She did not sleep, she did not even lie down that night. He seemed always before her; in the stillness of her chamber she heard his voice, and she started up thinking he touched her.
He had looked aged, ill, weary, unhappy; the sight of him bore conviction to her that he, like herself, found no compensation, no consolation. Perchance her monitress had been right; she had been cruel. Perchance, whatever sin his present or his future life might hold would lie, directly indeed at his own door, but indirectly at hers. She had always held that high and spiritual view of marriage which, rising above mere sensual indulgence, regarded the bond of souls as sacred, and made the life on earth mere passage and preparation for eternity. She had loved to believe that she ennobled, purified, exalted his life by union with hers. Was she now false to her own creed when she left him alone, unfriended, unpardoned, to drift to any solace in vice, or any distraction in evil, which might be his fate? The sensitiveness and apprehension of her conscience before the possibility of a neglected duty made of her meditations a very martyrdom. All her life long she had been resolute and serene in action, deciding quickly, and carrying resolve into action without hesitation; but here, in the supreme crisis of her fate, she was irresolute and wrung by continual doubt. Had it only been any other crime than this!—this which cankered all the honour of her race, and was rank with the abhorred putridity of fraud!
The spring passed into summer, and the children played amidst masses of roses and sweet ranks of lilies, stretching down the green grass alleys of the gardens. More than once she went to the same hamlet, where now châlets were arising, made of pine and elm, cut in the past winter in her own woods. But of him she saw no more. She could not bend her will to ask of him of any of her household, not even of Greswold. Whether he lingered amidst her mountains, or whether he had but come thither in a momentary impulse, she knew not.
The infinite yearning of affection, which is wholly outside the instincts of the passions, awoke in her once more. She began to doubt her own reading of obligation and of duty. Had her counsellors been right—had she met the supreme test of her character and had failed before it?
Was it true that a great love must be as exhaustless as the ocean in its mercy and as profound in its comprehension?
Had his sin to her released her from her duties towards him? Because he had been disloyal was she absolved from loyalty to him? Ought she sooner to have said to him,—'Nay, no crime, no untruth, no failure in yourself shall divide you from me; the darker be your soul the greater need hath it to lean on mine?'
In the violent scorn of her revolted pride, of her indignant honour, had she forgotten a lowlier yet harder duty left undone?
In her contempt and dread of yielding to mere amorous weakness had she stifled and denied the cry of pity, the cry of conscience?
To suffer woes which hope thinks infinite, To forgive wrongs darker than death or night, To defy power which seems omnipotent, To love, and live to hope till hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates, Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent.
This, perchance, had been the higher diviner way which she had missed—this the obligation from the passion of the past which she had left unfulfilled, unaccepted.