CHAPTER XIX.

VULNERANT OMNES, ULTIMA NECAT.

The ceremony took place at dusk with great pomp and unction. The palatial house of Suertebella was admirably suited to the ostentatious display of a splendid ceremonial, the tribute of worldly wealth to an august mystery. Exquisite flowers, and tapers innumerable are thought the most proper offerings to do honour to the Lord of Lords. Amid such dazzling accessories even the works of human hands showed to greater advantage; as though they too borrowed a reflection of glory from the presence of the Deity. The sounds of weeping which were audible here and there--in a corner of the Chinese boudoir, or from behind some Greek statue, whose majestic features looked like an embodiment of the perfect balance of spirit and matter--added to the melancholy solemnity of the scene. Piety and dread, the one founded on reverence and the other on the approach of Death, were blended into a single emotion.

The priest of Polvoranca brought the sacred Host from the church in a carriage sent for the purpose and followed by a long train in slow procession. The very horses seemed to understand that they ought to make no noise and step quietly. The portico was crowded with people, under the ruddy glare of the torches they held, in liveries and in plain dress--masters and servants, all alike on their knees.

The little bell with its mysterious sound of consolation and awe, echoes through the long corridors rousing the marble figures from their stony dreams. Comic or grave, the works of art seem to put on a semblance of Christian reverence; the polished floors reflect the gleam of tapers; flowers and tapestries seem to bow in silent worship. Footsteps sound heavily on the boards; they might be the distant roll of muffled funeral drums. Presently they fall more dully on the carpets, suggesting a subterranean procession. At last they come to a standstill--there is silence as of the grave: the procession has reached the chamber of death. Then for a while the whole house is deserted; all the inhabitants have collected in the immediate vicinity of the closing scene. Those who cannot actually witness it can fancy themselves in that room, filled with light and suffering, and they sob and revel in the picture, imagining what they cannot see. It is easily conjured up, and their spirits quake before it. In the halls and passages, all deserted and all blazing with tapers, the still air gives an impression of suspended breath, speechless and awe-stricken. There is not a sound--except that in some remote corner there is a rustle--as it were a whisper--of a woman’s dress that stealthily hastens by and is lost in the distance.

Time goes on. Then at first a murmuring drone is heard, steps again--the servants reappear with their heavy tapers--the noise grows louder--the shadows of the living fall on the painted figures on the walls and across the waxed floors--the procession closes with a gaudy array of liveries and dresses of every colour, men and women of every degree; some quite callous faces, others really sad or pitiful--the whole with its accompaniment of prayer and response from the priest and his acolytes. This procession, in which some walk with a sort of rapture of grief while others are chilled with dread, makes its way to the sound of a bell rung by a boy--the very boy known to Monina as Guru--and goes out again through the hall and portico where some kneel to see it depart and others still follow with bared heads.--Within, the scent of the flowers hangs about the house as though it were the mysterious breath of the invisible Guest who has passed through it.

“I am the Way and the Life and the Truth.”

* * * * *

All the family had been present; the marquesa prostrate on the floor in her anguish, unable even to kneel, while her husband and sons were bitterly and sincerely grieved. When the Sacrament was ended they separated, all closely attended by their most intimate friends. Milagros entirely lost consciousness; she was carried to a sofa in the Chinese room where her kind friends plied her with restoratives and sought to give her consolation. The marquis, forgetting his interest in the art and curiosities of the house, fled from his importunate comforters, and begged to be left alone. He buried himself in a recess in the tapestried room, behind a marble Satyr, and gave himself up to meditations on the vanity of human grandeur. Gustavo devoted himself to his mother and submitted to the jeremiades of the poet of “pious raptures” and “white souls.” Leopoldo did nothing but sigh; he was nervous and tremulous, for the cold hand of death had come so near to him that he fancied he could feel its touch.

Numbers of visitors were departing, and in the park stood rows of carriages, the coachmen addressing each other by their master’s name: “Garellano! You there?”--“Cerinola, you’re wanted.”--“Lepanto, move on a little.”

It was a beautiful night, calm and clear, lighted by a pallid, full moon; the distant horizon looked deceptively like a calm sea. The smaller stars sank into insignificance, but the larger ones shone brightly, trembling rather than twinkling. Nature was lovely and seemed to breathe forth peace and love. It was an hour to be born in, rather than to die in.

Nothing can make man feel so dwarfed as the contemplation of the sublime indifference of the skies to all the woes of earth. The most disastrous moral revolution could never give rise to the tiniest film of cloud. All the tears of weeping humanity will never form a single drop of water in infinite space.

Leon came out of his wife’s room to express his thanks to the master of the house.

“My dear friend,” said Fúcar, wringing his hands, “accept the sincere condolences of a much troubled man. I myself am the victim of a very serious misfortune.”

“Is any one ill?”

“No, no; we will discuss it another day--this is not the time.--Nay, nay, you have nothing to thank me for; it was no more than my duty. As you see I ordered them to decorate the house properly--suitably for so solemn a ceremony, and as befits my firm religious convictions. I had all the camellias brought in from the green-house, and all the rhododendrons and orange-trees in those heavy wooden tubs ... but there are occasions when I grow reckless, when I think even exaggeration is not out of place.... You shall know all in good time ... we will talk it over....”

