“I will weep on his bosom,” she said to herself, “he will weep with me; nothing is better than weeping when we have to pardon and forget, when we have been pardoned and are invoking forgetfulness.”
However, the silence in Casa Guasco was supreme, and Donna Maria heard no step approaching. The boudoir, which preceded her room, was in half-darkness, lit by a single lamp. On the other side was her husband’s study, where they had met an hour ago, and where he had remained silent without following her. The study door was closed. No noise reached from there.
“He is working, perhaps,” she thought. Then suddenly a contradiction arose. “Working? At what? At this hour?”
Like a spectre Maria re-entered her room, praying for calm against the heavy disturbance which was again oppressing her. She sat at her desk, and pressing her burning forehead in her cool hands, endeavoured to subdue herself, to conquer herself.
Again the sentiment of humility, with which she had mortified her proud heart in the months of solitude and repentance which she had passed at Florence, inundated her soul with pity, with affection, and with loving charity. She thought of the state of Emilio’s heart, on that day on which he had accomplished such a noble and tender deed, pardoning a long and atrocious offence, in which he had given a beautiful proof of magnanimity, receiving again into his home the traitress, the truant, who had broken her sacred promises and vows. She thought of how he must have suffered for four eternal years in the same land, in the same society, having no comfort of any kind, having no children and in a deserted house, and of how he must have cursed his destiny and her name.
She thought of what the pardon he had offered her must have cost him in intense moral pain, and in powerful moral sacrifice, which she had only accepted when it was convenient for her to accept it.
Again, the figure of her husband opposed to her egoism, opposed to her love folly, opposed to the delirium of her own passion, seemed to grow large with goodness, and she felt herself mean and unworthy before him. She felt the need of seeing him, of telling him of her gratitude and her admiration, since he alone possessed every virtue and energy of well-doing, while she was a fragile and fallen creature. Thus in the silence, in her solitude, she evoked the presence of her husband. She invoked that presence, in order that she might tell him how a whole life of devotion would compensate for his heroic pardon.
With fixed eyes Maria stood at the door, all ardour, to see it open after the invocation. Her contracted face spoke of a heavy anguish, her sinuous body in its flowing white gown was alert and rigid with waiting. From not seeing her husband appear, as she had thought, hoped, and desired, she suffered the more from the profound silence of the house, from the desert which the house seemed to have become, from that mortal solitude, but especially from her mortal delusion. She suffered acutely. And it was intolerance of such torturing waiting, in all its moments of repression, that exasperated her; she wished through her imperious will to force the destiny of that long night to change.
“I will go and seek him,” she said to herself. Once having decided she crossed the boudoir, reached the door of the study, where she supposed her husband was closeted, and stooped to knock, even to open it violently. But her raised hand did not obey the movement suggested by her will. Quite apart, her feverish and convulsed brain had inspired her with a shock, with an immense fear.
“Suppose he were to think.... Suppose he were to think....” she murmured to herself almost deliriously.