"Did I?"
"Now God has taken her...."
"I wish I thought so, Raul."
"Don't say that," he objected.
"You know how I feel, you know what I believe. I can't lie, even at this time." The gentleness of her speech took away its offense. "I wish I could believe in immortality. It would be my comfort too, you know. I need that comfort."
Raul fingered his pipe in his pocket. It was not often he resented Lucienne's Teutonic independence, her foreignness, her atheism. Glancing beyond her, he felt the sorrow of his friend Manuel, expressed in his face, stooped shoulders, and bowed head. He looked at the raw burial place, the palms with their tattered greens and browns, fronds over the headstones and markers in this family plot. A mound of vines hid his grandfather's stone, and the same vines in exuberance scrambled toward the newly upturned earth that would cover Caterina. Raul determined to have the cemetery cleaned and properly tended: by the end of the week the graves should be cleared and reornamented with shells.
Men were approaching, carrying Don Fernando, who had refused to attend chapel service but who had demanded to be brought to the grave. The men stumbled over roots; Fernando cried out; lizards fled under vines; birds soared away.
The Radziwills and de Selvas walked together and Father Gabriel and Angelina followed; then the peasants, like white ants, sifted through the grove. Vicente, ashamed of himself, had hidden in the stable.
They were a courageous-looking lot. The sunburned hacendados had the bodies of people who live outdoors, for even the asthmatic Count had been a stockman. The powdered women stood out among the peasants who needed only a feather or two to put them back a thousand years. Fine faces, buck faces, pretty girls, hags with tortilla cheeks, all gazed with sympathy at the grave of the child.
A bright cloud hung over the group, its shadow twisting toward the slope of the volcano. Shadows flecked the grove, the bent heads, the casket and its wilting flowers; other shadows fled across fields where oxen grazed. Gabriel said a few words and prayed and Angelina wept, clinging to Raul's arm, hating his black, hating Lucienne. She longed to return to her room and hide her grief, to be away from Lucienne's auburn hair, her placid face. Had she never known tragedy? Why had she come? Not out of respect! No, no ... to see Raul, to bribe him away, to laugh at her sorrow ... let me go, Raul. I'll go back alone!