"I know it; you despise me, and you are right to despise me. With this just contempt you will kill me more surely than with a dagger, and without staining either your hands or your conscience with blood.

Farewell! I am about to free you from my odious presence. Farewell forever!"

Having said this, Pepita rose from her seat, and, without looking at Don Luis, her face bathed with tears, beside herself, rushed toward the door that led to the inner apartment. An unconquerable tenderness, a fatal pity, took possession of Don Luis. He feared Pepita would die. He started forward to detain her, but it was too late. Pepita had crossed the threshold. Her form disappeared in the obscurity within. Don Luis, impelled by a superhuman power, drawn as by an invisible hand, followed her into the darkened chamber.

The library remained deserted.

The servants' dance must have already terminated, for the only sound to be heard was the murmur of the fountain in the garden below.

Not even a breath of wind troubled the stillness of the night and the serenity of the air.

The perfume of the flowers and the light of the moon entered softly through the open window. After a long interval, Don Luis made his appearance, emerging from the darkness. Terror was depicted on his countenance, mingled with despair--such despair as Judas may have felt after he had betrayed his master.

He dropped into a chair and, burying his face in his hands, with his elbows resting on his knees, he remained for more than half an hour plunged in a sea of bitter reflections.

To see him thus, one might have supposed that he had just a.s.sa.s.sinated Pepita.

Pepita, nevertheless, at last made her appearance. With slow step, with an air of the deepest melancholy, with bent head, and glance directed to the floor, she approached Don Luis and spoke.

"Now, indeed," said she, "though, alas! too late, I know all the vileness of my heart and the iniquity of my conduct. I have nothing to say in my own defense, but I would not have you think me more perverse than I am. You must not think I have used any arts--that I have laid any plans for your destruction. Yes; it is true that I have been guilty of an atrocious crime, but an unpremeditated one; a crime inspired, perhaps, by the spirit of evil that possesses me. Do not abandon yourself to despair, do not torture yourself, for G.o.d's sake! You are responsible for nothing. It was a frenzy, a madness that took possession of your n.o.ble spirit. Your sin is a light one; mine is flagrant, shameful, horrible. Now I am less worthy of you than ever. It is I who ask you now to leave this place. Go; do penance. G.o.d will pardon you.

Go; a priest will give you absolution. Once cleansed from sin, carry out your purpose, and become a minister of the Most High. Then, through the holiness of your life, through your ceaseless labors, not only will you efface from your soul the last traces of this fall, but you will obtain for me, when you have pardoned me the evil I have done you, the pardon of Heaven also. You are bound to me by no tie, and even if you were I should loosen or break it. You are free. Let it suffice me that I have taken captive by surprise the star of the morning. It is not my desire--I neither can nor ought to seek to keep him in my power. I divine it, I read it in your gesture, I am convinced of it--you despise me more than before; and you are right in despising me. There is neither honor, nor virtue, nor shame in me."

When she had thus spoken, Pepita, throwing herself on her knees, bowed her face till her forehead touched the floor. Don Luis continued in the same att.i.tude as before. Thus, for some moments, they remained both silent with the silence of despair.

In a stifled voice, and without raising her face from the floor, Pepita after a time continued:

"Go now, Don Luis, and do not, through an insulting pity, remain any longer at the side of so despicable a wretch as I. I shall have courage to bear your indifference, your forgetfulness, your contempt, for I have deserved them all. I shall always be your slave--but far from you, very far from you, in order that nothing may recall to your memory the infamy of this night."

Pepita's voice, as she ended, was choked with sobs.

Don Luis could restrain himself no longer. He arose, approached Pepita, and, raising her in his arms from the floor, pressed her to his heart; then, putting aside from her face the blond tresses that fell in disorder over it, he covered it with pa.s.sionate kisses.

"Soul of my soul," he said at last, "life of my life, treasure of my heart, light of my eyes, raise up your dejected brow, and do not prostrate yourself any longer before me. The sinner, the vile wretch, he who has shown himself weak of purpose, who has made himself the b.u.t.t of scorn and ridicule, is I, not you. Angels and devils alike must laugh at me and mock me. I have clothed myself with a false sanct.i.ty. I was not able to resist temptation, and to undeceive you in the beginning, as would have been just, and now I am equally unable to show myself a gentleman, a man of honor, or a tender lover who knows how to value the favors of his mistress. I can not understand what it was you saw in me to attract you. There never was in me any solid virtue--nothing but vain show and the pedantry of a student who has read pious books as one reads a novel, and on this foundation has based his foolish romance of a future devoted to converting the heathen, and to pious meditations. If there had been in me any solid virtue, I should have undeceived you in time, and neither you nor I would have sinned. True virtue is not so easily vanquished. Notwithstanding your beauty, notwithstanding your intelligence, notwithstanding your love for me, I should not have fallen if I had been in reality virtuous, if I had had a true vocation. G.o.d, to whom all things are possible, would have bestowed his grace upon me. It would have needed nothing less than a miracle, or some other supernatural event, to have enabled me to resist your love, but G.o.d would have wrought the miracle, and I should have been worthy of it, and a motive sufficient for its being wrought. You are wrong to counsel me to become a priest. I know my own unworthiness. It was only pride that actuated me in my desire to be one. It was a worldly ambition, like any other. What do I say--like any other? It was worse than any other; it was a hypocritical, a sacrilegious, a simoniacal ambition."

