"I will not see Hippolyte again," thought George. "I have dark forebodings. I know that, in five or six days, I shall go to seek the hermitage of our dreams; but, at the same time, I know that it will be in vain, that I shall achieve nothing, that I shall hurl myself against an unknown obstacle! How strange and indefinable are my feelings! It is not I who know; but some one in me knows that all is about to end."
He thought: "She does not write to me any more. Since I am here I have received from her only two short telegrams—one from Pallanza, the other from Bellagio. I never felt so far away from her. Perhaps at this moment another man pleases her. Is it possible that love falls out of a woman's heart all at once? Why not? Her heart is tired; at Albano, warmed anew by buried memories, it palpitated for perhaps the last time. I was mistaken. But certain incidents, for him who knows how to consider them under their ideal forms, bear in themselves secret significance, precise and independent of appearances. Well! when I examine in thought all the little incidents constituting our life at Albano, they assume an unquestionable significance and an evident character; they are final. On the evening of Good Friday, when we arrived at the station at Rome, and when we said good-by, and the cab carried her off in the fog, did it not seem to me that I had just lost her forever? Had I not the innate conviction that all was at an end?" His imagination presented to him the gesture with which Hippolyte had lowered her black veil after the last kiss. And the sun, the azure, the flowers, the general joyousness of nature, suggested to him only this reflection: "Without her, life for me is impossible."
At this moment his mother leaned over the balustrade, looked towards the porch of the cathedral, and said:
"The procession is leaving the church."
The funereal brotherhood left the porch with its insignia. Four men in cowled robes carried the coffin on their shoulders. Two long files of men, also in cowled robes, marched behind with lighted tapers, only their eyes being visible through the two holes in their hoods. From time to time the breeze made the tiny and almost invisible flames flicker, and even extinguished some of them; and the candles consumed themselves in tears. Each cowled man had at his side a barefooted child, who collected the melted wax in the hollow of his two hands.
When the whole cortège had spread out in the street, musicians dressed in red with white facings struck up a funeral march. The undertaker's assistants regulated their steps to the time of the music; the brass instruments glittered in the sun.
"What sadness and ridicule in the honors rendered to the dead!" thought George. He saw himself in a coffin, imprisoned between the boards, carried by that masquerade of people, escorted by those candles and that horrible noise of trumpets; and the idea filled him with disgust. Then his attention was attracted to the ragged urchins who strove to collect the waxen tears, walking unevenly, painfully, the body bent, their eyes fixed on the flickering flames.
"Poor Don Defendente!" murmured the mother, watching the cortège as it disappeared in the distance.
Then, immediately, as if she were addressing herself and not her son, she added wearily:
"Why poor? He is at peace now; it is we who are to be pitied."