CHAPTER XII.

THE STRIFE OF WORDS.

As soon as Fúcar heard the solemn tread of Padre Paoletti’s leaden foot on the floors of his house, he hastened to pay him the usual compliments, putting his house, his table, and his servants at his disposal--his carriages, chapel and treasures of art. It might have been supposed, from the lavish generosity with which he offered everything that could give joy and comfort to necessitous humanity, that he was lord and master over the whole created world. And bowing as low as his burly dignity would allow he expressed, by his polite subserviency, how inferior are all the riches and splendours of the world to the humility of a simple priest, who has no gala dress but his gown, and no palace but his cell.

Paoletti, who was an accomplished connoisseur, not only of the fine arts but of all the arts of life, complimented his host on the magnificence of Suertebella, thus giving the marquis a fair excuse for indulging his favourite vanity, which was to display the mansion, room by room, and do the duties of showman. The excursion was a long one and would have been enough to fatigue the strongest head, the gorgeous apartments contained such a miscellaneous collection of pretty things. Padre Paoletti admired everything with much politeness, showing that he was a man well versed in collections and curiosities. Don Pedro, who talked like the reporter to a newspaper and praised up the mediocre and even inferior works, was apt to quote the price of certain objects--pictures bought of Goupil, or porcelains from some auction at the hotel Drouot, most of them mere good imitations.

“I am overdone, positively overdone with fine things,” said he, looking into Paoletti’s face and folding his hands with an air of resignation. “I am the slave of wealth, my good Padre. No one would think it, but in fact it is the most intolerable form of slavery. I really envy those who live at ease, with the freedom and independence that poverty gives; without the anxieties of business, with no banquet but what I could eat out of a bowl and no mansion but some cell or hut or cave!”

“But my dear Sir,” said the Italian, raising his hand to his mouth to conceal a yawn, “nothing can be easier than to realize such a wish. To be poor! When I hear poor men sigh and wish they were millionaires, I laugh and sigh; but when I hear a rich man pine for a hovel and six feet of ground in which to rest his bones, I say what I take the liberty of saying to you: Why do you not retire among the hermits of Cordova? Why not exchange Suertebella for a recluse’s cell?”

And he ended as he had begun, with a hearty laugh; but he yawned again, screening it behind his white hand.

“That is it--put in that way it sounds easy enough,” said Fúcar, laughing too. “But--what of social ties--of our duties to the State, who cannot spare her most useful sons? But dear me, it strikes me--how careless I am! It is so late, and you have eaten nothing.”

“Oh! never mind--do not trouble yourself.”

“Never mind! What next? Even your sainted body must be fed.”

“On a little plain chocolate--nothing more. It is a missionary’s body and can endure much.”

“Leon,” cried Don Pedro to his friend, whom he spied passing across the next room, “I will order them to serve breakfast in the Hall of Hymen. Then you will be close to your wife: and you, Señor Paoletti, will not care for the bustle of the dining-room; all the party are breakfasting in there.... Bautista, Philidor!”

Hailing his Spanish servants and his French majordomo, the marquis made the whole household stir in the service of his guests. The multitude and zeal of the domestics resulted in a general clatter; hasty steps echoed over the inlaid floors, and on all sides the clinking of bottles and glasses was heard on metal trays, and the rattle of plates--welcome sounds to the hungry but courteous visitor, while the fragrance of stewed and fried meats pervaded the passages and rooms, as incense floats from chapel to chapel in a church.

The Hall of Hymen, so called because, in the middle of it, stood a group personifying marriage--two figures clasped in each other’s arms holding two torches of which the marble flames burnt as one--was quite close to the room which we may call María’s; but it did not adjoin it. A table was laid at once, and Leon and the priest sat down.

“_Consommé_,” said Leon pointing to a tureen full of rich soup. “It will be very good for you,” and he helped him to a large plateful.

