At the Antico Giuseppone, Artois left the boat from the islet and,
taking another, was rowed towards the public gardens of Naples, whose
trees were faintly visible far off across the Bay. Usually he talked
familiarly to any Neapolitan with whom he found himself, but to-day he
was taciturn, and sat in the stern of the broad-bottomed craft looking
towards the city in silence while the boatman plied his oars. The
memory of his conversation with Hermione in the Grotto of Virgil, of
her manner, the look in her eyes, the sound of her voice there, gave him
food for thought that was deep and serious.
Although Artois had an authoritative, and often an ironical manner that
frightened timid people, he was a man capable of much emotion and of
great loyalty. He did not easily trust or easily love, but in those
whose worth he had thoroughly proved he had a confidence as complete as
that of a child. And where he placed his complete confidence he placed
also his affection. The one went with the other almost as inevitably as
the wave goes with the wind.
In their discussion about the emotion of the heart Artois had spoken the
truth to Hermione. As he had grown older he had felt the influence of
women less. The pleasures of sentiment had been gradually superceded
in his nature--or so at least he honestly believed--by the purely
intellectual pleasures. More and more completely and contentedly had
he lived in his work, and in the life of preparation for it. This life
could never be narrow, for Artois was a traveller, and studied many
lands.
In the years that had elapsed since the tragedy in Sicily, when the
husband of Hermione had met his death suddenly in the sea, almost in
sight of the home of the girl he had betrayed, the fame of Artois had
grown steadily. And he was jealous of his fame almost as a good woman is
jealous of her honor. This jealousy had led him to a certain selfishness
of which he was quite aware--even to a certain hardness such as he had
hinted to Hermione. Those who strove, or seemed likely to strive to
interrupt him in his work, he pushed out of his life. Even if they were
charming women he got rid of them. And the fact that he did so proved
to him, and not improbably to them, that he was more wrapped up in the
gratification of the mind than in the gratification of the heart, or
of the body. It was not that the charm of charming women had ceased to
please him, but it seemed to have ceased really to fascinate him.
Long ago, before Hermione married, he had felt for her a warm and
intimate friendship. He had even been jealous of Maurice. Without being
at all in love, he had cared enough for Hermione to be jealous. Before
her marriage he had looked forward in imagination down a vista of long
years, and had seen her with a husband, then with children, always more
definitely separated from himself.
And he had seen himself exceptionally alone, even almost miserably
alone.
Then fate had spun tragedy into her web. He had nearly died in Africa,
and had been nursed back to life by this friend of whom he had been
jealous. And they had gone together to Sicily, to the husband whose
memory Hermione still adored. And then had followed swiftly the murder,
the murderer’s departure to America, saved by the silence of Gaspare,
and the journey of the bereaved woman to Italy, where Artois had left
her and returned to France.
Once more Artois had his friend, released from the love of another man.
But he wished it were not so. Hermione’s generosity met with a full
response of generosity from him. All his egotism and selfishness dropped
from him then, shaken down like dead leaves by the tempest of a genuine
emotion. His knowledge of her grief, his understanding of its depth,
brought to him a sorrow that was keen, and even exquisitely painful. For
a long while he was preoccupied by an intense desire to assuage it. He
strove to do so by acting almost in defiance of his nature, by fostering
deception. From the Abetone Hermione had written him letters, human
documents--the tale of the suffering of a woman’s heart. Many reserves
she had from him and from every one. The most intimate agony was for her
alone, and she kept it in her soul as the priest keeps the Sacred Host
in its tabernacle. But some of her grief she showed in her letters, and
some of her desire for comfort. And without any definite intention,
she indicated to her subtle and devoted friend the only way in which he
could console her.
For once, driven by his emotion, he took that way.
