XXV
A night and a day had passed, and still Artois had not seen Hermione. The autopsy had been finished, and had revealed nothing to change the theory of Dr. Marini as to the determining cause of death. The English stranger had been crossing the dangerous wall of rock, probably in darkness, had fallen, been stunned upon the rocks in the sea beneath, and drowned before he recovered consciousness.
Gaspare said nothing. Salvatore held his peace and began his preparations for America. And Maddalena, if she wept, wept now in secret; if she prayed, prayed in the lonely house of the sirens, near the window which had so often given a star to the eyes that looked down from the terrace of the Casa del Prete.
There was gossip in Marechiaro, and the Pretore still preserved his air of faint suspicion. But that would probably soon vanish under the influence of the Cancelliere, with whom Artois had had some private conversation. The burial had been allowed, and very early in the morning of the day following that of Hermione's arrival at the hotel it took place from the hospital.
Few people knew the hour, and most were still asleep when the coffin was carried down the street, followed only by Hermione, and by Gaspare in a black, ready-made suit that had been bought in the village of Cattaro. Hermione would not allow any one else to follow her dead, and as Maurice had been a Protestant there was no service. This shocked Gaspare, and added to his grief, till Hermione explained that her husband had been of a different religion from that of Sicily, a religion with different rites.
"But we can pray for him, Gaspare," she said. "He loved us, and perhaps he will know what we are doing."
The thought seemed to soothe the boy. He kneeled down by his padrona under the wall of the Campo Santo by which Protestants were buried, and whispered a petition for the repose of the soul of his padrone. Into the gap of earth, where now the coffin lay, he had thrown roses from his father's little terreno near the village. His tears fell fast, and his prayer was scarcely more than a broken murmur of "Povero signorino—povero signorino—Dio ci mandi buon riposo in Paradiso." Hermione could not pray although she was in the attitude of supplication; but when she heard the words of Gaspare she murmured them too. "Buon riposo!" The sweet Sicilian good-night—she said it now in the stillness of the lonely dawn. And her tears fell fast with those of the boy who had loved and served his master.
When the funeral was over she walked up the mountain with Gaspare to the Casa del Prete, and from there, on the following day, she sent a message to Artois, asking him if he would come to see her.
"I don't ask you to forgive me for not seeing you before," she wrote. "We understand each other and do not need explanations. I wanted to see nobody. Come at any hour when you feel that you would like to.