“I have been thinking,” said Paoletti when, after a few spoonfuls, he was recovering from the exhaustion he had been suffering under for one hour past, “that in the whole course of my life--not a short one, nor free from strange conjuncture--I never have seen such a picture as we two compose at this moment.”

“What picture?”

“Ourselves--you and I eating together. Nothing is the outcome of chance; God alone knows what divine purpose our strange meeting may be destined to work out. What wonderful changes, even in the highest destinies, have been wrought before now by the meeting--apparently fortuitous--of two persons! Reflect upon it, my dear Sir: sometimes a few minutes thought, or some incidental remark may suffice to throw a vivid light into the soul, and meanwhile.--No, no, thanks; no highly flavoured dishes; none of the delicacies of modern cooking.--Have you reflected...?”

“Will you have some wine?” asked Leon much disinclined to follow the priest on the antipathetic theme of his observations.

“No, I never drink it. A little water, if you please, and God bless the giver. Any fool, seeing us sitting opposite each other, would criticise you or me--: ‘Look at that wretched priest making up to a freethinker,’ they would say; or ‘Look at the infidel hob and nob with the parson;’ not understanding that though we are eating a little bread and meat together truth can never come to a compromise with error, nor error ever forgive truth, her bitterest foe,--Strawberries? I never taste them--since truth puts error to shame; hence she flies before truth, hiding herself blindly in her own conceits, or filling her ears with the tumult of the world.--But you are not eating!”

“I have no appetite.”

Paoletti had eaten but little; Leon hardly anything. Fixing his expressive eyes on Leon’s face, the Italian said with startling emphasis:

“Señor Don Leon, of all the world you seem to me the most to be pitied. Our poor Doña María is not to be pitied; no, only to be admired. If she dies she will enter the realm of the blest wearing many crowns, and among them the crown of martyrdom; if she lives she will be an example to all women. She is a fair lily, combining the graces of beauty, purity and fragrance.”

“Yes. She was, no doubt, such a lily,” said Leon, turning very white, while his whole being quivered with excitement.--“A lily which, in its purity and fragrance, invited Christian love and promised all the honest joys of life....”

“But it grew close by a thistle....”

“No,” interrupted Leon. “A hippopotamus came and broke it down with its ruthless tread.”

The padre’s eyes grew bigger.

“She is a treasure of great price...” he said.

“She was a treasure of great price,” said Leon, tying a knot in his napkin and drawing it very tight, “but with coarse passions and a nature at once visionary and sensual.”

“A purifying hand was extended to cleanse away the dross...”

“A hand of ice--that snatched out the diamonds and left false stones instead.”

“Why did the owner neglect his jewel?”

“When the thieves do not break in by the door, but mine underground, the owner does not discover them till they have stolen his gem.--They robbed her of her love, generosity and trust, and left me nothing but cold duty and moral proprieties. She was like a crystal fountain--they dried up the spring, the water became stagnant, and when I hoped to drink nothing remained but filthy sediment. By constantly flowing, the water, though somewhat bitter, would have grown sweet. But they stopped the current and a foul swamp was the result.”

“Nay, the water is sweet and of wondrous power,” said Paoletti with a seraphic look. “The mystic water, freely bestowed; the very essence of the soul: Divine Love. Where so precious a fount is found on earth it is only just that God should absorb it, and break the cup.”

“Nay, the cup is just what has been left for me.”

“A golden cup; the only thing that can excite the cupidity of a man devoid of faith. The miserable slave of ‘Matter’ can never crave that precious drink; his thirst cannot be allayed by spiritual love; it is only a form of avarice and can be slaked by the possession of the golden vessel--physical beauty.”

“For you who know nothing of love but through sin--for you who never felt love but only hear of it, taking in at your ears the secrets of others who love, to you much of what concerns only the heart of man must be an inexplicable mystery. You see nothing in life but duties fulfilled and sins committed. This is much, no doubt, but it is not all. Only the man who has never drank at all can enjoy the insipid draught of mysticism, or the bitter savour of sin.”

