Slowly Guisseppi struggled to his feet. He staggered weakly against the wall and buried his face in his arms.
“And you, Rosina!” he sobbed.
This was the final, crushing blow. He felt now that he was indeed dead—dead at the grave of his lost love.
VI.
A taxicab stood in the narrow street near Rosina’s home, its driver ready at the wheel, its engine purring. Behind the drawn blinds, sat Guisseppi, aflame with excitement, peering eagerly through the curtains from time to time.
Guisseppi was desperate. There was no place for the dead among the living. He had learned that clearly. As a “living dead man,” all his experiences had been tragic. He regretted his resuscitation. He longed for the peace of the grave.
His old friends had fallen away from him. Many believed him a spirit damned, who, by some strange dispensation, was spared to life for yet a little while to make more exquisite the final agony reserved for him. Others were intelligent enough to know the truth, but even these were repelled by a certain unwholesomeness, a savor of the sepulchre, that seemed to cling about him.
The girls he had known in his old, gay days would have nothing to do with him. As handsome as ever, as romantic, with a voice as musical and appealing, he was in their imagination enveloped in an atmosphere of the charnel-house, and the curse of hell was branded on his brow.
His relatives held aloof. Between him and even his mother and father he was conscious that a thin shadow had gradually crept, and the tenderness of their love had been cooled by a ghostly fear of this eerie son who had been down among the dead and read with dead eyes the mysteries beyond the tomb.
He had been unable to find employment. It was as if every business house had up a sign, “No dead men need apply.”