Although Hermione had told Artois that she could not find complete rest
and happiness in her child, that she could not live again in Vere fully
and intensely as she had lived once, as she still had it in her surely
to live, she and Vere were in a singularly close relationship. They had
never yet been separated for more than a few days. Vere had not been to
school, and much of her education had been undertaken by her mother. In
Florence she had been to classes and lectures. She had had lessons
in languages, French, German, and Italian, in music and drawing. But
Hermione had been her only permanent teacher, and until her sixteenth
birthday she had never been enthusiastic about anything without
carrying her enthusiasm to her mother, for sympathy, explanation, or
encouragement.
Sorrow had not quenched the elan of Hermione’s nature. What she had told
Artois had been true--she was not a finished woman, nor would she ever
be, so long as she was alive and conscious. Her hunger for love, her
passionate remembrance of the past, her incapacity to sink herself in
any one since her husband’s death, her persistent, though concealed,
worship of his memory, all these things proved her vitality. Artois was
right when he said that she was a force. There was something in her that
was red-hot, although she was now a middle-aged woman. She needed much
more than most people, because she had much more than most people have
to give.
Her failure to express herself in an art had been a tragedy. From this
tragedy she turned, not with bitterness, but perhaps with an almost
fiercer energy, to Vere. Her intellect, released from fruitless toil,
was running loose demanding some employment. She sought that employment
in developing the powers of her child. Vere was not specially studious.
Such an out-of-door temperament as hers could never belong to a bookworm
or a recluse. But she was naturally clever, as her father had not been,
and she was enthusiastic not only in pleasure but in work. Long ago
Hermione, trying with loving anxiety to educate her boyish husband, to
make him understand certain subtleties of her own, had found herself
frustrated. When she made such attempts with Vere she was met half way.
The girl understood with swiftness even those things with which she was
not specially in sympathy. Her father’s mind had slipped away, ever so
gracefully, from all which it did not love. Vere’s could grasp even an
unloved subject. There was mental grit in her--Artois knew it. In all
her work until her sixteenth year Vere had consulted her mother. Nothing
of her child till then was ever hidden from Hermione, except those
things which the human being cannot reveal, and sometimes scarcely
knows of. The child drew very much from her mother, responded to
her enthusiasm, yet preserved instinctively, and quite without
self-consciousness, her own individuality.
Artois had noticed this, and this had led him to say that Vere also was
a force.
But when she was sixteen Vere woke up to something. Until now no one but
herself knew to what. Sometimes she shut herself up alone in her room
for long periods. When she came out she looked lazy, her mother thought,
and she liked to go then to some nook of the rocks and sit alone, or to
push a boat out into the centre of the Saint’s Pool, and lie in it with
her hands clasped behind her head looking up at the passing clouds or at
the radiance of the blue.
Hermione knew how fond Vere was of reading, and supposed that this love
was increasing as the child grew older. She sometimes felt a little
lonely, but she was unselfish. Vere’s freedom was quite innocent. She,
the mother, would not seek to interfere with it. Soon after dinner on
the evening of the Marchesino’s expedition with Artois, Vere had got up
from the sofa, on which she had been sitting with a book of Rossetti’s
poems in her hand, had gone over to one of the windows, and had stood
for two or three minutes looking out over the sea. Then she had turned
round, come up to her mother and kissed her tenderly--more tenderly,
Hermione thought, even than usual.
“Good-night, Madre mia,” she had said.
And then, without another word, she had gone swiftly out of the room.
After Vere had gone the room seemed very silent. In the evening, if they
stayed in the house, they usually sat in Hermione’s room up-stairs.
They had been sitting there to-night. The shutters were not closed. The
window that faced the sea towards Capri was open. A little moonlight
began to mingle subtly with the light from the two lamps, to make it
whiter, cleaner, suggestive of outdoor things and large spaces. Hermione
had been reading when Vere was reading. She did not read now Vere was
gone. Laying down her book she sat listening to the silence, realizing
the world without. Almost at her feet was the sea, before her a
wide-stretching expanse, behind her, confronted by the desolate rocks,
the hollow and mysterious caverns. In the night, the Saint, unwearied,
watched his Pool. Not very far off, yet delightfully remote, lay Naples
with its furious activities, its gayeties, its intensities of sin, of
misery, of pleasure. In the Galleria, tourists from the hotels and
from the ships were wandering rather vaguely, watched and followed
by newspaper sellers, by touts, by greedy, pale-faced boys, and old,
worn-out men, all hungry for money and indifferent how it was gained.
