He had always marvelled when he saw in others the interior torturing lashes of jealousy, and its external manifestations. Now he is a victim to this gloomy and fascinating force which comes from the lowest elements of the human system, but which dominates a man entirely. Sometimes he would give his blood to snatch his wife away from the arms of Marco Fiore, at other times he was seized by an exasperation which almost led him to a crime. Then he had to leave Rome and go far away where only memory could follow him. On his return, through the natural power of his equilibrium, he was always calm, patient, and sad.
At last, at the end of three years, so long to a heart which had never known how to love, which perhaps had still not learned to love better but was not inept to suffer, Emilio, with concealed curiosity and anxiety, had learnt that the amorous folly of Marco and Maria had begun to languish, had become a folly’s shadow, and was lapsing into a pale usage. From this knowledge which reached him from reliable sources, from secret inquiries which he had made with extreme caution, knowing how every day that love shadow was vanishing more and more, a unique sentiment, derived from so many opposite sentiments at war with each other, had raised his heart almost to heroism. This was the sentiment of human and Christian pity for a miserable woman who had wanted and still wanted to give her life to her dream, who instead saw all her dream vanish before her in a time which seemed as short as a flash of lightning. Anger long repressed, sorrow long concealed, the offence which wounds without ever a wound appearing, love rendered more supreme and consuming in jealousy itself,--all in Emilio Guasco was sunk in this tender compassion for Maria. He felt within himself all the evangelical virtue of charity, perhaps stronger than any other sentimental impulse. He was the good Samaritan who rescues the dying man on the road-side, doctors his cruel wounds, and pours out the balsam that heals.
Thus the pardon had been offered by Emilio Guasco to the wife who had betrayed and left him. When he had sent her word he had thought nothing more of the past or the future; he had thought only of healing the poor creature’s wounds, struck by passion’s cruel and implacable weapons; he felt within himself a new soul greater, more generous, and superior to sophisms and the world’s axioms. There seemed to be something heroic in his heart, which raised and exalted him as at no other time in his life. The immense tenderness he felt for her reacted on him; he pitied and admired himself like the heroic person in a romance whose story he sometimes read. The nearer the day of her return approached, the more his emotion increased, the more the noble and sublime thing, which is pardon, the law which Christ has given as the most supreme, seemed to find in him a pure interpreter. So on that April evening in the presence of the woman, pale and trembling as he had never seen her before and would never see her again, he had pronounced those Christian words which cancel, absolve, and redeem--