CHAPTER VIII.

LEON ROCH PAYS A VISIT.

Acting on a generous impulse, and being desirous of fulfilling the promise he had made to his wife, Leon Roch set out for Madrid and went to the church of St. Prudencio in search of Father Paoletti. Nothing could be more unlikely than that he should set foot in such a place, and when the serving-brother had asked him to wait in the bare parlour, he had leisure to reflect on the matter and on himself, with a sort of incredulous surprise, feeling as though either the place he was in or he himself must be the creation of a dream. The man who vows that he will never cross the threshold of some particular door must be either very foolish or very proud, or incapable of discerning that the swift turns of life bring us in front of those portals--open them--and push us in; and we do not even think of escape.

Leon had not had much time for these reflections when a priest stood before him; a singularly small man of middle age, with a tiny, pale, boyish face, and such large inquisitive, piercing eyes, that, in fact, he seemed all eyes. The deliberateness of his gait contrasted strangely with the smallness of his person; his steps were measured, even stately, with a firm, slow tread such as might result from constantly wearing shoes soled with lead. Paoletti bowed to his visitor with elegant politeness, and Leon, who was in no mood for ceremony, briefly explained his object. Paoletti, seating himself in front of the weary infidel with the calm tenacity of a humble believer, listened to him with the benevolence of a father confessor, cast down his eyes, knit his fingers, and twirled his thumbs--his hands it may be noted were as slender and delicate as those of a fine lady.

“Let us go,” he said looking up and stopping the rotation of his thumbs. “I have heard of her journey to Carabanchel and of her illness, but I did not know that it was serious, nor that she had been carried to Suertebella.--To the house itself?”

“To the house itself,” said Leon gloomily.

“I suppose then,” said Paoletti with a subtle intonation, “that the marquis’ daughter has come to Madrid with her darling child.”

“She is to do so to-day.”

“And you?”

“I do not purpose leaving María so long as she is ill.”

“You impress me very favourably, Señor,” said the Italian, giving Leon his hand with a hearty gesture. “At the same time your position with reference to that blessed martyr is a strange one, and unpleasant for both of you.”

“It is the singularity of our position,” said Leon, “that made me decide on coming myself, that I might give you certain items of information which concern no one but me, and request your co-operation...”

“Mine?”

“Yes--to help me to carry out my arrangements, and get out of my difficulties as well as possible.”

Paoletti knit his brows. He had risen to start at once; but he now sat down again, and once more began to twirl his thumbs.

“In the first place,” he said in the tone of a man accustomed to drive matters home, “explain to me the motives which brought you here. It is strange enough that you should come to confess to me, surely?” And he smiled with sarcastic triumph in a way that to Leon was more offensive than open mockery would have been.

“To confess?--yes indeed!”

“No, no, Señor,” said Paoletti with an affectation of sweetness which betrayed his Italian blood, “I do not expect you to confess--far from it! you will neither lay bare your conscience, nor retract your errors. You will only tell me what I know already--what every one knows. And all in order that I may help you...” And the priest ended his sentence by quoting the reports diffused by Pilar de San Salomó’s gossiping circle.

“In all that there is a little truth and a great deal of falsehood,” said Leon. “It is false to say that Monina is my child; it is false to accuse me of such a connection with Pepa Fúcar. That I love her is true--and that every kind of love for my unhappy wife is dead within me. I have no feeling left for her but calm regard, and a dispassionate respect for her virtues which I fully acknowledge.”

“Regard, respect!” said Paoletti. “Appreciation of her virtues!... This, Sir, is something. The pure and noble soul of María Egyptiaca deserves more, much more, it is true; but if we might hope that your regard and respect would develop and expand....” Again he took Leon’s hand in his own which was as white and cold as marble--“we might bring about a reconciliation.”

“Impossible!” said Leon. “Utterly, totally impossible. A little while since it would have been easy--but what effort did she make to effect it?--You ought to know.”

The little man looked at the ground and nodded affirmatively.