Along the Marina, with its huge serpent of lights, the street singers
and players were making their nightly pilgrimage, pausing, wherever they
saw a lighted window or a dark figure on a balcony, to play and sing
the tunes of which they were weary long ago. On the wall, high above
the sea, were dotted the dilettante fishermen with their long rods and
lines. And below, before each stone staircase that descended to the
water, was a waiting boat, and in the moonlight rose up the loud cry of
“Barca! Barca!” to attract the attention of any casual passer-by.
And here, on this more truly sea-like sea, distant from the great crowd
and from the thronging houses, the real fishermen who live by the sea
were alert and at work, or were plunged in the quiet sleep that is a
preparation for long hours of nocturnal wakefulness.
Hermione thought of it all, was aware of it, felt it, as she sat there
opposite to the open window. Then she looked over to her writing-table,
on which stood a large photograph of her dead husband, then to the sofa
where Vere had been. She saw the volume of Rossetti lying beside the
cushion that still showed a shallow dent where the child’s head had been
resting.
And then she shut her eyes, and asked her imagination to take her away
for a moment, over the sea to Messina, and along the curving shore, and
up by winding paths to a mountain, and into a little room in a tiny,
whitewashed house, not the house of the sea, but of the priest. It still
stood there, and the terrace was still before it. And the olive-trees
rustled, perhaps, just now in the wind beneath the stars.
Yes, she was there. Lucrezia and Gaspare were in bed. But she and
Maurice were sitting in the straw chairs on each side of the table,
facing the open French window and the flight of shallow steps that led
down to the terrace.
Faintly she heard the whisper of the sea about the islet, but she would
not let it hinder her imagination: she translated it by means of her
imagination into the whisper of the wind low down there, in the ravine
among the trees. And that act made her think of the ravine, seemed
presently to set her in the ravine. She was there in the night with
Gaspare. They were hurrying down towards the sea. He was behind her,
and she could hear his footsteps--longing to go faster. But she was
breathless, her heart was beating, there was terror in her soul. What
was that? A rattle of stones in the darkness, and then an old voice
muttering “Benedicite!”
She opened her eyes and moved suddenly, like one intolerably stirred.
What a foe the imagination can be--what a foe! She got up and went to
the window. She must drive away that memory of the ravine, of all that
followed after. Often she lingered with it, but to-night, somehow, she
could not, she dared not. She was less brave than usual to-night.
She leaned out of the window.
“Am I a fool?”
That was what she was saying to herself. And she was comparing herself
now with other people, other women. Did she know one who could not
uproot an old memory, who could suffer, and desire, and internally weep,
after more than sixteen years?
“I suppose it is preposterous.”
She deliberately chose that ugly word to describe her own condition
of soul. But instantly it seemed to her as if far down in that soul
something rose up and answered:
“No, it is not. It is beautiful. It is divine. It is more--it is due. He
gave you the greatest gift. He gave you what the whole world is always
seeking; even in blindness, even in ignorance, even in terrible vice. He
gave you love. How should you forget him?”
Far away on the sea that was faintly silvered by the moon there was
a black speck. It was, or seemed from the distance to be, motionless.
Hermione’s eyes were attracted to it, and again her imagination carried
her to Sicily. She stood on the shore by the inlet, she saw the boat
coming in from the open sea. Then it stopped midway--like that boat.
She heard Gaspare furiously weeping.
But the boat moved, and the sound that was in her imagination died away,
and she said to herself, “All that was long ago.”
The boat out there was no doubt occupied by Neapolitan fishermen, and
she was here on the islet in the Sea of Naples, and Sicily was far
away across the moonlit waters. As to Gaspare--she was sure he was not
weeping, faithful though he was to the memory of the dead Padrone.
And Vere? Hermione wondered what Vere was doing. She felt sure, though
she did not know why, that Vere had not gone to bed. She realized
to-night that her child was growing up rapidly, was passing from the
stage of childhood to the stage of girlhood, was on the threshold of
all the mysterious experiences that life holds for those who have ardent
temperaments and eager interests, and passionate desires and fearless
hearts.
To-night Hermione felt very strongly the difference between the father
and the daughter. There was a gravity in Vere, a firmness that Maurice
had lacked. Full of life and warmth as she was, she was not the pure
spirit of joy that he had been in those first days in Sicily. She was
not irresponsible. She was more keenly aware of others, of just how they
were feeling, of just how they were thinking, than Maurice had been.
