Page:Plays by Jacinto Benavente - Second series (IA playsbyjacintobe00bena).pdf/331

 only sorry that the fault was not real, and that it was not mine, if it might have caused you greater pain had it been so.

. No, Isabel. You are unjust if you have ever thought, however great my offenses against you may have been, that they deserved the punishment of not believing in you, or of doubting your faith for one moment. You cannot know how deeply I love you. I have been cruel and selfish, as you say, I have tortured your heart, but you cannot, you must not doubt my love. It may be that we give no one so much pain in our lives as we do our mother; it may be that there is no love to which we sacrifice less, so sure are we of its possession forever, that forever it will pardon and forgive. With merely living and being happy it seems to us that our mother's love is repaid. But the living faith which inspires us, in appearance makes us seem less devout, all the while in the recesses of our hearts more deeply believing in that holy, never-dying love of which we are assured. What other love in life is equal to this, which is at once and eternally the faith and hope of the heart? Confess that there has never been a moment when you would have exchanged places with any of the other women who have passed through my life; confess that you have always believed that when I have compared you with them all together, the thought of you has been as a halo, as the altar before the image of the saint. Can you imagine how proud I have been to repeat over and over, that among all of them, she alone has been in my heart, she alone has been faithful, she always has been true, she, my wife—as my mother? And do you pretend that María Antonia has acted wisely? No, you do not believe it; you do not think it, because you know that my love is true, and the adoration which I feel, because you were always the one who waited, the one who forgave, always, like a mother, like a saint, like something which is above and superior to