"Do not judge yourself so harshly," said Pepita, now more tranquil, and smiling through her tears. "I do not want you to judge yourself thus, not even for the purpose of making me appear less unworthy to be your companion. No; I would have you choose me through love--freely; not to repair a fault, not because you have fallen into the snares you perhaps think I have perfidiously spread for you. If you do not love me, if you distrust me, if you do not esteem me, then go. My lips shall not breathe a single complaint, if you should abandon me forever, and never think of me again."

To answer this fittingly, our poor and beggarly human speech was insufficient for Don Luis. He cut short Pepita's words by pressing his lips to hers, and again clasping her to his heart.

Some time afterward, with much previous coughing and shuffling of the feet, Antonona entered the library with the words:

"What a long talk you must have had! The sermon our student has been preaching this time can not have been that of the _seven words_--it came very near being that of the _forty hours_. It is time you should go now, Don Luis; it is almost two o'clock in the morning."

"Very well," answered Pepita, "he will go directly."

Antonona left the library again, and waited outside.

Pepita was like one transformed. One might suppose that the joys she had missed in her childhood, the happiness and contentment she had failed to taste in her early youth, the gay activity and sprightliness that a harsh mother and an old husband had repressed, and, as it were, crushed within her, had suddenly burst into life in her soul, like the green leaves of the trees, whose germination has been r.e.t.a.r.ded by the snows and frosts of a long and severe winter.

A city-bred lady, familiar with what we call social conventionalities, may find something strange, and even worthy of censure, in what I am about to relate of Pepita. But Pepita, although refined by instinct, was a being in whom every feeling was spontaneous, and in whose nature there was no room for the affected sedateness and circ.u.mspection that are customary in the great world. Thus it was that, seeing the obstacles removed that had stood in the way of her happiness, and Don Luis conquered, holding his voluntary promise that he would make her his wife, and believing herself, with justice, to be loved, nay, worshiped by him whom she too loved and worshiped, she danced and laughed, and gave way to other manifestations of joy that had in them, after all, something childlike and innocent.

But it was necessary that Don Luis should now depart. Pepita took a comb and smoothed his hair lovingly, and kissed him. She then rearranged his neck-tie.

"Farewell, lord of my life," she said, "dear sovereign of my soul. I will tell your father everything if you fear to do. He is good, and he will forgive us."

At last the lovers separated.

When Pepita found herself alone, her restless gayety disappeared, and her countenance a.s.sumed a grave and thoughtful expression.

Two thoughts now presented themselves to her mind, both equally serious; the one possessing a merely mundane interest, the other an interest of a higher nature. The first thought was that her conduct to-night--the delirium of pa.s.sion once past--might prejudice her in the opinion of Don Luis; but, finding, after a severe examination of her conscience, that neither premeditation nor artifice had had any part in her actions, which were the offspring of an irresistible love, and of impulses n.o.ble in themselves, she came to the conclusion that Don Luis could not despise her for it, and she therefore made her mind easy on that point.

Nevertheless, although her frank confession that she was unable to comprehend a love that was purely spiritual, and her taking refuge afterward in the obscurity of her chamber--without foreseeing consequences--were both the result of an impulse innocent enough in itself, Pepita did not seek to deny in her own mind that she had sinned against G.o.d, and on this point she could find for herself no excuse.

She commended herself with all her heart, therefore, to the Virgin, entreating her forgiveness. She vowed to the image of Our Lady of Solitude, in the convent of the nuns, seven beautiful golden swords of the finest and most elaborate workmanship, to adorn her breast, and determined to go to confess herself on the following day to the vicar, and to submit herself to the harshest penance he should choose to impose upon her, in order to merit the absolution of those sins by means of which she had vanquished the obstinacy of Don Luis, who, but for them, would without a doubt have become a priest.

While Pepita was engaged in these reflections, and while she was arranging with so much discretion the affairs of her soul, Don Luis had descended to the hall below, accompanied by Antonona.

