In time the convulsions ceased, the stupor lightened; they began to hope.
The danger had been great, but it was well-nigh past; the vigour and perfection of her strength had enabled her to keep her hold on life. After those few words to her kinsman she spoke seldom, she appeared sunk in silent thought; when the door opened she shrank with a sort of apprehension. Greswold watching her said to himself: 'She is afraid lest her husband should enter.'
She never spoke of him or of the children.
Sabran did not dare to ask to see her. When Greswold would fain have urged him, he refused with vehemence.
'I dare not—it would be to insult her more. Only if she summon me—but that she will never do.'
'He has been faithless to her,' thought the old man.
All those weeks of her slow and painful restoration to life she was mute, her lips only moving in reply to the questions of her physicians. It seemed to her strange that when her spiritual and mental life had been poisoned to their source, her bodily life should be able mechanically to gather force, and resume its functions. Had matter so far more resistance than the soul?
Her women were frightened at the look upon her face; it had the rigidity, the changelessness of marble, and all the blood seemed gone out of it for ever.
In after days her heart would speak; remembered happiness, lost beliefs, ruined love, would in their turn have place in her misery; but now all she was sensible of was the unbearable insult, the ineffaceable outrage. She was like a queen who beholds the virgin soil of her kingdom invaded and wasted by a traitor.
Any other thing she would have pardoned—infidelity, indifference, cruelty, any sins of manhood's caprice or passion—but who should pardon this? The sin was not alone against herself; it was against every law of decency and truth that ever she had been taught to hold sacred; it was against all those great dead, who lay with the cross on their breasts and their swords by their side, from whom she had received and treasured the traditions of honour, the purity of a race.