Vere was very individual.
With that thought there came to Hermione a deeper sense of loneliness.
She was conscious now in this moment, as she had never been conscious
before, of the independence of her child’s character. The knowledge of
this independence seemed to come upon her suddenly--she could not tell
why; and she saw Vere apart from her, detached, like a column in a
lonely place.
Vere must not escape from her. She must accompany her child step by
step. She must not be left alone. She had told Emile that she could not
live again in Vere. And that was true. Vere was not enough. But Vere was
very much. Without Vere, what would her life be?
A wave of melancholy flowed over her to-night, a tide come from she knew
not where. Making an effort to stem it, she recalled her happiness with
Maurice after that day of the Tarantella. How groundless had really been
her melancholy then! She had imagined him escaping from her, but he had
remained with her, and loved her. He had been good to her until the end,
tender and faithful. If she had ever had a rival, that rival had been
Sicily. Always her imagination was her torturer.
Her failure in art had been a tragedy because of this. If she could have
set her imagination free in an art she would have been far safer than
she was. Emile Artois was really lonelier than she, for he had not
a child. But his art surely saved him securely from her sense of
desolation. And then he was a man, and men must need far less than
women do. Hermione felt that it was so. She thought of Emile in his most
helpless moment, in that period when he was ill in Kairouan before she
came. Even then she believed that he could not have felt quite so much
alone as she did now; for men never long to be taken care of as women
do. And yet she was well, in this tranquil house which was her own--with
Vere, her child, and Gaspare, her devoted servant.
As mentally she recounted her benefits, the strength there was in her
arose, protesting. She called herself harsh names: egoist, craven,
_faineant_. But it was no use to attack herself. In the deeps of her
poor, eager, passionate, hungry woman’s nature something wept, and
needed, and could not be comforted, and could not be schooled. It
complained as one feeble, but really it must be strong; for it was
pitilessly persistent in its grieving. It had a strange endurance. Life,
the passing of the years, could not change it, could not still it. Those
eternal hungers of which Hermione had spoken to Artois--they must have
their meaning. Somewhere, surely, there are the happy hunting-grounds,
dreamed of by the red man--there are the Elysian Fields where the souls
that have longed and suffered will find the ultimate peace.
There came a tap at the door.
Hermione started up from the cushion against which she had pressed
her head, and opened her eyes, instinctively laying her hand on Vere’s
volume of Rossetti, and pretending to read it.
“Avanti!” she said.
The door opened and Gaspare appeared. Hermione felt an immediate
sensation of comfort.
“Gaspare,” she said, “what is it? I thought you were in bed.”
“Ha bisogna Lei?” he said.
It was a most familiar phrase to Hermione. It had been often on
Gaspare’s lips when he was a boy in Sicily, and she had always loved it,
feeling as if it sprang from a nature pleasantly ready to do anything
in her service. But to-night it had an almost startling appropriateness,
breaking in as if in direct response to her gnawing hunger of the heart.
As she looked at Gaspare, standing by the door in his dark-blue clothes,
with an earnest expression on his strong, handsome face, she felt as
if he must have come just then because he was conscious that she had so
much need of help and consolation. And she could not answer “no” to his
simple question.
“Come in, Gaspare,” she said, “and shut the door. I’m all alone. I
should like to have a little talk with you.”
He obeyed her, shut the door gently, and came up to her with the
comfortable confidence of one safe in his welcome, desired not merely as
a servant but as a friend by his Padrona.
“Did you want to say anything particular, Gaspare?” Hermione asked him.
“Here--take a cigarette.”
She gave him one. He took it gently, twitching his nose as he did so.
This was a little trick he had when he was pleased.
“You can smoke it here, if you like.”
“Grazie, Signora.”
He lit it gravely and took a whiff. Then he said:
“The Signorina is outside.”
“Is she?”
Hermione looked towards the window.
“It is a lovely night.”
“Si, Signora.”
He took another whiff, and turned his great eyes here and there, looking
about the room. Hermione began to wonder what he had to say to her. She
was certain that he had come to her for some reason other than just to
ask if she had need of him.
“It does the Signorina good to get a breath of air before she goes to
bed,” Hermione added, after a moment of silence. “It makes her sleep.”
“Si, Signora.”
He still stood calmly beside her, but now he looked at her with the odd
directness which had been characteristic of him as a boy, and which he
had not lost as a man.