He allowed Hermione to believe that he agreed with her in the conception
she had formed of her husband’s love for her. It was difficult for him
to do this, for he had an almost cruel passion for truth, and generally
a clear insight into human character. Far less than many others would
have condemned did he, in his mind, condemn the man who was dead for
the sin against love that he had committed. He had understood Maurice
as Hermione had not understood him, and knowledge is full of pardon. But
though he could pardon easily he could not easily pretend. By pretending
he sinned against himself, and helped his friend some steps along the
way to peace. He thought he had helped her to go much farther along that
way than she had gone. And he thought that Vere had helped her, too.
Now the hollow mutterings of the rock in Virgil’s Grotto seemed to be
in his heart, as he realized how permanent was the storm in Hermione’s
nature. Something for her he had done. And something--much more, no
doubt--Vere had done. But how little it all was!
Their helplessness gave him a new understanding of woman.
Hermione had allowed him great privileges, had allowed him to protect
her, had taken his advice. After Vere was born she had wished to go back
again to Sicily. The house of the priest, where she had been so happy,
and so sad, drew her. She longed for it. She desired to make it her
home. He had fought against her in this matter, and had been aided by
Gaspare.
There had been a subtle understanding, never expressed, between the boy
and him.
Artois had played upon her intellect, had appealed, too, to her mother’s
heart.
He had not urged her to try to forget, but he had urged her not morbidly
to remember, not to cherish and to foster the memory of the tragedy
which had broken her life. To go back to that tiny home, solitary in its
beautiful situation, in the changed circumstances which were hers, would
be, he told her, to court and to summon sorrow. He was even cruel to be
kind. When Hermione combated his view, assuring him that to her
Monte Amato was like a sacred place, a place hallowed by memories of
happiness, he recalled the despair in which that happiness had ended.
With all the force at his command, and it was great, he drew the picture
of the life that would be in comparison with the life that had been. And
he told her finally that what she wished to do was morbid, was unworthy
of her strength of character, was even wicked now that she was a mother.
He brought before her mind those widows who make a cult of their dead.
Would she be one of them? Would she steep a little child in such an
atmosphere of memories, casting a young and tender mind backward into a
cruel past instead of leading it forward into a joyous present? Maurice
had been the very soul of happiness. Vere must be linked with the
sunbeams. With his utmost subtlety Artois described and traced the
effect upon a tiny and sensitive child of a mother’s influence, whether
for good or evil, until Hermione, who had a deep reverence for his
knowledge of all phases of human nature, at last, almost in despite of
the truth within her, of the interior voice which said to her, “With you
and Vere it would not be so,” caught alarm from his apparent alarm, drew
distrust of herself from his apparent distrust of her.
Gaspare, too, played his part. When Hermione spoke to him of returning
to the priest’s house, almost wildly, and with the hot energy that
bursts so readily up in Sicilians, he begged her not to go back to the
_maledetta casa_ in which his Padrone’s dead body had lain. As he spoke
a genuine fear of the cottage came upon him. All the latent superstition
that dwells in the contadino was stirred as dust by a wind. In clouds
it flew up about his mind. Fear looked out of his great eyes. Dread was
eloquent in his gestures. And he, too, referred to the child, to the
_povera piccola bambina_. It would cast ill-luck on the child to bring
her up in a chamber of death. Her saint would forsake her. She too would
die. The boy worked himself up into a fever. His face was white. Drops
of sweat stood on his forehead.
He had set out to be deceptive--what he would have called _un poco
birbante_, and he had even deceived himself. He knew that it would
be dangerous for his Padrona to live again near Marechiaro. Any day
a chance scrap of gossip might reach her ears. In time she would
be certain almost to hear something of the dead Padrone’s close
acquaintance with the dwellers in the Casa delle Sirene. She would
question him, perhaps. She would suspect something. She would inquire.
She would search. She would find out the hideous truth. It was this
fear which made him argue on the same side as Artois. But in doing so he
caught another fear from his own words. He became really natural, really
truthful in his fear. And--she scarcely knew why--Hermione was even more
governed by him than by Artois. He had lived with them in the Casa
del Prete, had been an intimate part of their life there. And he was
Sicilian of the soil. The boy had a real power to move, to dominate her,
which he did not then suspect.