He went off to Madrid in his carriage, reflecting on the catastrophe in his house, on the bad government of a nation which, the day after issuing one loan, found it necessary to start another.

Leon went back to his wife’s room. The end was at hand. Rafaela, Paoletti, Moreno Rubio and himself gathered round María who, since the last words of confession she had uttered had been rapidly sinking, and looked every moment more like death. Her face, which nature had moulded on a type of ideal beauty, looked even more perfect at this moment, when physical vitality was almost extinct; and its fixity and whiteness, the immobility of that calm repose on the pillow, the sculpturesque stillness of every feature and muscle betraying no sign of suffering, made her look like some marble image of Death--noble and dignified, with nothing vulgar in its details--aristocratic, if so to speak, and wrought to grace the monument of some great lady. She lay motionless; she was privileged to enter the dark realm with tranquil deliberation and free from bodily pain, as we pass from one scene to another in the varying phases of a dream.

Her half-closed eyes, under their black lashes, were fixed on her husband’s gloomy and rigid face. Leon stood by the bed, gazing sadly at the loveliness to which Death was lending a sublimer beauty, and reflecting in a vein of sentimental philosophy on this transformation of his wife into a statue. The solemnity of the scene, the silence, broken only by her breathing which grew more difficult every moment, the sad fixity of those dying eyes, fastened on him like a mysterious tendril that could not be torn away, filled his brain with thoughts of himself and of her,--two beings who called themselves husband and wife, and between whom there was no link but that gaze. He sounded the depths of his soul, trying to find in it some faded remnant of love, that he might offer it as a last blossom of conjugal devotion to the woman who lay there dying in the cold solitude of mysticism; but he sought in vain--he could find none. All the wealth of love and regard that his heart had once contained had been diverted from its legitimate centre, and been stored and hidden in another part of his nature.

But though he found no affection, the beautiful creature who had been the pride of his earlier life filled him with such deep and keen pity that he could, in that hour of grief, have mistaken it for love. As he watched the ebb of that life which might have been the crown and joy of his own, Leon felt the tears rise to his eyes and a tight grip on his heart. “Unhappy woman!” he thought to himself. “May God forgive you for all the ill you have done me; I mourn for you as if I had loved you; and I pity you,--not so much for dying young but for the cruel disappointment in store for you when you learn--and you must learn it soon--that the love of God is only a sublimer development of love for those whom he has created!”

He went closer to her, attracted by her eyes which had opened a little wider; he looked at the soft, almost invisible down that shaded her lip, the bright light in her eye, with its tawny hazel iris; he felt the warmth of her breath--now scarcely perceptible.--Poor soul, poor soul! There are no words to describe the pathos which she could not utter in words, but only by the last gleam of those eyes that were almost extinct.

Behind the external calmness of her attitude and the steady gaze of her eye, who knows what anxieties, what torments, nay what petty worries may not have been racking her and dull jealousies vaguely stirring in the depths of her dying soul--since there was no physical means of giving them utterance! but the surface betrayed nothing, just as the frozen surface of a river prevents our hearing the swift and noisy flow of the deeper current.

Leon understood this. He saw a tear glittering in each of María’s eyes: the last and only means of expression for the one surviving human feeling of her soul, brought from the unsounded depths to which the world still clung by a slender root of desire. Two half-formed tears, that did not overflow, were all that came to light from that hidden fount. Leon bent down and pressed his lips firmly to her cold forehead; as he did so he heard a sigh of satisfied longing. A strong shudder ran through her frame and in a steady voice she said: “Ah! Thanks!”

There was silence--an awful silence, while María Egyptiaca was tossing on the threshold of the invisible land, like a grain of sand flung up by the waves on to a shore where human ken cannot penetrate. The bystanders murmured with a sigh that she was dead--they might speak aloud now. Leon closed her eyes with a timid hand--he was afraid of hurting her.

The priest on his knees prayed in silence, his eyes tightly shut, like a prisoner whose dungeon windows are closed with double shutters. Leon stood for a few minutes, gazing at the remains of one of the most beautiful women of her day--with the added reputation of being the most saintly of her native city; and he shuddered with grief as he remembered the past, and realized what his present feelings were. How sad was the stillness of those limbs not yet cold, of the features in which beauty so masked death, that it would not have been hard to call death life and life death.

Deeply agitated, and with his heart oppressed with intense pity, he quitted the room, feeling as if he had left his youth behind him. The devout watchers and some of the servants remained there; Paoletti withdrew to the chapel. The news flew through the house; there was a sound of weeping, the bustle of attendants rushing for restoratives, the sighs and lamentations of friends coming and going. Leon took refuge in the hall of Hymen, where he threw himself on a couch and lay staring at an antique clock, which bore an inscription on a semicircle above the dial, like a frowning brow: _Vulnerant omnes, ultima necat._