“The Signorina is getting quite big, Signora,” he said. “Have you
noticed? Per Dio! In Sicily, if the Signorina was a Sicilian, the
giovinotti would be asking to marry her.”
“Ah, but, Gaspare, the Signorina is not a Sicilian,” she said. “She
is English, you know, and English girls do not generally think of such
things till they are much older than Sicilians.”
“But, Signora,” said Gaspare, with the bluntness which in him was
never rudeness, but merely the sincerity which he considered due to his
Padrona--due also to himself, “my Padrone was like a real Sicilian,
and the Signorina is his daughter. She must be like a Sicilian too, by
force.”
“Your Padrone, yes, he was a real Sicilian,” Hermione said softly.
“But, well, the Signorina has much more English blood in her veins than
Sicilian. She has only a little Sicilian blood.”
“But the Signorina thinks she is almost a Sicilian. She wishes to be a
Sicilian.”
“How do you know that, Gaspare?” she asked, smiling a little at his
firmness and persistence.
“The Signorina said so the other day to the giovinotto who had the
cigarettes, Signora. I talked to him, and he told me. He said the
Signorina had said to him that she was partly a Sicilian, and that he
had said ‘no,’ that she was English. And when he said that--he said to
me--the Signorina was quite angry. He could see that she was angry by
her face.”
“I suppose that is the Sicilian blood, Gaspare. There is some in the
Signorina’s veins, of course. And then, you know, both her father and
I loved your country. I think the Signorina must often long to see
Sicily.”
“Does she say so?” asked Gaspare, looking rather less calm.
“She has not lately. I think she is very happy here. Don’t you?”
“Si, Signora. But the Signorina is growing up now, and she is a little
Sicilian anyhow, Signora.”
He paused, looking steadily at his Padrona.
“What is it, Gaspare? What do you want to say to me?”
“Signora, perhaps you will say it is not my business, but in my country
we do not let girls go about by themselves after they are sixteen. We
know it is better not. Ecco!”
Hermione had some difficulty in not smiling. But she knew that if she
smiled he might be offended. So she kept her countenance and said:
“What do you mean, Gaspare? The Signorina is nearly always with me.”
“No, Signora. The Signorina can go wherever she likes. She can speak to
any one she pleases. She is free as a boy is free.”
“Certainly she is free. I wish her to be free.”
“Va bene, Signora, va bene.”
A cloud came over his face, and he moved as if to go. But Hermione
stopped him.
“Wait a minute, Gaspare. I want you to understand. I like your care
for the Signorina. You know I trust you and depend on you more than on
almost any one. But you must remember that I am English, and in England,
you know, things in some ways are very different from what they are in
Sicily. Any English girl would be allowed the freedom of the Signorina.”
“Why?”
“Why not? What harm does it do? The Signorina does not go to Naples
alone.”
“Per Dio!” he interrupted, in a tone almost of horror.
“Of course I should never allow that. But here on the island--why, what
could happen to her here? Come, Gaspare, tell me what it is you are
thinking of. You haven’t told me yet. I knew directly you came in that
you had something you wanted to say. What is it?”
“I know it is not my business,” he said. “And I should never speak to
the Signorina, but--”
“Well, Gaspare?”
“Signora, all sorts of people come here to the island--men from Naples.
We do not know them. We cannot tell who they are. And they can all see
the Signorina. And they can even talk to her.”
“The fishermen, you mean?”
“Any one who comes in a boat.”
“Well, but scarcely any one ever comes but the fishermen. You know
that.”
“Oh, it was all very well when the Signorina was a little girl, a child,
Signora,” he said, almost hotly. “But now it is different. It is quite
different.”
Suddenly Hermione understood. She remembered what Vere had said about
Gaspare being jealous. He must certainly be thinking of the boy-diver,
of Ruffo.
“You think the Signorina oughtn’t to talk to the fishermen?” she said.
“What do we know of the fishermen of Naples, Signora? We are not
Neapolitans. We are strangers here. We do not know their habits. We
do not know what they think. They are different from us. If we were
in Sicily! I am a Sicilian. I can tell. But when men come from Naples
saying they are Sicilians, how can I tell whether they are ruffiani or
not?”
Gaspare’s inner thought stood revealed.
“I see, Gaspare,” Hermione said, quietly. “You think I should not have
let the Signorina talk to that boy the other day. But I saw him myself,
and I gave the Signorina leave to take him some cigarettes. And he dived
for her. She told me all about it. She always tells me everything.”
