happy—why have I none?”

      * * * * *

      Then there was a third phase, during which María’s devotion to him was as great as ever, though still vehement rather than tender, and no more sympathetic than at first. At this time María would attack her husband with a mixture of human passion and mystic piety, which did not exclude each other because they reacted and complemented each other—trying to seduce him into the path of religion à la mode, faint with incense, splendid with tapers, gay with flowers, smoothed with suave sermons and graced with women of elegance and rank. Her fondest dream was to remain a bigot without forfeiting the man who had so completely realised the visions of her girlhood. To get him to church—that was the hard task she had set herself.

      “Leave me—pray leave me,” Leon would say, tortured by regret. “Go and pray God for me.”

      “But without you half of myself is wanting; I cannot feel as though I were good throughout, as I want to be.”

      Then she would fly to him, clasp him in her arms and rest her head against the weary man’s breast, saying, with a sort of sob: “I love you so much!”

      Leon’s persistent refusal to take any part in her pious practices brought them at length to that chronic state of misunderstanding, or rather of moral divorce, in which we have seen them two years after their marriage. They had ceased to share their ideas or to consult each other on any opinion or plan; they never enjoyed that community of pleasures or of trouble which is the natural marriage of souls; they neither wept together nor rejoiced together—they did not even quarrel. They were like those stars which look as if they were but one, and which in reality are millions of miles apart. All their friends could see that Leon was wretched, and suffering deeply though in silence.

      “He has set his heart on making his wife a rationalist,” they said, “and that is as absurd as a sanctimonious man would be.”

      “That is just what I say,” another would reply, “belief and disbelief are a matter of sex.”

      “The fact is that he is desperately in love with her.”

      And this was the truth. Leon was bewitched by the beauty of his wife, who every day seemed more lovely and who, without interfering with her pious exercises, had the art of enhancing it by the luxury and taste of her dress and the perfect care of her person. It was equally true of María: she too was desperately in love; for no earthly consideration would she have changed the husband with whom fate and the church had blest her. The void in her heart had been filled by a perfectly unspiritual passion for his extraordinarily handsome person. Nor was he indifferent to the homage paid by the multitude to the lord and master of a gracious and beautiful wife—on the contrary, he was extremely proud of it, and the thought that María could under any conceivable circumstances have belonged