The Devil's Mother-in-Law/The Pardon
THE PARDON
Emilia Pardo-Bazan
Of all the women busily engaged in lathering soiled linen in the public laundry of Marineda, their arms stiff with the biting cold of a March morning, Antonia the charwoman was the most bowed down, the most disheartened, the one who wrung the clothes with the least energy, and rinsed them with the greatest lassitude. From time to time she would interrupt her work in order to pass the back of her hand across her reddened eyelids; and the drops of water and soapy bubbles glistened like so many tears upon her withered cheeks.
Antonia's companions at the tubs eyed her compassionately, and every now and again, in the midst of the confusion of gossip and of quarrels, a brief dialogue would ensue in lowered tones, interrupted by exclamations of astonishment, indignation, and pity. The entire laundry knew, down to the smallest details, the poor washerwoman's misfortunes, which furnished occasion for unending comment. No one was unaware that, after her marriage a few years ago with a young butcher, she had kept house together with her mother and husband in one of the suburbs outside the town wall, and that the family lived in comfortable circumstances, thanks to Antonia's steady industry, and to the frugal savings of the older woman in her former capacity of huckster, second-hand dealer, and money-lender.
Still less-had anyone forgotten the tragic evening when the old woman was found assassinated, with nothing but splinters left of the lid of the chest in which she kept her money and a few earrings and trinkets of gold; still less, the horror that spread through the neighborhood at the news that the thief and assassin was none other than Antonia's husband, as she herself declared, adding that for some time past the guilty man had been tormented with a desire for his mother-in-law's money, with which he wished to set up a butcher's shop of his own. The accused, to be sure, attempted to establish an alibi, relying on the testimony of two or three boon companions, and so far confused the facts, that, instead of going to the gallows, he got off with twenty years in prison.
Public opinion was less indulgent than the law; in addition to the wife's testimony, there was one overwhelming piece of evidence, namely, the wound itself which had caused the old woman's death, an accurate, clean-cut wound, delivered from above downward, like the stroke used in slaughtering hogs, evidently with a broad, keen blade, like that of a meat knife. Among the people, there was no question but that the culprit should have paid for his deed upon the scaffold. And Antonia's destiny began to evoke a holy horror when the rumor was circulated that her husband had sworn to get even with her, on the day of his release, for having testified against him. The poor woman was expecting soon to have a child; yet none the less, he left her with the assurance that, as soon as he should come back, she might count herself among the dead.
When Antonia's son was born, she was unable to nurse him, because of her enfeebled and wasted condition, and the frequent attacks of prostration from which she had suffered since the commission of the crime. And since the state of her purse did not permit her to pay for a nurse, the women of the neighborhood who had nursing children took turns in caring for the poor little thing, which grew up sickly, suffering the consequences of all its mother's anguish. Before she had fully got back her strength, Antonia was hard at work again, and although her cheeks continually showed that bluish pallor which is characteristic of a weak heart, she recovered her silent activity and her placid manner.
Twenty years of prison! In twenty years, she told herself, either he might die, or she might die, and from now until then was, in any case, a long time. The idea of a natural death did not disturb her; but the mere thought of her husband's return filled her with horror. In vain her sympathetic neighbors tried to console her, suggesting the possibility that the guilty wretch might repent and mend his ways, or, as they expressed themselves, "think better of it"; but Antonia would only shake her hand, murmuring gloomily:
"What, he? Think better of it? Not unless God Himself came down from Heaven to tear his dog's heart out of him and give him another!"
And at the mere mention of the criminal, a shudder would run throughout Antonia's body.
After all, twenty years contain a good many days, and time alleviates even the cruelest pain. Sometimes it seemed to Antonia as though all that had happened was a dream, or that the wide gates of the prison, having once closed upon the condemned man, would never again reopen; and that the law, which in the end had punishment for the first crime, would have the power to prevent a second. The law! that moral entity, of which Antonia formed a mysterious and confused conception, was beyond doubt a terrible force, yet one that offered protection; a hand of iron that would sustain her upon the brink of an abyss. Accordingly she added to her illimitable fears a sort of indefinable confidence, founded chiefly upon the time that had already elapsed and that which remained before the expiration of the sentence.