Again and again he repeated those words, “_La povera bambina--la povera
piccola bambina_.” And at last Hermione was overcome.
“I won’t go to Sicily,” she said to Artois. “For if I went there I could
only go to Monte Amato. I won’t go until Vere is old enough to wish to
go, to wish to see the house where her father and I were happy.”
And she had never gone back. For Artois had not been satisfied with this
early victory.
In returning from a tour in North America the following spring, when
Vere was nearly two years old, he had paid a visit to Marechiaro, and,
while there, had seen the contadino from whom Hermione had rented, and
still rented, the house of the priest. The man was middle-aged, ignorant
but shrewd, and very greedy. Artois made friends with him, and casually,
over a glass of _moscato_, talked about his affairs and the land
question in Sicily. The peasant became communicative and, of course,
loud in his complaining. His land yielded nothing. The price of almonds
had gone down. The lemon crop had been ruined by the storms. As to the
vines--they were all devoured by the phylloxera, and he had no money to
buy and plant vines from America. Artois hinted that he received a good
rent from the English lady for the cottage on Monte Amato. The contadino
acknowledged that he received a fair price for the cottage and the land
about it; but the house, he declared, would go to rack and ruin with no
one ever in it, and the land was lying idle, for the English lady would
have everything left exactly as it had been when she lived there with
her husband. Artois seized upon this hint of what was in the peasant’s
mind, and bemoaned with him his situation. The house ought to be
occupied, the land all about it, up to the very door, and behind upon
the sunny mountain-side, planted with American vines. If it belonged to
him that was what he would do--plant American vines, and when the years
of yielding came, give a good percentage on all the wine made and sold
to the man who had tended the vineyard.
The peasant’s love of money awoke. He only let the cottage to
Hermione year by year, and had no contract with her extending beyond a
twelve-months’ lease. Before Artois left Marechiaro the tender treachery
was arranged. When the year’s lease was up, the contadino wrote to her
declining to renew it. She answered, protesting, offering more money.
But it was all in vain. The man replied that he had already let the
cottage and the land around it to a grower of vines for a long term of
years, and that he was getting double the annual price she offered.
Hermione was indignant and bitterly distressed. When this letter reached
her she was at Fiesole with Vere in a villa which she had taken. She
would probably have started at once for Sicily; but Vere was just then
ill with some infantile complaint, and could not be left. Artois,
who was in Rome, and had received from her the news of this carefully
arranged disaster, offered to go to Sicily on her behalf--and actually
went. He returned to tell her that the house of the priest was already
occupied by contadini, and all the land up to the very door in process
of being dug up and planted with vines. It was useless to make any
further offer. The thing was done.
Hermione said nothing, but Artois saw in her eyes how keenly she was
suffering, and turned his own eyes away. He was only trying to preserve
her from greater unhappiness, the agony of ever finding out the truth;
but he felt guilty at that moment, and as if he had been cruel to the
woman who roused all his tenderness, all his protective instinct.
“I shall not go back to Marechiaro now,” Hermione said. “I shall not
go back even to see the grave. I could never feel that anything of his
spirit lingered there. But I did feel, I should have felt again, as if
something of him still loved that little house on the mountain, still
stayed among the oak-trees. It seemed to me that when I took Vere to the
Casa del Prete she would have learned to know something of her father
there that she could never have learned to know in another place. But
now--no, I shall not go back. If I did I should even lose my memories,
perhaps, and I could not bear that.”
And she had not returned. Gaspare went to Marechiaro sometimes, to see
his family and his friends. He visited the grave and saw that it was
properly kept. But Hermione remained in Italy. For some time she lived
near Florence, first at Fiesole, later at Bellosguardo. When the summer
heat came she took a villa at the Abetone. Or she spent some months with
Vere beside the sea. As the girl grew older she developed a passion
for the sea, and seemed to care little for the fascination of the pine
forests. Hermione, noting this, gave up going to the Abetone and took
a house by the sea for the whole summer. Two years they were at Santa
Margherita, one year at Sorrento.
