Hermione found that she would gain nothing by starting that night. By
leaving early the next morning she would arrive at Trapani in time to
catch a steamer which left at midnight for Tunis, reaching Africa at
nine on the following morning. From Tunis a day's journey by train would
bring her to Kairouan. If the steamer were punctual she might be able to
catch a train immediately on her arrival at Tunis. If not, she would have
to spend one day there.
Already she felt as if she were travelling. All sense of peace had left
her. She seemed to hear the shriek of engines, the roar of trains in
tunnels and under bridges, to shake with the oscillation of the carriage,
to sway with the dip and rise of the action of the steamer.
Swiftly, as one in haste, she wrote down times of departure and arrival:
Cattaro to Messina, Messina to Palermo, Palermo to Trapani, Trapani to
Tunis, Tunis to Kairouan, with the price of the ticket--a return ticket.
When that was done and she had laid down her pen, she began for the first
time to realize the change a morsel of paper had made in her life, to
realize the fact of the closeness of her new knowledge of what was and
what was coming to Maurice's ignorance. The travelling sensation within
her, an intense interior restlessness, made her long for action, for some
ardent occupation in which the body could take part. She would have liked
to begin at once to pack, but all her things were in the bedroom where
Maurice was sleeping. Would he sleep forever? She longed for him to wake,
but she would not wake him. Everything could be packed in an hour. There
was no reason to begin now. But how could she remain just sitting there
in the great tranquillity of this afternoon of spring, looking at the
long, calm line of Etna rising from the sea, while Emile, perhaps, lay
dying?
She got up, went once more to the terrace, and began to pace up and down
under the awning. She had not told Lucrezia that she was going on the
morrow. Maurice must know first. What would he say? How would he take it?
And what would he do? Even in the midst of her now growing sorrow--for
at first she had hardly felt sorry, had hardly felt anything but that
intense restlessness which still possessed her--she was preoccupied with
that. She meant, when he woke, to give him the telegram, and say simply
that she must go at once to Artois. That was all. She would not ask, hint
at anything else. She would just tell Maurice that she could not leave
her dearest friend to die alone in an African city, tended only by an
Arab, and a doctor who came to earn his fee.