“Only the man who has never drank at all, and who nevertheless is not thirsty, can, by the blessed gift of intuition--which is one of the best graces of our nature--fully enter into all the emotions of true love, from the noblest to the basest. The man who knows everything can feel for everything. You, who abuse us so roundly, might have found friends in those whom you have believed to be your enemies, and peacemakers in your married life in those whom you regard as its disturbers.”

“I refuse any such co-operation.”

“What right have you to complain when you have yourself broken every tie? The mere circumstance that he chooses to consider himself outside of the pale of the Church, deprives a man of the right of complaining of the pressure of a bond which is in its nature a religious one. ‘I need no religion,’ they say--‘I abominate it, I cast it from me; but I do not allow religion to defend itself against my attacks, I do not allow it to claim its own!’”

“No--what I do not allow it to claim is mine.”

“God will have the divine part...”

“And I demand the human part...”

Neither of the men finished his sentence.

“The human part is a convenient loop-hole,” said Paoletti sharply, “through which a man sneaks into unfaithfulness and adultery, leaving the martyred wife alone and without protection.”

“But the divine part puts the martyred wife under the protection of those who drink of the spiritual fount!”

“What would become of her if it were not so? the wretched soul must become corrupt from contact with a soul already corrupt.”

“I never tried to corrupt her: I tried to save her by persuasion, almost always by kindness, sometimes by authority verging on tyranny....”

“You confess it--you confess that you were despotic!”

“Not such despotism as it might have been in vulgar hands. Some would have punished, I simply prohibited--and my prohibitions were constantly disobeyed--I could not have insisted without going to cruel lengths.”

“And the dove fled from the talons of the vulture,” said Paoletti with a sort of honeyed sarcasm.

“Yes.--And fell into those of the vampire who sucked all the sweetness out of my existence. I was teaching my treasure to trust me and you taught her to loathe me; I never argued against her beliefs, I made no objection to her having a judicious confessor--but her sanctimonious friends disgusted me. And my enemy was not a man but a whole army--a host that called itself celestial, and that has made itself formidable by gaining allies in bigots and hysterical wretches who believe themselves to be saints. I tried to fight in the dark, but in the dark I was cut in pieces. An act of hypocrisy such as has saved many a weak man, would perhaps have saved me. She, poor deluded soul, bound over to mysticism by promises of celestial joys, proposed terms of peace; nothing could be easier--: ‘Abjure your mad scepticism; come into our fold,’ she said. This was what they wanted! But I would not purchase peace by an imposture, nor try to capture the heart that was slipping away from me by false professions of faith. I would not add another to the host of hypocrites who make up the greater portion of modern society.--Time went on; the struggle had to be fought out. My sincerity exasperated my wife’s spiritual advisers: the ministers of interference and of misapplied piety.

“But after all, what does it matter? I would rather be infamous in your eyes than in my own.”

“A man who fears any eyes but those of God should never speak of such things.”

“And if we are not allowed to talk, what are we allowed to do? You pile a mountain on to a hapless wretch and may he not groan when he is crushed?”

“Lift up your hands and hold off the rock that weighs upon you.”

“I cannot, I cannot. It bears the burthen of centuries, and is formed of the bones of a thousand generations!”

“Poor insect!” said Paoletti ironically. “I declare nothing on earth moves me to pity so much as a philosopher. For my own part I can only beg you to express yourself with perfect frankness on all your feelings....”

“With frankness?”

“With perfect frankness, sparing me no hard words.”

“When the storm overtakes me and lashes me and fells me to the ground, what am I to think of that terrific power? can I stop it, can I punish it, can I even insult and abuse it? What can I say that will hurt it, how can I defend myself against so formidable a foe--who is but empty air?”

“Dear Sir,” said Paoletti folding his hands with an expression of compunction: “I, as a humble but outraged priest, pity you and forgive you.” And then his slow, leaden step sounded across the floor as he made his way back to the sick-room.