Strange, indeed, is the conception of human events! Certainly it would never have occurred to the king, when, clad in the uniform of general-in-chief and with his breast covered over with decorations, he gave his hand to a princess before the altar, that this solemn act would cost pangs beyond number to a poor washerwoman in the capital of a distant province. When Antonia learned that her husband had been one of the convicts singled out for royal clemency, she spoke not a word; and the neighbors found her seated on the sill of her doorway, with her fingers interlocked and her head drooping forward on her breast; while the boy, raising his sad face, with its stamp of chronic invalidism, kept moaning:
"Mother, mother, warm me some soup, for God's sake, for I am starving!"
The kind-hearted and chattering chorus of neighbors swooped down upon Antonia; some busied themselves in preparing the child's dinner; others tried as best they could to instill courage into the mother. She was very foolish to distress herself like this! Holy Virgin! It wasn't as though the brute had nothing to do but just walk in and kill her! There was a government, God be thanked, and the law courts, and the police; she could appeal to the authorities, to the mayor
"The mayor's no good!" she answered, with a gloomy look, in a hopeless tone.
"Or to the governor, or the regent, or the chief of the city council; you ought to go to a lawyer and find out what the law says."
One kind-hearted girl, married to a policeman, offered to send for her husband, "to give the scoundrel a good scare"; another, a swarthy, dauntless sort of woman, insisted on coming every night to sleep at the charwoman's house; in short, so many and so varied were the signs of interest shown by her neighbors that Antonia made up her mind to take a bold step, and without waiting for her counselors to adjourn, decided to consult a lawyer and find out what he advised.
When Antonia returned from the consultation, paler even than usual, from every basement and ground floor disheveled women emerged to hear the news, and exclamations of horror arose. Instead of protecting her, the law required the daughter of the murdered woman to live under the same roof with the assassin, as his wife!
"What laws, divine Lord of Heaven! That's how the brigands who make them carry them out!" clamored the indignant chorus. "And is here no help for it, my dear, no help at all?"
"He says that I could leave him after I got what they call a divorce."
"And what is a divorce, my dear?"
"It's a lawsuit that takes a long time."
A;;the women let their arms fall hopelessly. Lawsuits never came to an end, or if they did it was all the worse, because they were always decided against the innocent and the poor.
"And to get it," continued the charwoman, "I should have to prove that my husband had ill-treated me."
Lord of mercy! Hadn't the beast killed her own mother? And if that wasn't ill treatment, then what was? And didn't the very cats in the street know that he had threatened to kill her too?
"But since no one heard him.—The lawyer says the proof has to be very clear."
Something akin to a riot ensued. Some of the women insisted that they would certainly send a petition to the king himself, asking to have the pardon revoked; and they took turns at spending the night at the charwoman's house, so that the poor thing could get a chance to sleep. Fortunately, it was only three days later that the news arrived that the pardon was only a partial remission of the sentence, and that the assassin still had some years to drag his chains behind prison bars. The night after Antonia had learned this was the first that she did not suddenly start up in bed, with her eyes immeasurably wide open, and scream for help.
After this first alarm, more than a year passed, and the charwoman recovered her tranquillity and was able to devote herself to her humble labors. One day the butler in one of the houses where she worked thought that he was doing a kindness to the poor, white-faced thing who had a husband in prison, by telling her that there was soon to be an heir to the throne, and that this would undoubtedly mean some more pardons.
The charwoman was in the midst of scrubbing the floor, but on hearing this announcement she dropped her scrubbing-brush and, shaking down her skirt, which had been gathered up around her waist, she left the house, moving like an automaton, as cold and silent as a statue. To all inquiries from her various employers, she replied that she was ill; although, in reality, she was merely suffering from a sort of general prostration, an inability to raise her arms to any work whatever. On the day of the royal birth, she counted the number of salutes, whose reverberations seemed to jar through to the center of her brain; and when someone told her that the royal child was a girl, she began to take heart at the thought that a male child would have been the occasion of a larger number of pardons.