“I do not doubt the Signorina,” said Gaspare. “But I thought it was my
duty to tell you what I thought, Signora. Why should people come here
saying they are of my country, saying they are Sicilians, and talking as
the Neapolitans talk?”
“Well, but at the time, you didn’t doubt that boy was what he said he
was, did you?”
“Signora, I did not know. I could not know. But since then I have been
thinking.”
“Well, Gaspare, you are quite right to tell me. I prefer that. I have
much faith in you, and always shall have. But we must not say anything
like this to the Signorina. She would not understand what we meant.”
“No, Signora. The Signorina is too good.”
“She would not understand, and I think she would be hurt”--Hermione
used the word “_offesa_,”--“as you would be if you fancied I thought
something strange about you.”
“Si, Signora.”
“Good-night, Gaspare.”
“Good-night, Signora. Buon riposo.”
He moved towards the door. When he reached it he stopped and added:
“I am going to bed, Signora.”
“Go. Sleep well.”
“Grazie, Signora. The Signorina is still outside, I am sure.”
“She goes out for a minute nearly every evening, Gaspare. She likes the
air and to look at the sea.”
“Si, Signora; in a minute I shall go to bed. Buon riposo.”
And he went out.
When he had gone Hermione remained at first where she was. But Gaspare
had effectually changed her mood, had driven away what she chose to
call her egoism, had concentrated all her thoughts on Vere. He had never
before spoken like this about the child. It was a sudden waking up on
his part to the fact that Vere was growing up to womanhood.
When he chose, Gaspare could always, or nearly always, make his Padrona
catch his mood, there was something so definite about him that he made
an impression. And, though he was easily inclined to be suspicious
of those whom he did not know well, Hermione knew him to be both
intelligent and shrewd, especially about those for whom he had
affection. She wondered now whether it were possible that Gaspare saw,
understood, or even divined intuitively, more clearly than she did--she,
a mother!
It was surely very unlikely.
She remembered that Gaspare had a jealous nature, like most of his
countrymen.
Nevertheless he had suddenly made the islet seem different to her.
She had thought of it as remote, as pleasantly far away from Naples,
isolated in the quiet sea. But it was very easy to reach from Naples,
and, as Gaspare had said, what did they know, or understand, of the
Neapolitans, they who were strangers in the land?
She wondered whether Vere was still outside. To-night she certainly
envisaged Vere newly. Never till to-night had she thought of her as
anything but a child; as characteristic, as ardent, as determined
sometimes, perhaps as forceful even, but always with a child’s mind
behind it all.
But to the people of the South Vere was already a woman--even to
Gaspare, who had held her in his arms when she was in long clothes. At
least Hermione supposed so now, after what Gaspare had said about the
giovinotti, who, in Sicily, would have been wishing to marry Vere, had
she been Sicilian. And perhaps even the mind of Vere was more grown-up
than her mother had been ready to suppose.
The mother was conscious of a slight but distinct uneasiness. It was
vague. Had she been asked to explain it she could not, perhaps, have
done so.
Presently, after a minute or two of hesitation, she went to the window
that faced north, opened it, and stood by, listening. It was from the
sea on this side that the fishermen who lived in the Mergellina, and in
the town of Naples, came to the islet. It was from this direction that
Ruffo had come three days ago.
Evidently Gaspare had been turning over the boy’s acquaintance with
Vere in his mind all that time, disapproving of it, secretly condemning
Hermione for having allowed it. No, not that; Hermione felt that he was
quite incapable of condemning her. But he was a watchdog who did not
bark, but who was ready to bite all those who ventured to approach his
two mistresses unless he was sure of their credentials. And of this
boy’s, Ruffo’s, he was not sure.
Hermione recalled the boy; his brown healthiness, his laughing eyes and
lips, his strong young body, his careless happy voice. And she found
herself instinctively listening by the window to hear that voice again.
Now, as she looked out, the loveliness of the night appealed to her
strongly, and she felt sure that Vere must be still outside, somewhere
under the moon.
Just beneath the window was the narrow terrace, on to which she had
stepped out, obedient to Vere’s call, three days ago. Perhaps Vere was
there, or in the garden beyond. She extinguished the lamp. She went to
her bedroom to get a lace shawl, which she put over her head and drew
round her shoulders like a mantilla. Then she looked into Vere’s room,
and found it empty.
A moment later she was on the terrace bathed in the radiance of the
moon.