In Maremma/Volume 3/Chapter 50
CHAPTER L.
WEEK went by and he did not return. To her it seemed as if the whole peopled world was dead.
A great despair fell on her, numbing, deadening, destroying all her life as paralysis falls upon the body and enchains it. No tears came to her eyes; no sound came to her lips. She was like a creature suddenly struck dumb.
She crouched in a corner of the inner chamber by Joconda's coffin, and stayed there as a frightened animal whose spirit is all gone out in terror, crouches in a corner, refusing in the stupidity of its fear even to take what would keep life in it.
A week went by, and she crept up into the air, and sat half the hot hours through under the tall tree-heaths in the sand; looking, looking, looking across those sunburnt levels over which he had passed away to the unknown world. For all that seemed left to her of him, it might have been but a dream that ever she had found him there, seated beside the embers of her fire on that August eve.
She was not surprised that he had gone. She had never thought that he would stay, once knowing.
He had gone; she did not reproach him; she did not even wonder. She would have wondered if he had stayed.
She had known very well that when she had told him he was free she had drawn the knife across the throat of her living joy and killed it for ever.
She did not reason on it, or protest against her doom; it seemed to her inevitable, as that when the sun rose darkness fled. The instinctive fatalism, the strange passivity, that are in the southern temper, and succeed its gusts of passion, its heat of rage or love, made her accept her abandonment as a thing not to be questioned; to be borne as any visitation of nature is borne by the earth, though it trembles and changes as the earthquake destroys or the flood effaces it.
Thought seemed dead in her, dead with all other forms of life.
He was gone, he was hers no more; this was all that she knew.
To her as to him who mourned for Daphnis in the Sicilian vales, it seemed as though the very flowers of earth must lament his loss, and the very stone of the rock sigh because it no more could echo to his voice. To her all creation seemed stricken, deserted, mute.
Her happiness was dead, and all living things seemed to her to die with it.
The terrible days, the yet more terrible nights, dragged on; the vacant hours with no pulse of gladness beating in them passed away in slow procession. No more did she rise and greet the sun with smiling eyes; no more did the twilight seem a messenger of heaven; no more was every breath a sigh of deep content.
No more: no more.
The silence that follows on separation has a likeness so frightful to the eternal separation of death that it brings with it the same unspeakable terror, the same sense of endless, unutterable loss. It is separation, not sleep, that is death's image.
Her soul was dark and empty, like the spent lamp and the dry cup that he had need of no longer.
The light of the world burned now for him, and he could drink from the springs of the world's pleasure-places. He did not want these sad and humble things of hers. She rebelled no more than the earthen vessel and the bronze lamp rebelled because they lay untouched.
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