The Lost Girl Part 90

She felt her heart and the child die within her.

"Why?" she said.

Was she to bear a hopeless child?

"You _have_ hope. Don't make a scene," she snapped. And she went downstairs, as she had intended.

And when she got into the kitchen, she forgot what she had come for.

She sat in the darkness on the seat, with all life gone dark and still, death and eternity settled down on her. Death and eternity were settled down on her as she sat alone. And she seemed to hear him moaning upstairs--"I can't come back. I can't come back." She heard it. She heard it so distinctly, that she never knew whether it had been an actual utterance, or whether it was her inner ear which had heard the inner, unutterable sound. She wanted to answer, to call to him. But she could not. Heavy, mute, powerless, there she sat like a lump of darkness, in that doomed Italian kitchen. "I can't come back." She heard it so fatally.

She was interrupted by the entrance of Pancrazio.

"Oh!" he cried, startled when, having come near the fire, he caught sight of her. And he said something, frightened, in Italian.

"Is it you? Why are you in the darkness?" he said.

"I am just going upstairs again."

"You frightened me."

She went up to finish the preparing of the meal. Ciccio came down to Pancrazio. The latter had brought a newspaper. The two men sat on the settle, with the lamp between them, reading and talking the news.

Ciccio's group was called up for the following week, as he had said.

The departure hung over them like a doom. Those were perhaps the worst days of all: the days of the impending departure. Neither of them spoke about it.

But the night before he left she could bear the silence no more.

"You will come back, won't you?" she said, as he sat motionless in his chair in the bedroom. It was a hot, luminous night. There was still a late scent of orange blossom from the garden, the nightingale was shaking the air with his sound. At times other, honey scents wafted from the hills.

"You will come back?" she insisted.

"Who knows?" he replied.

"If you make up your mind to come back, you will come back. We have our fate in our hands," she said.

He smiled slowly.

"You think so?" he said.

"I know it. If you don't come back it will be because you don't want to--no other reason. It won't be because you can't. It will be because you don't want to."

"Who told you so?" he asked, with the same cruel smile.

"I know it," she said.

"All right," he answered.

But he still sat with his hands abandoned between his knees.

"So make up your mind," she said.

He sat motionless for a long while: while she undressed and brushed her hair and went to bed. And still he sat there unmoving, like a corpse. It was like having some unnatural, doomed, unbearable presence in the room. She blew out the light, that she need not see him. But in the darkness it was worse.

At last he stirred--he rose. He came hesitating across to her.

"I'll come back, Allaye," he said quietly. "Be d.a.m.ned to them all."

She heard unspeakable pain in his voice.

"To whom?" she said, sitting up.

He did not answer, but put his arms round her.

"I'll come back, and we'll go to America," he said.

"You'll come back to me," she whispered, in an ecstasy of pain and relief. It was not her affair, where they should go, so long as he really returned to her.

"I'll come back," he said.

"Sure?" she whispered, straining him to her.