She listened quietly for a while. Then she interrupted him almost compassionately.
“How did you become so?”
“I thought of Sicily,” he said submissively.
“You thought of Sicily,” she repeated thoughtfully. “And why did you come home?”
“I came home to cause an insurrection.”
It was as if they had spoken of an illness, a chill, that he had contracted, and that could quite easily be cured.
“You came home to be our ruin,” she said, sternly.
“As you will; as you will,” he said, complying. “You can call it so. As everything is going now, you are certainly right to call it so. Ah, if they had not given me false information; if I had not come a week too late! Is it not like us Sicilians to let the government anticipate us? When I came the leaders were already arrested, the island garrisoned with forty thousand men. Everything lost!”
It sounded strangely blank when he said that “everything lost.” And for that which never could be anything, he had lost happiness. His opinions and principles seemed to him now to be dry cobwebs, which had captured him. He wished to tear himself away to come to her. She was the only reality, the only thing that was his. So he had felt before. It came back now. She was the only thing in the world.
“They are, however, fighting to-day in Paternó.”