Then I remembered: this was the man I had met with the fair young woman going from one survivor to another, asking for news of Messina.
An Italian officer and an Englishman passed, and stood looking down at those men digging in the long trench.
“What do you advise?” asked the officer. “She is tormented; here is her last letter. Nothing will satisfy her unless I find him. I have tried every way; there is no trace, no record. He may have been among those burned or carried out to sea the first days; he may be in that trench. What would you do?”
“Find him,” said the Englishman, “or another in his place, and put up a stone to him. Then she can have a place to lay her flowers and to weep; it’s not his bones, but his memory—” They passed out of earshot.
We moved to another part of the upper terrace and watched half a dozen men take up the flat stone covers of a row of tombs, sunk under the marble pavement.
“What are they doing?” Patsy asked.
“We must make room here, there, everywhere, for these new ones,” Caterina answered. “No one could have expected such a calamity; how could we be prepared?” She spoke with the anxiety of a hostess, who has not beds enough for her guests to sleep in. “These poor dead, they too must lie in sanctified ground; it is their turn.”
“Those buried here before?”
“The people who died of the last cholera.”
“Let us go,” said Patsy, “we’ve seen enough.”