Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 2).djvu/141

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IN MAREMMA.
133

had said that she believed him: this was enough.

She waited for him of his own free will to tell her more. He did not do so; apathy, and the selfishness of extreme feebleness and misery, kept him mute and indifferent, and absorbed in his own past.

An extreme lassitude and impatience came over him turn by turn; his long malady and his terrible privations had unnerved and paralysed him. Great tears would gather in his eyes and roll down his cheeks. He was heart-sick and bruised, body and soul; and there was no opiate in her pharmacy of simples that could give him rest from his own thoughts. Terror was always with him; and he never escaped from it even in his disturbed and heavy sleep.

As he recovered his strength, this life became irksome and almost unendurable; these darksome chambers of the dead seemed almost as abhorrent to him as the prison cell of Gorgona. There was no change from one morn to another; only when the sun had set did he dare to come to the door of the tomb, and breathe the air, and cast a hurried glance, the glance of the hunted