Then, sailing one evening on the sea towards Bagnoli, they saw the house
on the islet beyond the Pool of San Francesco. Vere was enchanted by it.
“To live in it,” she exclaimed, “would be almost like living in the
sea!”
Hermione, too, was fascinated by its situation, the loneliness, the
wildness, yet the radiant cheerfulness of it. She made inquiries, found
that it was owned by a Neapolitan who scarcely ever went there, and
eventually succeeded in getting it on a long lease. For two years now
she and Vere had spent the summer there.
Artois had noticed that since Hermione had been in the Casa del Mare
an old desire had begun to revive in her. She spoke more frequently of
Sicily. Often she stood on the rock and looked across the sea, and
he knew that she was thinking of those beloved coasts--of the Ionian
waters, of the blossoming almond-trees among the olives and the rocks,
of the scarlet geraniums glowing among the thorny cactus, of the giant
watercourses leading up into the mountains. A hunger was awake in her,
now that she had a home so near the enchanted island.
He realized it. But he was no longer much afraid. So many years had
passed that even if Hermione revisited Marechiaro he believed there
would be little or no danger now of her ever learning the truth. It had
never been known in the village, and if it had been suspected, all the
suspicions must have long ago died down. He had been successful in his
protection. He was thankful for that. It was the one thing he had been
able to do for the friend who had done so much for him.
The tragedy had occurred because of him. Because of him all knowledge
of it had been kept from Hermione, and would now be kept from her
forever--because of him and Gaspare.
This he had been able to do. But how powerless he was, and how powerless
was Vere!
Now he looked vaguely at the villas of Posilipo, and he realized this
thoroughly.
Something for her he had done, and something Vere had done. But how
little it all was!
To-day a new light had been thrown upon Hermione, and he realized what
she was as he had never realized it before. No, she was right. She could
never live fully in a girl child--she was not made to do that. Why had
he ever thought, hoped that perhaps it might be so, that perhaps Vere
might some day completely and happily fill her life? Long ago he had
encouraged her to work, to write. Misled by her keen intelligence, her
enthusiasm, her sincerity and vitality, by the passion that was in her,
the great heart, the power of feeling, the power of criticising
and inspiring another which she had freely shown to him, Artois had
believed--as he had once said to her in London--that she might be an
artist, but that she preferred to be simply a woman. But he found it
was not so. Hermione had not the peculiar gift of the writer. She could
feel, but she could not arrange. She could discern, but she could not
expose. A flood of words came to her, but not the inevitable word. She
could not take that exquisite leap from the known into the unknown
which genius can take with the certainty of alighting on firm ground.
In short, she was not formed and endowed to be an artist. About such
matters Artois knew only how to be sincere. He was sincere with his
friend, and she thanked him for being so.
One possible life was taken from Hermione, the life of the artist who
lives in the life of the work.
There remained the life in Vere.
To-day Artois knew from Hermione’s own lips that she could not live
completely in her child, and he felt that he had been blind as men are
often blind about women, are blind because they are secretly selfish.
The man lives for himself, but he thinks it natural, even distinctively
womanly, that women should live for others--for him, for some other
man, for their children. What man finds his life in his child? But the
woman--she surely ought to, and without difficulty. Hermione had been
sincere to-day, and Artois knew his blindness, and knew his secret
selfishness.
The gray was lifting a little over Naples, the distant shadowy form of
Vesuvius was becoming clearer, more firm in outline. But the boatman
rowed slowly, influenced by the scirocco.
How, then, was Hermione to live? How was she to find happiness or peace?
It was a problem which he debated with an ardor that had in it something
of passion. And he began to wonder how it would have been if he had
acted differently, if he had allowed her to find out what he suspected
to be the exact truth of the dead man. Long ago he had saved her from
suffering. But by doing so had he not dedicated her, not to a greater,
but to a longer suffering? He might have defiled a beautiful memory. He
must have done so had he acted differently. But if he had defiled it,
might not Hermione have been the subject of a great revulsion? Horror
can kill, but it can also cure. It can surely root out love. But from
such a heart as Hermione’s?