“Of course! you know all about it!” said Leon bitterly. “My wife’s conscience-keeper, the ruler of my household, the master of my married life, who has held the sacred chain in his hand and could bind or unloose--the man whom I see now for the first time since he came to see my hapless brother-in-law, Luis Gonzaga, who died in my house--this man who, though it is no earthly concern of his, has secretly disposed of my happiness and of my life as a master does of his purchased slaves.--You, I say, must of course, know everything.”

“This worldly tone of haughty philosophy is well known to me too, Señor,” said Paoletti, in a tone of apostolic reproof. “If you wish me to meet you on that ground and to confute you utterly I will do so.”

“No--I did not come here to argue. The horrible struggle is over--I am beaten, after having risked honour and delicacy, after fighting with skill, nay, and with fury. My opinions were settled long since, and cannot now be altered. This is not the moment for discussion; we are in presence of a terrible fact.”

“María then is dying?”

Leon told Paoletti of his wife’s visit to his lodgings, and of the scene which culminated in the fainting fit and subsequent illness of the saintly María.

There was a pause; then Paoletti said severely:

“It is clear to me that María loves you, and that you are the real traitor to the contract--guilty to-day as you were yesterday and from the beginning. Without further knowledge of the facts, I cannot pronounce on the step taken by my beloved daughter; but such a step, such a proceeding, taken as it stands, argues that she still loves you, and that her tender soul is full of sweetness and kindness for a man who is wholly undeserving of them.”

“You, who know everything, know very well that my wife no longer loves me; and if those who are incapable of judging of a pure and noble feeling choose to give the name of love to a sentiment that has no title to it, I shall at once assert myself as the sole judge of my unhappy wife’s feelings, and declare that they do not satisfy my demands, that I repudiate them, and put them out of court in deciding on the question of separation or reunion.”

Paoletti stood lost in thought.

“There is no fundamental and moral bond between us,” Leon went on. “María and I are two separate souls: in my mind I see her and myself as the very idea incarnate of divorce.”

“Yes--a group of statuary--a work of art!” said Paoletti, a lightning shaft of malice flashing across the dark cloud of his austerity.

“Well, yes--a work of art--which did not originate spontaneously, mark you, but was somebody’s doing, somebody’s work. My wife does not love me. I believe she might have loved me as I hoped, if the grave faults of her character, instead of diminishing and vanishing under my authority and tenderness, had not become more marked under alien influences. She does not love me; I do not love her. Consequently any reconciliation is out of the question.”

“You cannot say,” added the priest, with some severity, tempered however by tolerance, “that I have not listened to you with patience.”

“Patience! I have had much longer patience!”

“Even those who have it least retain with it a touch of the Christian about them, caballero.--Then the long and short of it, Señor de Roch, is that you do not love your wife and she does not love you--you respect and regard her.--But what is the upshot of it all? Or to put it plainly, what did you come here for?”

“María begged me to fetch her confessor. Far from opposing her I consented with pleasure.”

“Then let us go at once!” said Paoletti rising.

“The most important thing is yet to come,” said Leon laying his hand on the priest’s robe. “You, with your perspicacity will at once perceive that I need not have come myself merely to fetch you. I came to tell you what no one else could tell you. Consider in the first place that her mind is the part really affected.”

“I see.”

“I ought to tell you that I honestly desire that she should recover,” said Leon with firm composure. “I call God to witness that this is the truth: I hope and wish, without any kind of mental reservation, that my wife may live.”

“I perfectly understand; you wish that she should get well again--that her nervous excitement should be soothed and removed, and to that end nothing must be suggested to her that can remind her of the cause of her illness. Comforting and pleasing ideas must be kept before her, to help her to disentangle the confusion caused by her indignation and unsatisfied passions; my spiritual guidance must be qualified by a certain infusion of worldly tact, so as to foster her illusions and conceal the sad truth,--the father-confessor must be to some extent a physician, allaying jealousy and encouraging hope, so as to clutch back, as it were, the life that is fluttering to escape--that will escape, beyond recall, if the mental excitation that has imperilled it is not promptly banished.”