Before taking his leave, Don Luis, without preface or circ.u.mlocution, spoke thus:

"Antonona, tell me, you who are acquainted with everything, who is the Count of Genazahar, and what has he had to do with your mistress?

"You begin to be jealous very soon."

"It is not jealousy that makes me ask this, it is simply curiosity."

"So much the better. There is nothing more tiresome than jealousy. Well, I will try to satisfy your curiosity. This same count has given room enough for talk. He is a dissipated fellow, a gambler, and a man of no principle whatever, but he has more vanity than Don Roderick on the gallows. He made up his mind that my mistress should fall in love with him and marry him, and, as she has refused him a thousand times, he is mad enough to be tied. This does not prevent him, however, from keeping in his money-chest more than a thousand dollars that Don Gumersindo lent him years ago, without any more security than a bit of paper, through the fault and at the entreaty of Pepita, who is better than bread. The fool of a count thought, no doubt, that Pepita, who was so good to him as a wife that she persuaded her husband to lend him money, would be so much better to him as a widow that she would consent to marry him. He was soon undeceived, however, and then he became furious."

"Good-by, Antonona," said Don Luis, as, now grave and thoughtful, he left the house.

The lights of the shops and of the booths in the fair were now extinguished, and everybody was going home to bed, with the exception of the owners of the toy-shops, and other poor hucksters, who slept beside their wares in the open air.

In some of the grated windows were still to be seen lovers, wrapped in their cloaks, and chatting with their sweethearts. Almost every one else had disappeared.

Don Luis, once out of sight of Antonona, gave a loose rein to his thoughts. His resolution was taken, and all his reflections tended to confirm this resolution. The sincerity and ardor of the pa.s.sion with which he had inspired Pepita; her beauty; the youthful grace of her person, and the fresh exuberance of her soul, presented themselves to his imagination, and rendered him happy.

Notwithstanding this, however, he could not but reflect with mortified vanity on the change that had been wrought in himself. What would the dean think? How great would be the horror the bishop! And, above all, how serious were the grounds for complaint he had given his father! The displeasure of the latter, his anger when he should know of the bond that bound his son to Pepita, caused him infinite disquietude.

As for what--before he fell--he had called his fall it must be confessed that, after he had fallen, it did not seem to him either so very serious or so very reprehensible. His spiritual-mindedness, viewed in the light that had just dawned upon him, he fancied to have had neither reality nor consistency; to have been but the vain and artificial product of his reading, of his boyish arrogance, of his aimless tenderness in the innocent days of his college life. When he remembered that he had at times thought himself the recipient of supernatural gifts and graces, that he heard mystic whisperings, that his spirit held communion with superior beings; when he remembered that he had fancied himself almost beginning to tread the path that leads to spiritual unity, through contemplation of the Divine, penetrating into the recesses of the soul, and mounting up to the region of pure intelligence, he smiled to himself, and began to suspect that during the period in question he had not been altogether in his right mind. It had all been simply the result of his own arrogance. He had neither done penance, nor pa.s.sed long years in meditation; he did not possess, nor had he ever possessed, sufficient merits for G.o.d to favor him with privileges like these. The greatest proof he could give himself of the truth of this, the greatest certainty he could possess that the supernatural favors he had enjoyed were spurious; mere recollections of the authors he had read, was that not one of them had ever given him the rapture of Pepita's "I love you," or of the soft touch of her hand caressing his dark locks.

Don Luis had recourse to another species of Christian humility to justify in his eyes what he now no longer called his fall, but his change of purpose. He confessed himself unworthy to be a priest; he reconciled himself to being a commonplace married man, a good sort of country gentleman, like any other, taking care of his vines and olives, and bringing up his children--for he now desired to have children--and to being a model husband at the side of his Pepita.

Here I think myself again in the necessity--responsible as I am for the publication and divulgation of this history--of interpolating various reflections and explanations of my own.

I said at the beginning of the story that I was inclined to think that the narrative part, or _paralipomena_, was composed by the reverend dean for the purpose of completing the story, and supplying incidents not related in the letters; but I had not at that time read the ma.n.u.script with attention. Now, on observing the freedom with which certain matters are treated, and the indulgence with which certain frailties are regarded by the author, I am compelled to ask whether the reverend dean, with the severity of whose morals I am well acquainted, would have spent his time in writing what we have just read.

There are not sufficient grounds, however, for denying positively that the reverend dean was the author of these _paralipomena_. The question, therefore, may still be left in doubt, as in substance they contain nothing opposed to Catholic doctrine or to Christian morality. On the contrary, if we examine them carefully, we shall see that they contain a lesson to pride and arrogance, in the person of Don Luis. This history might easily serve as an appendix to the "Spiritual Disillusions" of Father Arbiol.