Lucrezia was terrified, almost like one assailed suddenly by robbers, terrified and half incredulous. When her hysteria subsided she was at first unbelieving.
"He cannot be really dead, signora!" she sobbed to Hermione. "The povero signorino. He was so gay! He was so—"
She talked and talked, as Sicilians do when face to face with tragedy.
She recalled Maurice's characteristics, his kindness, his love of climbing, fishing, bathing, his love of the sun—all his love of life.
Hermione had to listen to the story with that body lying on her bed.
Gaspare's grief was speechless, but needed comfort more. There was an element in it of fury which Hermione realized without rightly understanding. She supposed it was the fury of a boy from whom something is taken by one whom he cannot attack.
For God is beyond our reach.
She could not understand the conflict going on in the boy's heart and mind.
He knew that this death was probably no natural death, but a murder.
Neither Maddalena nor her father had been in the Casa delle Sirene when he knocked upon the door in the night. Salvatore had sent Maddalena to spend the night with relations in Marechiaro, on the pretext that he was going to sail to Messina on some business. And he had actually sailed before Gaspare's arrival on the island. But Gaspare knew that there had been a meeting, and he knew what the Sicilian is when he is wronged. The words "vengeance is mine!" are taken in Sicily by each wronged man into his own mouth, and Salvatore was notoriously savage and passionate.