Leon admired the confessor’s sagacity.

“Very good,” Paoletti went on; “I will do my best. I cannot pledge myself without knowing more exactly in what spiritual frame of mind my beloved daughter may be.”

“María is at Suertebella.”

“So I understand.”

“She must on no account be made aware of it.”

“Well--let that pass--” said Paoletti looking at the ground and screwing up his mouth. “It is a subterfuge which I hold excusable.”

“She insists on displaying the affection which now--rather late in the day--she feels for me.”

“Nor does that seem to me blamable. It may be allowed, considering that you think very little of her affection.”

“While María is ill she must not be allowed to fancy that I care for any other woman.”

“Stay, stay,” said Paoletti, putting up his white hand as if to screen himself. “This is going too far. I have slipped some rather thick threads through the eye of the needle but the camel, my dear Sir, the camel is too much for me. That is a gross imposition.”

“It is common charity.”

“Truth forbids it.”

“Her health requires it.”

“A mere physical necessity to which we must not attach too much importance. My saintly daughter will die as a Christian should, contemning the baser and more worldly passions.”

“It is always our first duty to guard against death.”

“Always, if we can do so without baseness. Am I to allow that angelic martyr to believe in her husband’s innocence when she is actually under the same roof as her rival? I will grant you that there may be nothing existing to insult or injure her while she, the unhappy wife, is breathing her last. Still, the frightful fact remains.--I will tell her nothing unless she asks, but if she questions me--and she will, she will!”

“You are right!” exclaimed Leon struck by this solemn appeal. “It is a farce, equally unworthy of her and of me. The truth terrifies me--the lie disgusts me; but the truth is certain death, and the lie possible recovery.--Do not come to Suertebella. I will find a priest--anybody--the vicar of the parish, or the house chaplain.”

He was leaving the room when Paoletti called him back in a conciliatory tone.

“You must be fully aware,” he said, “that the presence of no other confessor will have the same effect as mine. If you will pledge yourself not to interfere in any particular, I will go with you with pleasure, to comfort and help the hapless sufferer. Nay, more,” he added with a burst of feeling, “I may tell you frankly that I earnestly wish to go. She is so saintly, so admirable! I not only admire and respect her--I look up to her as a superior being.”

“And what will you tell her?”

“What it is my duty to tell her,” replied the Italian fixing a pair of eyes on Leon’s face, which might have been a hundred pairs. “It strikes me as strange that a man who declares that he had thrown off every matrimonial tie, should trouble himself so much about his wife’s conscience.”

“I am not anxious about her conscience, but about her health,” said Leon who was getting very weary.

“You tell me you do not love her, nor she you?”

“Yes.”

“But it is her person--her mortal part, that a man may claim, not her exquisite conscience.”

“Quite true,” said Leon, draining the cup. “I leave her conscience to you, who have made it. I have no wish to put in a claim for the monstrosity.”

“I forgive you the word,” said Paoletti looking down. “Now Señor--Yes or No.”

“Do you intend to kill her?”

“I!” and then, with a sigh, he added: “We will ask her who it is that has killed her?”

Leon’s heart sank within him; after a moment’s reflection he stamped his foot. A stamp sometimes strikes out an idea as a spark may flash from an iron shoe. Leon had an idea.

“Let us go, at any rate,” he said. “I will leave so delicate a matter to your own conscience.”

“And to prove worthy of your confidence,” said the priest, unable to conceal his satisfaction, “I may promise you to reconcile truth and prudence as far as lies in my power, and to do my utmost not to agitate the last hours--if the Lord so wills it--of my precious daughter in the Church. I am perfectly certain that my presence will be the greatest comfort to her.”

“Come then.”

“I am at your service in an instant,” said Paoletti, hastening as much as he could with his heavy step to fetch his hat and cloak. But pausing in the door-way he observed: “it is very early; you, perhaps have not had breakfast. Will you have some chocolate?”

“No thank you,” said Leon bowing. “No indeed.”

And an hour later they got out of the carriage at the door of Suertebella.