She stretched out her hand to him in dismissal, and sought a refuge in her oratory.
She felt that she must be alone.
She almost forgot the safety of her first-born in the sense that his father was near her. She fell on her knees before the Christ of Andermeyer and praised heaven for her child's preservation, and with a passion of tears besought guidance in her struggle with what now seemed to her the long and cruel hardness of her heart.
To hear thus of him whom once she had adored, blinded her to all save the memories of the past, which thronged upon her. If he had repented so greatly was it not her obligation to meet his penitence with pardon? It would be bitter to her to live out her life beside one whose word she would for ever doubt, whose disloyalty had cut to the roots of the pride and purity of her race. Nevermore between them could there be the undoubting faith, the unblemished trust, which are the glorious noonday of a cloudless love. She might forgive, but never, never, she thought, would she be able to command forget fulness.
But for that very reason, maybe, would her duty lie this way.
The knowledge of those lonely desolate years, passed so near her, whilst he kept the dignity and the humility of silence, touched all the generosity of her nature. She knew that he had suffered; she believed that, though he had betrayed her, he had loved and honoured her in honesty and truth. One lie had poisoned his life, as a rusted nail driven through an oak tree in its prime corrodes and kills it. But he had not been a liar always. She had made his life her own in bygone years: was she not bound now to redeem it, to raise it, to shelter it on her heart and in her home? Was not the very shrinking scorn she felt for his past a reason the more that she should bend her pride to union with him? She had thought of her life ever as the poet of the flower:
the ever sacred cup
Of the pure lily hath between my hands
Felt safe unsoiled, nor lost one grain of gold.
Had there been egotism in the purity of it, self-love beneath love of honour? Had she treasured the 'grain of gold' in her hands rather with the Pharisee's arrogance of purity than with the true humility of the acolyte?
She kneeled there before the carven Christ in an anguish of doubt.
He had given her back her first-born. Should she be less generous to him?