Besides, why should one of the pardons be for her husband? They had already remitted part of his sentence once, and his crime had been a shocking one. To kill a defenseless old woman, just for the sake of a few wretched pieces of gold! The terrible scene once more unrolled itself before her eyes. How did they dare to pardon the beast who had inflicted that fearful knife-thrust? Antonia remembered that the lips of the wound were livid, and it seemed as though she could still see the coagulated blood at the foot of the narrow bed.
She locked herself into her house, and passed the hours seated in a low chair before the hearth. Bah! If they were bound to kill her, they might as well come and do it!
Nothing but the plaintive voice of the little boy aroused her from her self-absorption.
"Mother, I am hungry! Mother, who is at the door? Who is coming?"
But at last. en a beautiful, sunny morning, she roused herself and, taking a bundle of soiled clothing. made her way towards the public washing place. To the many affectionate inquiries she answered only in slow monosyllables, and her eyes rested in unseeing absorption on the soapy water that now and again splashed in her face.
Who was it that brought to the laundry the unlooked-for news? It happened just as Antonia was gathering up her washing and preparing to start for home. Did someone invent the story, meaning to be kind, or was it one of those mysterious rumors, of unknown origin, which on the eve of momentous happenings, whether personal or public, palpitate and whisper through the air? The actual facts are that poor Antonia, upon hearing it, raised her hand instinctively to her heart and fell backward upon the wet flooring of the laundry.
"But is he really dead?" demanded the early comers of the more recent arrivals.
"Indeed he is!"
"I heard it in the market-place."
"I heard it in the shop."
"Well, and who told you?"
"Me? Oh, I heard it from my husband."
"And who told your husband?"
"The captain's mate."
"Who told the mate?"
"His foster-father."
At this point the matter seemed to be sufficiently authenticated, and no one sought to verify it further, but assumed that the news was valid and beyond question. The culprit dead, on the eve of pardon, and before completing the term of his sentence! Antonia, the charwoman, raised her head, and for the first time her cheeks tooks on the color of health, and the fountain of her tears was opened. She wept to her heart's content, and of all who saw her, there was not one that blamed her. It was she who had received her release, and her gladness was justified. The tears chased each other from the corners of her eyes, and as they flowed her heart expanded; because, from the day of the murder she had been under a weight too heavy for relief in tears. Now once more she could breathe freely, released from her nightmare fear. The hand of Providence had so plainly intervened that it never even occurred to the poor charwoman that the news might be false.
That evening, Antonia returned home later than usual, because she stopped at the primary school for her boy, and bought him some spice cakes and other dainties that he had long been wanting; and the two wandered from street to street, lingering before the shop windows. She forgot the dinner hour, and thought of nothing but of drinking in the air, and feeling herself alive, and little by little taking possession of herself.
So great was Antonia's self-absorption that she did not notice that her outer door was unlatched. Still holding the child by the hand, she entered the narrow quarters that served as parlor, kitchen and dining-room all in one, then recoiled in amazement at seeing that the candle was lighted. A huge, dark bulk raised itself from the table, and the scream which rose to the charwoman's lips was strangled in her throat.
It was he. Antonia, motionless, riveted to the ground, stared unseeingly at him, although the sinister image was mirrored in her dilated pupils. Her rigid body was for the moment paralyzed; her icy hands relaxed their hold upon the boy, who clung in terror to her skirts. The husband spoke:
"You were not counting on me today!" he murmured in a hoarse but tranquil tone; and at the sound of that voice, in which Antonia fancied that she could hear the echo of maledictions and threats of death, the poor woman, waking from her daze, came to life, emitted one shrill wail, and snatching her boy up in her arms, started to run to the door. The man intercepted her.
"Come, come! Where are you off to, my lady?" he asked her, with harsh irony. "Rousing the neighborhood at this time of night? Stay home and stop your noise!"
The last words were spoken without any accompanying gesture of intimidation, but in atone that froze Antonia's blood. Her first stupefaction had by this time given place to fever, the lucid fever of the instinct of self-preservation. A sudden thought flashed through her mind: she would appeal to hint through the child. The father had never seen him, but after all he was his father. Catching the boy up, she carried him over to the light.
