She who was to have been the mother of his first-born child was lying dead in the white-walled villa where they had once been happy.
Hush! In the soft clear light of an April morning he heard the tolling of the church bell, solemn, slow, measured, at agonising intervals, which left an age of expectancy between the heavy strokes of the clapper.
Vivos voco, mortuos plango.
They bury their dead at daybreak in that fair land of orange and lemon groves. In the early morning of the first day after death, the hastily-fashioned coffin was carried out into the sunshine, and the funeral procession wound slowly up the hill towards the graveyard near the church of Villefranche. George Ransome knew how brief is the interval between death and burial on that southern shore, and he had little doubt that the bell was tolling for her whose heart was beating passionately when the sun began to sink.
So soon! Her grave would be filled in and trodden down before they let him out of prison.
It had never seemed to him that he was to stay long in captivity, or that there could be any difficulty in proving his innocence of any part in the catastrophe, except that fatal part of having upset the balance of a weak mind, and provoked a passionate woman to suicide. As for the confinement of the past night, he had scarcely thought about it. He had a curious semi-consciousness of time and place which was a new experience to him. He found himself forgetting where he was and what had happened. There were strange gaps in his mind—intervals of oblivion—and then there were periods in which he sat looking at the slanting shaft of sunlight between the window and the ground, and trying to count the motes that danced in that golden haze.
The day passed strangely, too—sometimes at railroad pace, sometimes with a ghastly slowness. Then came a night in which sleep never visited his eyelids—a night of bodily and mental restlessness, the greater part of which he spent in futile efforts to open the heavily-bolted door, or to drag the window-bars from their stone sockets. His prison was a relic of the Middle Ages, and Hercules himself could not have got out of it.
In all those endeavours he was actuated by a blind impulse—a feverish desire to be at large again. Not once during that night did he think of his dead wife in her new-made grave on the side of the hill. He had forgotten why they had shut him up in that stony chamber—or rather had imagined another reason for his imprisonment.
He was a political offender—had been deeply concerned in a plot to overthrow Victor Emanuel, and to create a Republic for Italy. He himself was to be President of that Republic. He felt all the power to rule and legislate for a great nation. He compared himself with Solon and with Pericles, to the disadvantage of both. There was a greatness in him which neither of those had ever attained.
“I should rule them as God Himself,” he thought. “It would be a golden age of truth and justice—a millennium of peace and plenty. And while the nations are waiting for me I am shut up here by the treachery of France.”