The Sister of Charity went about with Maddalena's bracelet in her pocket, feeling very uncomfortable about it, since she had been quite sure from the first that there was something very sinful in the whole affair. But she was quite ready to fulfil her promise if Ghisleri showed signs of departing this life, which he did not, however, either when he first regained consciousness or later. So she, on her part, said nothing, and waited for the day when she might deliver up the trinket to the Mother Superior, to be sold for the poor, as Maddalena had directed. In that, at least, there could be no harm, and she was very thankful that she was not called upon to deliver the message to Ghisleri himself, for that, she felt sure, would have been sinful, or something very like it.
The surgeon was surprised by something else in the case. As a general rule, when a man fights a desperate duel in the very middle of the season, and especially such a man as he knew Ghisleri to be, and is severely hurt, he finds himself cut off from society in the midst of some chain of events in which the whole present interest of his life is engaged. He is consequently disturbed in mind, impatient of confinement, and feverishly anxious to get back to the world,—a state of temper by no means conducive to convalescence. Ghisleri, on the contrary, seemed to have forgotten to care for anything. No preoccupation appeared to possess him; no desire to be back again in the throng made him restless. He was perfectly calm and peaceful, always patient, and always resigned to whatever treatment seemed necessary. The Sister wondered much that a man of such marvellous gentleness and resignation could have found it in him to commit mortal sin in fighting a duel, and, perhaps, far down in her woman's heart, she did not wonder at all at what Maddalena had done on that first morning. The surgeon said that Ghisleri's sweet temper had much to do with his rapid recovery.
It need not be supposed from this that his character had undergone any radical change, nor that he was turning, all at once, into the saint he was never intended to be. It was very simple. The events of the night preceding the duel had brought his life to a crisis which, once past, had left little behind it to disturb him. First in his mind was the consciousness that his love for Maddalena dell' Armi was gone for ever, and that she herself expected no return of it. That alone was enough to change his whole existence in the present, and in the immediate future. Then, too, he felt that he had at least settled old scores with Campodonico and had in a measure expiated one, at least, of his past misdeeds, almost at the cost of his life. Morally speaking, too, he had kept his oath to Bianca Corleone, for under the utmost provocation he had refused to fight in the old quarrel, and even when driven to bay and forced upon new ground by Campodonico's implacable hatred, he had stood up to be killed without so much as firing at Bianca's brother. There was a deep and real satisfaction in that, and he was perhaps too ill as yet to torture himself by stigmatising it as a bit of vanity. The world might think what it pleased. Maddalena might misjudge his motives, and Gianforte might triumph in his victory—it all made no difference to him. He was conscious that to the best of his ability he had acted according to the dictates of true honour, as he understood it; and at night he closed his eyes and fell peacefully asleep, and in the morning he opened them quietly again upon the little world of his invalid's surroundings.
He was not happy, however. What he felt, and what perhaps saved his life, was a momentary absence of responsibility, an absolute certainty that nothing more could be required of him, because, in the events in which he had played a part, that part had been acted out to the very end. He even went so far as to believe that, if he had died, it would not have made any difference to any one, except that his death might possibly have been an added satisfaction to Campodonico. He would have left no sorrowing heart behind to mourn him, nor any gap in any circle which another man could not fill up. Herbert Arden, the only friend who would have really regretted him, was already dead, and there was no one else who stood to him in any relation of acquaintance at all so close as to be called friendship. All this contributed materially to his peace of mind, though in one respect he was mistaken. There was one person who loved him still, for himself, though she knew well enough that his love for her was dead.
And it was of her, though he was mistaken about her, that he thought the most during the long hours when he lay there quietly watching the sunbeams stealing across the room when it was fine, or listening to the raindrops pattering against the windows when the weather was stormy. In her was centred the great present regret of his life, and for her sake he felt the most sincere remorse. He asked himself, as she had asked him, what was to become of her, now that he had left her. The fact that she had been really the one to speak the word and cause the first break did not change the truth in the least. It had been his fault from the first to the last. He had not broken her heart, perhaps, because hearts are not now-a-days easily broken, if, indeed, they ever really were; but he had ruined her existence wantonly, uselessly, on the plea of a love neither pure nor lasting, and he fully realised what he had done. What chance had she ever had against him—she, young, inexperienced, trusting, wretchedly unhappy with a husband who had despised and trodden out the simple, girlish love she had offered—what chance had she against Pietro Ghisleri, the hardened, cool-headed man of the world, whose only weakness was that he sometimes believed himself sincere, as he had with her? He was not happy as he thought of it all. There had been little manliness in what he had done, and not much of the honour which he called his last shred of morality. And yet, in the world in which he had his being, few men would blame him, and none, perhaps, venture to condemn him. But that consideration did not cross his mind. He was willing to bear both condemnation and blame, and he heaped both upon himself in a plentiful measure.
Nevertheless, he was conscious of being surprised at the calmness of his own repentance, as he called it rather contemptuously, and he wished himself, as usual, quite different from what he was. And yet he had not forgotten the semi-theatrical resolution to change his life, which he had made on the night before the duel, still less had he any intention of breaking it. He had always laughed at men and women who made sudden and important resolutions under the influence of emotion, and, on the whole, he had never seen any reason for looking upon such gratuitous promises as valid, unless there had been witnesses to them, and human vanity afterwards came into play. But now, in his own case, he meant to try the experiment. It made no difference whether he were vain about it or not, if he succeeded, nor, if he failed, whether he scorned his own weakness a little more than before. No one would ever know, and since by Laura Arden's rigid standard of right and wrong the end to be gained belonged distinctly to the right, he would be in a measure following her advice in regard to life in general. Deeper down in his nature, too, there lay another thought which he would not now evoke, lest he should himself condemn it as sentimental. That secret promise had been honestly intended, and had been addressed to the memory of one who, though long dead, still had a stronger influence over him than any one now living. He hardly dared to acknowledge the truth of this and the real meaning of what he had done, lest, if he failed hereafter, he should have to accuse himself of faithlessness towards the one woman to whom he had been really true, and whom, if she had lived, he would have loved till the end, in spite of obstacles, in spite of mankind, in spite, he added defiantly, of Heaven itself. All this he tried to keep out of sight, while firmly resolving, in his own cynical way, to try the experiment of goodness for once, and to do no more harm in the world if he could help it.
He thought of Laura Arden, too, in his long convalescence, and her image was always pleasant to his inner vision, as the impression she had produced on him was soothing to recall. There were times when her holy eyes seemed to gaze at him out of the darker corners of the room, and he tried often to bring back her whole presence. The pleasure such useless feats of imagination gave him was artistic if it was anything, because he admired her beauty and had always delighted in it. He tried to fancy what she was doing, on certain days when he thought more of her than usual, and to follow her life a little, always trying in a vague way to fathom the secret of the character that was so wonderful in his estimation. And always, when he had been thinking of her, he came back to the contemplation of his own immediate interests with a renewed calm and with a peaceful sense that there might yet be better days in store for him—possibly days in which he should himself be better than he had been heretofore.
How the world would have jeered, could it have suspected that Pietro Ghisleri was thinking almost seriously of such a very commonplace subject as moral goodness, as he lay on his back, day after day, in the quiet of his room. How gladly would Adele Savelli have changed places with the man who, as she thought, for the sake of a bit of gossip she had invented out of spite, had nearly lost his life!