Six weeks passed away without incident after Giovanni had left, and she had received three letters from him--one from Naples, written before going on board the steamer, one from Port Said, and one from Massowah after his arrival there. The expedition was to start in three days, he said; it had been waiting for him and the officer who was to take the command, and who had gone with him.
A short time after receiving this last letter Angela was reading the news from an evening paper to Madame Bernard, translating the paragraphs offhand into French, by force of habit, because her old governess had often made her do it for practice.
Suddenly her eyes became fixed, the colour left her face, and she dropped the newspaper with a short, loud cry, falling back in her chair at the same moment.
Madame Bernard snatched up the sheet and glanced at the place where the girl had last been reading.
The expedition had fallen in with hostile natives a week after starting and had been massacred to a man. The names of the dead were given, and Giovanni's was the second on the list.
Angela lived for weeks in a state of sleepless apathy, so far as her companion could see. She scarcely spoke, and ate barely enough to keep herself alive. She seemed not to sleep at all, for two or three times during every night Madame Bernard got up and came to her room, and she always found her lying quite motionless on her back, her eyes wide open and staring at the tasteless little pattern of flowers stencilled in colours on the ceiling. Once Madame Bernard proposed to take away the night-light that burned in a cup on the floor, but Angela shook her head almost energetically. She never opened a book either, nor occupied herself in any way, but seemed content to sit still all day and to lie awake all night, never complaining, and never even speaking unless her friend asked her a direct question. Every morning at sunrise she put on her hat and went to the ancient church of San Crisogono, which is served by Trinitarian monks. Sometimes Madame Bernard went with her, but more often she was accompanied by the one woman-servant who cooked and did the housework.
The unhappy girl found neither consolation nor hope in the daily service; she went to it because, somehow, it seemed to be the only thing she could do for the dead. She knelt down every day on the same spot, and remained kneeling till after the priest and the acolyte were gone; she took her missal with her, but never looked at it, and her lips never moved in prayer; she felt no impulse to go to confession, nor any devotional craving for the Communion. The mass was a mere form to her, but she attended it regularly, as if she expected that much of herself and would not do less than the least that seemed to be her duty. That was all. Prayer in any form of words frightened her, for it soon brought her near to that blinding darkness which she had already met twice and had learned to dread; her present misfortune was incomparably greater than those that had gone before, and she was sure that if the outer night rose round her again it would take her soul down into itself to eternal extinction. If she had been physically stronger, she might have tried to call this a foolish delusion; weak as she was, and growing daily weaker, it seemed as certain as that her body must perish instantly if she walked over a precipice. The past was distorted, the present had no meaning, and there was no future; she vaguely understood Dante's idea that the body may be left on earth, apparently alive, for years after the soul has departed from it, for the evil Alberigo's spirit told the poet that his own body and Branca d'Oria's were still animated by demons when their souls were already in the torment of the eternal ice. But Angela felt rather as if her living self were a mere senseless shell, uninhabited by any spirit, bad or good, and moved by the mechanics of nature rather than by her own will or another's.