"Is that the kid?" murmured the convict, and taking up the candle he held it close to the boy's face. The latter, dazzled, blinked his eyes and covered his face with his hands, as if trying to hide from this unknown father whose name he had never heard pronounced excepting with universal fear and condemnation. He shrank back against his mother, and she at the same time nervously held him close, while her face grew whiter than wax.
"What an ugly kid!" muttered the father, setting the candle down again. "He looks as if the witches had sucked him dry."
Antonia, still holding the boy, leaned against the wall, half fainting. The room seemed to be circling around her, and the air was full of tiny flecks of blue light.
"Look here, isn't there anything to eat in the house?" demanded her husband. Antonia set the boy on the floor in a corner, where he sat, crying from fear and stifling his sobs, while she proceeded to hurry about the room, setting the table with trembling hands; she brought out some bread and a bottle of wine, and removed the pot of codfish from the fire, making herself a willing slave in the hope of placating the enemy. The convict took his seat and proceeded to eat voraciously, helping himself to repeated draughts of wine. She remained standing, staring in fascination at the hard, parchment-like face, with close-clipped hair, and the unmistakable prison pallor. He filled glass again and reached it towards her.
"No, I don't want it," stammered Antonia, for the wine, where the candlelight fell upon it, seemed to her imagination like a pool of blood.
He drank it himself, with a shrug of his shoulders, and replenished his plate with the codfish, which he consumed, greedily, feeding himself with his fingers and devouring huge slices of bread. His wife watched him as he ate, and a faint hope began to dawn in her heart. As soon as he had finished his meal, he might go out without killing her; in that case, she would lock and bar the door, and if he tried to come back to kill her, it would rouse the neighbors and they would hear her screams. Only it was quite likely that she would find it impossible to scream! She hawked repeatedly in order to clear her voice. Her husband, having eaten his fill, drew a cigar from his pocket, pinched off the tip with his finger nail, and tranquilly lighted it with the candle.
"Here, where are you going?" he called, seeing that his wife made a furtive movement towards the door. "Let's enjoy ourselves in peace."
"I must put the boy to bed," she answered, scarcely knowing what she said, and she took refuge in the adjoining room, carrying the child in her arms. She felt sure that the murderer would not dare to enter there. How could he have the dreadful courage to do so? It was the room where the crime was committed, her mother's room; the room that she had shared before her marriage. The poverty that followed the old woman's death had forced Antonia to sell her own bed and use that of the deceased. Believing herself in security, she proceeded to undress the child, who now ventured to sob aloud, and with his face buried on her breast. All at once the door opened and the ex-convict came in.
Antonia saw him cast a side glance around the room; then he proceeded tranquilly to remove his shoes, to undress, and finally stretch himself in the murdered woman's bed. The charwoman felt that she must be dreaming; if her husband had drawn a knife, he would have frightened her less than by this horrible show of tranquillity. He meanwhile stretched and turned between the sheets, sighing with the contentment of a weary man who has obtained the luxury of a soft, clean bed.
"And you?" he exclaimed, turning towards Antonia "what are you sitting there for, as dumb as a post? Aren't you coming to bed?"
"No, I—I am not sleepy," she temporized, with her teeth chattering.
"What if you aren't sleepy? Are you going to sit up all night?"
"No,—no,—there isn't room. You go to sleep. I'll get on here, some way or other."
He uttered two or three coarse words.
"Are you afraid of me, do you hate me, or what on earth is the trouble? We'll see whether you aren't coming to bed! If you don't—"
He sat up, reached out his hands, and prepared to spring from the bed to the floor. But Antonia, with the fatalistic docility of a slave, had already begun to undress. Her hurrying fingers broke the strings, violently tore off the hooks and eyes, ripped her skirts and petticoats bate. In one corner of the room could still be heard the smothered sobbing of the boy.
It was the boy who summoned the neighbors the following morning by his desperate cries. They found Antonia still in bed, stretched out as if dead. A doctor, summoned in haste, declared that she was still alive, and bled her, but he could not draw from her one drop of blood. She passed away at noon, by a natural death, for there was no mark of violence upon her. The boy insisted that the man who had passed the night there had called her several times to get up, and seeing that she didn't answer, had gone away, running like a madman.