Part 15 (1/2)
”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.