The Call of the Blood Part 97

"I am very sorry, signora," he said--"very sorry."

"Must I see the Pretore?" she said.

"I am afraid so, signora. They will want to ask you a few questions. The body ought not to have been moved from the place where--"

"We could not leave him in the sea," she said, as she had said in the night.

"No, no. You will only just have to say--"

"I will tell them what I know. He went down to bathe."

"Yes. But the Pretore will want to know why he went to Salvatore's terreno."

"I suppose he bathed from there. He knew the people in the Casa delle Sirene, I believe."

She spoke indifferently. It seemed to her so utterly useless, this inquiry by strangers into the cause of her sorrow.

"I must just write something," she added.

She went up the steps into the sitting-room. Gaspare was there with three men--the Pretore, the Cancelliere and the Maresciallo. As she came in the strangers turned and saluted her with grave politeness, all looking earnestly at her with their dark eyes. But Gaspare did not look at her.

He had the ugly expression on his face that Hermione had noticed the day before.

"Will you please allow me to write a line to a friend?" Hermione said.

"Then I shall be ready to answer your questions."

"Certainly, signora," said the Pretore; "we are very sorry to disturb you, but it is our duty."

He had gray hair and a dark mustache, and his black eyes looked as if they had been varnished.

Hermione went to the writing-table, while the men stood in silence filling up the little room.

"What shall I say?" she thought.

She heard the boots of the Cancelliere creak as he shifted his feet upon the floor. The Maresciallo cleared his throat. There was a moment of hesitation. Then he went to the steps and spat upon the terrace.

"Don't come yet," she wrote, slowly.

Then she turned round.

"How long will your inquiry take, do you think, signore?" she asked of the Pretore. "When will--when can the funeral take place?"

"Signora, I trust to-morrow. I hope--I do not suppose there will be any reason to suspect, after what Dr. Marini has told us and we have seen, that the death was anything but an accident--an accident which we all most deeply grieve for."

"It was an accident."

She stood by the table with the pen in her hand.

"I suppose--I suppose he must be buried in the Campo Santo?" she said.

"Do you wish to convey the body to England, signora?"

"Oh no. He loved Sicily. He wished to stay always here, I think, although--"

She broke off.

"I could never take him away from Sicily. But there is a place here--under the oak-trees. He was very fond of it."

Gaspare began to sob, then controlled himself with a desperate effort, turned round and stood with his face to the wall.

"I suppose, if I could buy a piece of land there, it could not be permitted--?"

She looked at the Pretore.

"I am very sorry, signora, such a thing could not possibly be allowed. If the body is buried here it must be in the Campo Santo."

"Thank you."

She turned to the table and wrote after "Don't come yet":

"They are taking him away now to the hospital in the village. I shall come down. I think the funeral will be to-morrow. They tell me he must be buried in the Campo Santo. I should have liked him to lie here under the oak-trees.

HERMIONE."

When Artois read this note tears came into his eyes.

No event in his life had shocked him so much as the death of Delarey.

It had shocked both his intellect and his heart. And yet his intellect could hardly accept it as a fact. When, early that morning, one of the servants of the Hotel Regina Margherita had rushed into his room to tell him, he had refused to believe it. But then he had seen the fishermen, and finally Dr. Marini. And he had been obliged to believe. His natural impulse was to go to his friend in her trouble as she had come to him in his. But he checked it. His agony had been physical. Hers was of the affections, and how far greater than his had ever been! He could not bear to think of it. A great and generous indignation seized him, an indignation against the catastrophes of life. That this should be Hermione's reward for her n.o.ble unselfishness roused in him something that was like fury; and then there followed a more torturing fury against himself.

He had deprived her of days and weeks of happiness. Such a short span of joy had been allotted to her, and he had not allowed her to have even that. He had called her away. He dared not trust himself to write any word of sympathy. It seemed to him that to do so would be a hideous irony, and he sent the line in pencil which she had received. And then he walked up and down in his little sitting-room, raging against himself, hating himself.

In his now bitterly acute consideration of his friendship with Hermione he realized that he had always been selfish, always the egoist claiming rather than the generous donor. He had taken his burdens to her, not weakly, for he was not a weak man, but with a desire to be eased of some of their weight. He had always been calling upon her for sympathy, and she had always been lavishly responding, scattering upon him the wealth of her great heart.

And now he had deprived her of nearly all the golden time that had been stored up for her by the decree of the G.o.ds, of G.o.d, of Fate, of--whatever it was that ruled, that gave and that deprived.

A bitterness of shame gripped him. He felt like a criminal. He said to himself that the selfish man is a criminal.

"She will hate me," he said to himself. "She must. She can't help it."

Again the egoist was awake and speaking within him. He realized that immediately and felt almost a fear of this persistence of character. What is the use of cleverness, of clear sight into others, even of genius, when the self of a man declines to change, declines to be what is not despicable?

"Mon Dieu!" he thought, pa.s.sionately. "And even now I must be thinking of my cursed self!"

He was beset by an intensity of desire to do something for Hermione. For once in his life his heart, the heart she believed in and he was inclined to doubt or to despise, drove him as it might have driven a boy, even such a one as Maurice. It seemed to him that unless he could do something to make atonement he could never be with Hermione again, could never bear to be with her again. But what could he do?

"At least," he thought, "I may be able to spare her something to-day. I may be able to arrange with these people about the funeral, about all the practical things that are so frightful a burden to the living who have loved the dead, in the last moments before the dead are given to the custody of the earth."

And then he thought of the inquiry, of the autopsy. Could he not help her, spare her perhaps, in connection with them?