Despite all his understanding of women, Artois felt at a loss to-day. He
could not make up his mind what would have been the effect upon Hermione
if she had learned that her husband had betrayed her.
Presently he left that subject and came to Vere.
When he did this he was conscious at once of a change within him. His
tenderness and pity for Hermione were replaced by another tenderness and
pity. And these were wholly for Vere. Hermione was suffering because
of Maurice. But Vere was surely suffering, subconsciously, because of
Hermione.
There were two links in the chain of suffering, that between Maurice and
Hermione, and that between Hermione and Vere.
For a moment he felt as if Vere were bereaved, were motherless. The
sensation passed directly he realized the exaggeration in his mind. But
he still felt as if the girl were deprived of something which she ought
to possess, which, till now, he had thought she did possess. It seemed
to him that Vere stood quite outside of her mother’s life, instead of
in it, in its centre, its core; and he pitied the child, almost as he
pitied other children from time to time, children to whom their parents
were indifferent. And yet Hermione loved Vere, and Vere could not know
what he had only known completely to-day--that the mother often felt
lonely with the child.
Vere did not know that, but surely some day she would find it out.
Artois knew her character well, knew that she was very sensitive, very
passionate, quick to feel and quick to understand. He discovered in her
qualities inherited both from her father and her mother, attributes both
English and Sicilian. In appearance she resembled her father. She had
“thrown back” to the Sicilian ancestor, as he had. She had the Southern
eyes, the Southern grace, the Southern vivacity and warmth that had made
him so attractive. But Artois divined a certain stubbornness in Vere
that had been lacking in the dead man, a stubbornness that took its rise
not in stupidity but in a secret consciousness of force.
Vere, Artois thought, might be violent, but would not be fickle. She had
a loyalty in her that was Sicilian in its fervor, a sense of gratitude
such as the contadini have, although by many it is denied to them; a
quick and lively temper, but a disposition that responded to joy,
to brightness, to gayety, to sunlight, with a swiftness, almost a
fierceness, that was entirely un-English.
Her father had been the dancing Faun. She had not, could never have his
gift of thoughtlessness. For she had intellect, derived from Hermione,
and an old truthfulness that was certainly not Sicilian. Often there
were what Artois called “Northern Lights” in her sincerity. The strains
in her, united, made, he thought, a fascinating blend. But as yet she
was undeveloped--an interesting, a charming child, but only a child.
In many ways she was young for her age. Highly intelligent, she was
anything rather than “knowing.” Her innocence was like clear water in a
spring. The graciousness of youth was hers to the full.
As Artois thought of it he was conscious, as of a new thing, of the
wonderful beauty of such innocent youth.
It was horrible to connect it with suffering. And yet that link in the
chain did exist. Vere had not something that surely she ought to have,
and, without consciously missing it, she must sometimes subtly, perhaps
vaguely, be aware that there was a lack in her life. Her mother gave her
great love. But she was not to her mother what a son would have been.
And the love that is mingled with regret has surely something shadowy in
it.
Maurice Delarey had been as the embodiment of joy. It was strange that
from the fount of joy sorrow was thrown up. But so it was. From him
sorrow had come. From him sorrow might still come, even for Vere.
In the white and silent day Artois again felt the stirring of intuition,
as he had felt it long ago. But now he roused himself, and resolutely,
almost angrily, detached his mind from its excursions towards the
future.
“Do you often think of to-morrow?” he suddenly said to the boatman,
breaking from his silence.
“Signore?”
“Do you often wonder what is going to happen to-morrow, what you will
do, whether you will be happy or sad?”
The man threw up his head.
“No, Signore. Whatever comes is destiny. If I have food to-day it is
enough for me. Why should I bother about to-morrow’s maccheroni?”
Artois smiled. The boat was close in now to the platform of stone that
projected beneath the wall of the Marina.
As he stepped out he gave the boatman a generous _buonamano_.
“You are quite right, comrade,” he said. “It is the greatest mistake in
the world to bother about to-morrow’s maccheroni.”