Donna Micaela looks up with inexpressible dismay. He surely must understand that she has nothing to do with it.
She goes out to the gallery and sends Luca down with the request that they will be silent.
When she comes back, Gaetano has risen. He offers her his hand; he wishes to go.
Donna Micaela puts out her hand almost without knowing what she is doing. But then she draws it back; “No, no,” she says.
He wishes to go, and who knows whether he will come again on the morrow. She has not been able to talk to him; she has not been able to say a word to him of all that she wished to say.
Surely there was no need for them to be like ordinary lovers. That man had given her life all its life for many years. Whether he spoke to her of love or not was of no importance; yet she wishes to tell him what he has been to her.
And now, just now. One has to make the most of one’s opportunities when Gaetano is in question. She dares not let him go.
“You must not go yet,” she says. “I have something to say to you.”
She draws forward a chair for him; she herself places herself a little behind him. His eyes are too gay to-night, they trouble her.
Then she begins to speak. She lays before him the great, hidden treasures of her life. They were all the words he had said to her and all the dreams he had set her to dreaming. She had not lost one. She had collected and saved them up. They had been the only richness in her poor life.
In the beginning she speaks fast, as if repeating a lesson. She is afraid of him; she does not know whether he likes her to speak. At last she dares to look at him. He is serious now, no longer malicious. He sits still and listens as if he would not lose a syllable. Just now his face was sickly and ashen, but now it suddenly changes. His face begins to shine as though transfigured.
She talks and talks. She looks at him, and now she is beautiful. How could she help being beautiful? At last she can speak out to him, she can tell him how love came to her and how it has never left her since. Finally she can tell him how he has been all the world to her.
Words cannot say enough; she takes his hand and kisses it.
He lets her do it without moving. The color in his cheeks grows no deeper, but it becomes clearer, more transparent. She remembers Gandolfo, who had said that Gaetano’s face was so white that it shone.