If she were dead—if those people had killed her——
Never had Vanno seen any one sleep so soundly. There was no flicker of the eyelids, no quivering of the nostrils, no rising and falling of the breast. He laid his hand over her heart, and could not feel it beating, yet he was not sure that it did not beat very faintly. There were bounding pulses in his hand as he touched her. He could not tell whether it was his own blood that throbbed, or whether hers spoke to his, through living veins.
Very gently he lifted her head, and laying it down again, higher on the pillow whence it seemed to have slipped, he moved the arm that had supported it. Then kneeling beside the bed, he kissed her hand again and again. It was very cold, cold as a lily, he thought, yet not so cold as a lily killed by the frost.
If some one had come to him at that moment and said, "Mary is dead," he would have believed that it was the truth, for she looked as if her eyes had seen the light beyond this world. She was not smiling, yet there was a radiance on her face which did not seem to be given by the sunset. Rather did the light appear to come from within. Yet, because no one said aloud the words that went echoing through his heart, Vanno would not believe that Mary was dead.
"If I have lost you in this world," he said aloud, as though she could hear him, "I will follow where you are, to tell you that we belong to one another through all eternity, and nothing can part us. But you haven't gone. You could not leave me so."
As he spoke to her, on his knees, her cold hand pressed against his warm throat, he kept his eyes upon her face, hungrily, watching for some sign that her spirit heard him from very far off. But there was no change. The dark, double line of her lashes did not break. Her lips kept their faint, mysterious half-smile.
Vanno resolved that if she had gone, he too would go, for without her the world was empty and dead.
It was then that Peter stole to the open door with Apollonia, and looked in. Her impulse was to cry out, and run into the room to sob at her friend's feet; but something held her back. It was as if she caught a strain of music; and she remembered the air. It came from the opera of "Romeo è Giuletta," which she had heard in New York a year ago. The music was as reminiscently distinct as if her brain were a gramophone. She had seen a tableau like this, of two lovers, while that music played in the theatre; and with tears in her eyes she had thought, "If only Romeo had waited, if he had had faith, he could have called her back again."
She did not enter the room, but standing by the door she said softly yet clearly, "Don't let her go. Call her spirit. Maybe it is near. Tell her that you are calling her back to happiness and love. I believe she will come to you, because you are her heart and her soul. I am going, and I will bring a doctor. But you are the only one who can save her now."
The girl's voice had no personality for Vanno. He did not turn his mind for an instant to Peter. It was as if his own thoughts spoke aloud and gave him counsel what to do.