It had not been easy for Don Ippolito, taken by surprise as he was. But Castiglione had put his case as one man of honour may to another, and had told as much of the truth as he might without casting the least slur on Maria’s good name. He had loved her before her marriage, he had said; he loved her still. After she had been married he had left her no peace, and Montalto had made him the reason for leaving her. She had bidden him, Castiglione, to go away and never see her again. He had so far obeyed as to stay away several years. He had come back at last to ask her forgiveness; he was not sure of obtaining it—he had not yet met her in the church—but he came to Don Ippolito as a friend. His love for Maria was great, he said, but even if she forgave him, he would never see her again rather than be the cause of any further trouble or anxiety to her. What did Don Ippolito think? Don Ippolito considered the matter for a few minutes, and then said that in his opinion any renewal of friendly intercourse between Castiglione and the Countess would surely bring trouble and would inevitably cause her anxiety. If Castiglione loved her in the way he believed he did, he would think more of her welfare than of the pleasure he would have in seeing her. If he was sure that his thoughts of her were what he represented them to be, he could write to her, and she might write to him if she thought fit. The prelate refused to say more than that, but the opinion was delivered in such manly and direct words that Castiglione was much impressed by it; and when, in the church, he had generously offered to leave Rome at once, because he saw in Maria’s face all the trouble and anxiety he feared for her, he had spoken with Ippolito Saracinesca’s honourable words still ringing in his ears. It was no wonder if he told Maria that she could not have chosen a better man of whom to ask help and advice; and though he knew what that advice would be, and felt sorrowfully sure that she would try to follow it, he almost smiled at the coincidence as he watched her cross the nave in the direction of the Sacristy.
And now, when she came back into the Basilica, she retraced her steps towards the tomb of Leo Twelfth. Again she stopped a moment and almost knelt as she passed before the Julian Chapel and went on to the north aisle; but when the small gate before which she had knelt with Castiglione was in sight she paused in the shadow of the pillar and leant against the marble, as if she were very tired.
Till then she had not dared to ask herself what she meant to do, but when she saw the place where she had so lately touched Castiglione’s hand in forgiveness of the past, the truth rushed back upon her, as the winter’s tide turns from the ebb to storm upon the beaten shore.
It was upon her, and she felt that it would sweep her from her feet and drown her; and it was not the imaged truth she had taught herself to believe those many years. She gazed at the closed gate, and she knew why she had forgiven her lover at last. It was because she wished to forgive herself, and she had found it easy, shamefully easy. The hour of evil came back to her memory with frightful vividness, and now her pale cheek burned with shame and she pressed it hard against the icy marble; and she forced her eyes to stay wide open, lest if she shut them for an instant, she should see what she remembered so horribly well.
She would not go to the gate again, now; the words she had said there had been false and untrue, the prayer she had breathed there had been a blasphemy and nothing else. For years and years she had lived in the mortal sin of those brief moments; unconfessing and unpardoned of God, she had gone to Communion month after month, telling herself that she was an innocent, suffering woman, doing her best to atone for another’s crime; yet she had always felt in the dark hiding-places of her heart the knowledge that it was all untrue, that she had been less sinned against than herself sinning, and that if she would die in the faith in which she had been brought up, and in the hope of life hereafter, she must some day humble herself and her pride to the earth, and ask of God and man the pardon she had granted just now as if it were hers to give.
It was too much; it was more than she could bear. In her anger and hatred of herself she found strength to turn from the pillar and to go on straight and quickly to the door. Two or three soldiers who had wandered in were just leaving the Basilica; they lifted the heavy curtain for her and she thanked them mechanically and passed out, holding her head high.
CHAPTER IV
Maria hardly knew how she had come home. She had no distinct recollection of having taken a cab, nor of having driven through the city, nor of having paid a cabman when she reached the Via San Martino. There are times when unconscious cerebration is quite enough for the ordinary needs of life. Maria neither fainted nor behaved in any unusual way during the half-hour that elapsed between her leaving the pillar against which she had leant in the church and the moment when she entered her own room. Even then she hardly knew that she gave her maid her hat and gloves and smoothed her hair before she went to her sitting-room to be alone.