not contemptuously now, but still coldly. ‘Why should I?’
He raised his eyes and met hers steadily, and she saw that there was no mistaking the truth.
‘I give you my word of honour,’ he said slowly, and waited.
She could not speak then, because her joy was so great, in spite of herself; and he would not say more; he only waited while she looked steadily at the mantelpiece, choking down something and hoping that he could not see her face clearly in the rather dim light. He would not stoop to ask if she believed his word, and she was dumb. It was too much, all at once.
Presently, when she thought she could trust her voice, she tried to speak. It had seemed a long time.
‘It is——’ she began.
But she broke off, for she felt the great cry coming in the word that should have followed. Therefore instead of speaking she held out her hand to him and turned her face away from his. They were just so near that by leaning far forward he could hold her fingers. He pressed them quietly for one moment, a little hard, perhaps, but with no attempt to hold them.
‘Thank you,’ he said, not very steadily.
She had regretted the little impulsive action at once, expecting that he would kiss her hand, as almost any man might have done with less reason. But she was glad that he had not; glad, and grateful to him. Perhaps he knew it, but she was able to speak now; he should not think that he had gained a hairbreadth’s advantage.
‘I am glad that you have lived a good life,’ she said, much more kindly than she had spoken yet. ‘But you must not call it faithfulness. You must not mean that you have been faithful to the memory of a great sin, of the worst deed you ever did. It would have been much better to forget me.’
‘You do not understand,’ he answered. ‘My sins are on my soul, and yours with them, if you have any. I am wicked enough to hope that I may never forget you, and that I may live till I die as I have lived since we parted. It is the least I can do, not for your sake, but out of respect for myself and regret for the worst deed I ever did. Yes, you are right, it was that. The question that fills my life is this: Can I in any way atone to you for that deed? Can you ever forgive me so far as not to hate me, and not to despise the mere thought of me, so far as to be willing that I should live in the same city with you and see you sometimes?’
He waited for her answer, but it was long before it came. When she tried to collect her thoughts she was amazed and frightened by the change that had come over her in the last few minutes. Her impulse was to confess frankly that she had always loved him, though she could not forgive him, and to implore him to go away and never to come near her again; and then she remembered that she had said those very words to him long ago under the ilex-trees in the Villa Borghese, with many cruel ones which neither had forgotten. He had given up his leave then, and had gone back to his regiment in a distant city, and he had never come near her nor written to her since.
But there was more than that, much more. He had lived a clean life. She knew the world well enough now, and she knew what the lives of most unmarried men are at Castiglione’s age. Had she not a son to bring up, for whom she prayed daily that he might grow to manhood without reproach as well as without fear? She knew something of how men lived, and she could guess, as far as an honest woman may, at the daily temptations that must assail a good-looking young officer in the smartest cavalry regiment in the country; she guessed, too, that one who chose to live very differently from most of his comrades might not always escape jests which would not turn to actual ridicule only because Castiglione was not a man to be laughed at with impunity; not by any means.
She believed him, and though she might tell him that he was faithful to a sin, to something dangerously near a crime, his faith had been for her, and she could not deny it to herself. It was for her sake that he had not lived like the rest.
Then she covered her eyes with her hand and she saw her own past life clearly, and dared to look at it. The ugly blot was there, plain enough; but if the fault had really been all his, why should the stain look so very black after all those years? He believed that he had sinned against her, not with her; and so she had told herself—and had told him so with bitter reproaches before they had parted. Was it quite, quite true? If it was, she had no cause to reproach herself for the catastrophe. Yet since that hour she had accused herself daily. Of what? Of having loved Baldassare del Castiglione? But she had loved him innocently and dearly when she was seventeen, and ever since. Her mother had known it, but he was poor, he was no match for a girl who was something of an heiress. She had done as many other girls did and always will do; she had yielded to parental pressure, she had promised herself to forget, thinking it would be easy; she had married Montalto, making the great marriage of that season; she had begun to be a wife believing, poor soul, that she had done right in obeying her mother as a daughter should. But she had not forgotten.
Even that was no sin. It was her misfortune, and the natural consequence of a false system that sacrificed too much to money, or to money and name. She had actually been vain of marrying Montalto, for though he bore only the title of count, he was an authentic Count of the Empire, which is quite a different matter from being a Roman ‘conte.’ It had been a very great marriage indeed, and Maria had really been a little foolishly vain of becoming his wife. He had two historic castles in Italy as well as an historical palace in Rome and an historical estate on the Austrian frontier, and he was heir to historical lands in Spain by his mother; and he had a great number of historic ancestors who had been Counts of the Empire and Grandees of Spain, and hereditary Knights of the Sovereign Order of Malta. Everything about Montalto was historical, including his grave face and pointed black beard, and he might have passed for the original of more than one portrait in his historic gallery. His family even had a well-attested White Lady who appeared when one of them was going to die!
But all these things could not make the young wife forget Baldassare del Castiglione, who was only a more or less penniless officer in the Piedmont Lancers. The worst of it was that Montalto liked him, instinctively because his name was also so extremely historical, and fatally because husbands are the last to discover their wives’ preferences. Montalto had thrown Maria and Castiglione together.
She had gone to confession again and again, for she had been brought up to be very devout. Her confessor told her each time that she must avoid the man she loved and pray to forget him. She answered that her husband liked him and constantly asked him to the house; that she could not beg Montalto to change his attitude towards a friend without giving a good reason; and that the only reason she had was that she loved Baldassare with all her heart, though she was told it was wrong now that she was married, and she prayed that she might forget him and love her husband. Her confessor, having ascertained by further questions that she and Castiglione had avowed their love for each other in bygone days, long before her marriage, bade her appeal to the young man’s generosity, and beg him to refuse Montalto’s constant invitations and to see her as little as possible. But the confessor did not know the man. Maria followed the priest’s advice, but Baldassare utterly refused to do what she asked, and became more and more unmanageable from that day. Surely that was not her fault. It was not with this that she reproached herself. She had been afraid to tell Montalto, that was true; there had been one day, at last, when she should have confessed to him, instead of to the priest; she should have thrown herself upon his mercy and implored him to take her away. But then she had lacked courage. She had told herself that her husband loved her devotedly in his silent, respectful way, and that to tell him the truth would be the ruin of his happiness. She felt so sure that his honour was safe! And meanwhile Castiglione grew more passionate every day, more reckless and more uncontrollable; and she loved him the more, and he knew it, though she would not tell him so. She accused herself of that. She should have gone to her husband for protection, for his happiness was far less to him then than his honour. Some women would have invented an untruth as a means
