He listened with infinite gratitude to these words of charity coming from lips from which his injustice had wrung so many sobs. For a moment this forgiveness coming to him from his victim melted to tenderness the weight of remorse, the alleviation of which he had so long sought in vain, and he said to her in tones of deep emotion:
"What suffering I have caused you!"
"Do not reproach yourself for it," she said, with that angelic mildness which caused in him so strange a feeling at once of sadness and of consolation—of sadness, for this mildness betokened so great a shattering, of consolation, for the balm of this pity penetrated to the most secret recesses of his wounded heart—"Yes," she went on, shaking her head, "it is this suffering that has saved me, and it is through it that I have judged my life. When we parted in the way you know, I returned here nearly mad, I had to take to my bed for many days, and unceasingly I found the eyes of the man I had deceived fixed upon me with devotion and sadness! By what I suffered, I understood the suffering that I had caused and the evil that I had spread around one. The shame into which I had fallen appeared to me, and in the presence of death I inwardly vowed to make every endeavour to become once more a virtuous woman."
She paused; he saw clearly that she wished to speak to him of the other, to tell him that man had not been received at her house again; but was not her silence after the last sentence sufficiently eloquent?
"And then," she resumed, "that was again for your sake. To cause you that remorse for having ruined me—ah! the distraction caused by injustice could alone have impelled me to such unworthy revenge. But I had seen you weep. I thought to myself: He will return to me some day if he is suffering, and if he be not suffering, why cause him to suffer? But no, he will return to me, and I will tell him to live in peace. There is now nothing in my life but my duty towards my son and his father, and you must know that I found strength for this resolve only in the remnant of my affection for you. But I have perhaps the right to ask you for a promise in exchange for what I have given you."
She added in a deep tone:
"In memory of me, for we must see each other no more, say that you will never trample upon a heart, that you will respect feeling wherever you may find it."
He was silent. These last words, in revealing to him the transformation wrought in this soul by its martyrdom, reassured him concerning the terrible anxiety of those cruel weeks in London. After perceiving all the ruin that may be multiplied by egotistical and mistrustful injustice, he felt the supreme beneficence of pity. It was through having pity for her lover's remorse, pity for her husband's love, pity for her son's future, that Helen had been arrested in the fatal path. It was from pity that she was blotting out all their sad and gloomy past. It was further from pity for her husband and for her son that she might perhaps find means to live a life of reparation if only he, Armand, pitied and assisted her.
Thus, the principle of salvation which he had failed to obtain from impotent reason, and which the dogmas of faith had not given him, he now met with in that virtue of charity which foregoes all demonstrations and all revelations—though is it not itself the abiding and supreme revelation? And he felt that something had sprung up within him through which he might always find reasons for living and acting—the religion of human suffering.