He rode on again.
"It does not matter," he repeated.
He was thinking of the English signora standing beside the bed in her wet skirts and holding the hand of the weeping boy.
It was the first time in his life that he had ever sacrificed a good cigar.
He wondered why he did so now, but he did not care to return just then to the Casa del Prete.
XXIII
Hermione longed for quiet, for absolute silence.
It seemed strange to her that she still longed for anything—strange and almost horrible, almost inhuman. But she did long for that, to be able to sit beside her dead husband and to be undisturbed, to hear no voice speaking, no human movement, to see no one. If it had been possible she would have closed the cottage against every one, even against Gaspare and Lucrezia. But it was not possible. Destiny did not choose that she should have this calm, this silence. It had seemed to her, when fear first came upon her, as if no one but herself had any real concern with Maurice, as if her love conferred upon her a monopoly. This monopoly had been one of joy. Now it should be one of sorrow. But now it did not exist. She was not weeping for Maurice. But others were. She had no one to go to. But others came to her, clung to her. She could not rid herself of the human burden.
She might have been selfish, determined, she might have driven the mourners out. But—and that was strange, too—she found herself pitying them, trying to use her intellect to soothe them.