"Maurice!" she called, presently, without getting up from her seat,
"I've had such a strange letter from Emile. I'm afraid--I feel as if he
were going to be dreadfully ill or have an accident."
There was no reply.
"Maurice!" she called again.
Then she got up and looked into the bedroom. It was nearly dark, but she
could see her husband's black head on the pillow and hear a sound of
regular breathing. He was asleep already; she had not received his kiss
or tucked him up. She felt absurdly unhappy, as if she had missed a
pleasure that could never come to her again. That, she thought, is one of
the penalties of a great love, the passionate regret it spends on the
tiny things it has failed of. At this moment she fancied--no, she felt
sure--that there would always be a shadow in her life. She had lost
Maurice's kiss after his return from his first absence since their
marriage. And a kiss from his lips still seemed to her a wonderful,
almost a sacred thing, not only a physical act, but an emblem of that
which was mysterious and lay behind the physical. Why had she not let him
kiss her on the terrace? Her sensitive reserve had made her loss. For a
moment she thought she wished she had the careless mind of a peasant.
Lucrezia loved Sebastiano with passion, but she would have let him kiss
her in public and been proud of it. What was the use of delicacy, of
sensitiveness, in the great, coarse thing called life? Even Maurice had
not shared her feeling. He was open as a boy, almost as a peasant boy.
She began to wonder about him. She often wondered about him now in
Sicily. In England she never had. She had thought there that she knew him
as he, perhaps, could never know her. It seemed to her that she had been
almost arrogant, filled with a pride of intellect. She was beginning to
be humbler here, face to face with Etna.
Let him sleep, mystery wrapped in the mystery of slumber!
She sat down in the twilight, waiting till he should wake, watching the
darkness of his hair upon the pillow.
Some time passed, and presently she heard a noise upon the terrace. She
got up softly, went into the sitting-room, and looked out. Lucrezia was
laying the table for collazione.
"Is it half-past one already?" she asked.
"Si, signora."
"But the padrone is still asleep!"
"So is Gaspare in the hay. Come and see, signora."