‘You know more,’ she said sadly. ‘He has written you that he is coming back!’
‘No. I only think it possible. But if he did, could you refuse to live under his roof? Has he wronged you?’
‘He meant to be just! But if he should come back—oh, no, no, no! For God’s sake, not that!’
She bent her head lower still, and spoke scarcely above a whisper.
‘Remember that he has the right, that it lies with him to forgive, not with you. If he should do that, and should come, would you not be glad to feel that after all you had done your best? That so far as you could help it you had not seen your lover, nor encouraged him, nor given him the slightest cause to think you would? You could at least receive your husband’s forgiveness with a clear conscience. At least you could say that you had not failed again!’
Don Ippolito waited a moment, but Maria could not speak, or had no answer ready for him. He went on, quietly and kindly.
‘But if you allow Castiglione to come back and live here, and to see you, even rarely, it will all be different. Think only of what the world will say; and what the world says will be repeated to your husband. You have broken his heart, and all but ruined his life; remember that he loves you as much as your lover ever did; think what he has felt, what he has suffered! And then consider, too, that if anything has softened the bitterness of his pain, it has been the faultless life you have led since. Before God it is enough to do right, but before the world it is not. Men do not accept the truth unless it is outwardly proved to them. That is a part of the social contract by which our outward lives are bound. Allow Castiglione to come to Rome, to be seen with you and at your house, even now and then, and the world will have no mercy. It will say that you are tired of your loneliness, and have taken him back to be to you what he was. Then people will laugh at Teresa Crescenzi’s clever story instead of believing it. You came to me as to a friend, and as what you call a man of the world, and I give you what I think will be the world’s view. Am I right, or not?’
There was a long pause. Then Maria tried to meet the good man’s earnest eyes, but her own wandered to one of the angels on the wall.