'After all,' he thought, 'if she knew it might be better, but my first duty is to keep my word.'
She never tempted him to break it. She was not callous and hardened as he supposed. She felt a growing desire to learn where and how her husband had taken up the broken threads of his severed life. She had believed either that he would return to the unfettered existence that could be dreamed away under the cedar groves of Mexico, with the senses satisfied and the moral law set at naught, or that he would go amongst the men and women of the great world, popular, pitied, and easily consoled. She had seen that world exercise a potent fascination over him, and if it were called to pronounce against her or against him, she was well aware that he would bear away all its suffrages. He had always humoured and flattered it; she never.
He had passed from the sight of those who knew him as utterly as though he had descended to his grave. No sound or hint told her of his destiny. She still thought at times that he must have sought those flowery recesses of the West which had given his youth their shelter. It might well be that in his total ruin his instincts had urged him to return to the free barbaric life of his early manhood, where none would reproach him, none deride him, none know his secret or his sin. His correspondence with Greswold suggested a doubt to her. Perhaps remorse was with him and the weight of remembrance.
When, too harshly, she had assumed that all his love and life had been a lie, because one lie had been beneath it, she had told herself that he would find solace in those vices and pastimes which, in his earlier years, had been fatal to his ambition and to his perseverance. But since he cared to hear of his children's welfare, it might well be that their life together was nearer to his heart than she had credited. She believed that, if he had been sunk in the kind of self-indulgence she had imagined, he would have shunned all tidings, all memories, of his lost home.
Then again, with the inconsistency of all great suffering, an intense indignation possessed her that he did dare to remember, did dare to recall, that her offspring were also his. Even alone the hot flush of an ever-increasing shame came to her face when she thought that she had been for nine long years his, in the most absolute possession that woman can grant to man. Exile, severance, silence, cold and dark as the winters of the land of his birth, could not alter that. Whenever he chose to think of her she must be his in remembrance still.
Once the Princess ventured to say again to her a word which came from her heart. They were standing on the terrace watching the blush of evening glow on the virginal snows of the mountains.
'Let not the sun go down upon your wrath,' she murmured. 'Wanda, mine, do never you think of those words—you who let so many suns rise and set, and find your wrath unchanged?'
'If it were only that!' she answered bitterly. 'It is so much else—so much else! Crimes deep as yonder water, high as yonder hills, I could have forgiven, but—a baseness—never! Nay, there are pardons that would only be as base as what they pardoned.'
So it seemed to her.
When again and again her heart was thrilled with its old tenderness, her mind was haunted by a million memories of dead delights, she strove against herself, and trod down her temptation with the merciless self-punishment of an ascetic. It humbled and stained her in her own sight to feel that love could live within her without honour.