Artois left the island that night without speaking to Hermione. He
waited a long time. But she did not move to come to him. And he did not
dare to go to her. He did not dare! In all their long friendship never
before had his spirit bent before, or retreated as if in fear from
Hermione’s. To-night he was conscious that in her fierce anger, and
afterwards in her tears, she had emancipated herself from him. He was
conscious of her force as he had never been conscious of it before.
Something within him almost abdicated to her intensity. And at last he
turned and went softly away from the terrace. He descended to the sea.
He left the island.
Were they no longer friends?
As the boat gave itself to the mist he wondered. It had come to this,
then--that he did not know whether Hermione and he were any longer
friends. Almost imperceptibly, with movement so minute that it had
seemed like immobility, they had been drifting apart through these days
and nights of the summer. And now abruptly the gulf appeared between
them.
He felt just then that they could never more be friends, that their old
happy camaraderie could never be reestablished.
That they could ever be enemies was unthinkable. Even in Hermione’s
bitterness and anger Artois felt her deep affection. In her cry, “Take
care, Emile, or I shall hate you for keeping me in the dark!” he heard
only the hatred that is the other side of love.
But could they ever be comrades again? And if they could not, what could
they be?
As the boat slipped on, under the Saint’s light, which was burning
although the mist had hidden it from Hermione’s searching eyes, and out
to the open sea, Artois heard again her fierce exclamation. It blended
with Vere’s sob. He looked up and saw the faint lights of the Casa del
Mare fading from him in the night. And an immense sadness, mingled with
an immense, but chaotic, longing invaded him. He felt horribly lonely,
and he felt a strange, new desire for the nearness to him of life. He
yearned to feel life close to him, pulsing with a rhythm to which the
rhythm of his being answered. He yearned for that strange and exquisite
satisfaction, compounded of mystery and wonder, and thrilling with
something akin to pain, that is called forth in the human being who
feels another human being centring all its highest faculties, its
strongest powers, its deepest hopes in him. He desired intensely, as he
had never desired before, true communion with another, that mingling of
bodies, hearts, and spirits, that is the greatest proof of God to man.
The lights of the Casa del Mare were lost to his eyes in the night.
He looked for them still. He strained his eyes to see them. But the
powerful night would not yield up its prey.
And now, in the darkness and with Hermione’s last words ringing in his
ears, he felt almost overwhelmed by the solitariness of his life in the
world of lives.
That day, before he came to the island, he had met himself face to face
like a man meeting his double. He had stripped himself bare. He had
searched himself for the truth. Remembering all the Marchesino had said,
he had demanded of his heart the truth, uncertain whether it would save
or slay him. It had not slain him. When the colloquy was over he was
still upright.
But he had realized as never before the delicate poise of human nature,
set, without wings, on a peak with gulfs about it. Had he not looked in
time, and with clear, steadfast eyes, might he not have fallen?
His affection for Vere was perfectly pure, was the love of a man without
desire for a gracious and charming child. It still was that. He knew it
for that by the wave of disgust that went over him when his imagination,
prompted by the Marchesino’s brutality, set pictures before him of
himself in other relations with Vere. The real man in him recoiled
so swiftly, so uncontrollably, that he was reassured as to his
own condition. And yet he found much to condemn, something to be
contemptuous of, something almost to weep over--that desire to establish
a monopoly--that almost sickly regret for his vanished youth, that
bitterness against the community to which all young things instinctively
belong, whatever their differences of intellect, temperament, and
feeling.
Could he have fallen?
Even now he did not absolutely know whether such a decadence might have
been possible to him or not. But that now it would not be possible he
felt that he did know.
Age could never complete youth, and Vere must be complete. He had
desired to make her gift for song complete. He could never desire to
mutilate her life. Had he not said to himself one day, as his boat
glided past the sloping gardens of Posilipo, “Vere must be happy.”
Yet that evening he had made her unhappy.
He had come to the island from his self-examination strong in the
determination to be really himself, no longer half self-deceived and so
deceiving. He had gone out upon the terrace, and waited there. But when
Vere had come to join him, he had not been able to be natural. In his
desire to rehabilitate himself thoroughly and swiftly in his own opinion
he must have been almost harsh to the child. She had approached him a
little doubtfully. She had needed specially just then to be met with
even more than the usual friendship. Artois had seen in her face, in her
expressive eyes, a plea not for forgiveness--there was no need for that,
but for compassion, an appeal to him to ignore and yet to sympathise,
that was exquisitely young and winning. But, because of his
self-examination, and because he was feeling acutely, he had been
abrupt, cold, changed in his manner. They had sat down together in the
dark, and after some uneasy conversation, Vere, perhaps eager to make
things easier between herself and “Monsieur Emile,” had brought up the
subject of her poems with a sort of anxious simplicity, and a touch of
timidity that yet was confidential. And Artois, still recoiling secretly
from that which might possibly have become a folly but could never have
been anything more, had told Vere plainly and almost sternly that she
must go to her literary path unaided, unadvised by him.
“I was glad to advise you at the beginning, Vere,” he had said, finally;
“but now I must leave you to yourself to work out your own salvation.
You have talent. Trust it. Trust yourself. Do no lean on any one, least
of all on me.”
“No, Monsieur Emile,” she had answered.
Those were the last words exchanged between them before Hermione came
and questioned Vere. And only when Vere slipped into the house, leaving
that sound of pain behind her, did Artois realize how cruel he must have
seemed in his desire quickly to set things right.
He realized that; but, subtle though he was, he did not understand the
inmost and root-cause of Vere’s loss of self-control.
Vere was feeling bitterly ashamed, had been bending under this sense of
undeserved shame, ever since the Marchesino’s stratagem on the preceding
night. Although she was gay and fearless, she was exquisitely sensitive.
Peppina’s confession had roused her maidenhood to a theoretical
knowledge of certain things in life, of certain cruel phases of man’s
selfishness and lust which, till then, she had never envisaged. The
Marchesino’s madness had carried her one step further. She had not
actually looked into the abyss. But she had felt herself near to
something that she hated even more than she feared it. And she had
returned to the hotel full of a shrinking delicacy, not to be explained,
intense as snow, which had made the meeting with her mother and Artois
a torture to her, which had sealed her lips to silence that night, which
had made her half apology to Gaspare in the morning a secret agony,
which had even set a flush on her face when she looked at San Francesco.
The abrupt change in Monsieur Emile’s demeanor towards her made her feel
as if she were despised by him because she had been the victim of the
Marchesino’s trick. Or perhaps Monsieur Emile completely misunderstood
her; perhaps he thought--perhaps he dared to think, that she had helped
the Marchesino in his manoeuvre.
Vere felt almost crucified, but was too proud to speak of the pain and
bitterness within her. Only when her mother came out upon the terrace
did she suddenly feel that she could bear no more.
That night, directly she was in her room, she locked her door. She was
afraid that her mother might follow her, to ask what was the matter.
But Hermione did not come. She, too, wished to be alone that night. She,
too, felt that she could not be looked at by searching eyes that night.
She did not know when Artois left the terrace. Long after Ruffo’s song
had died away she still leaned over the sea, following his boat with her
desirous heart. Artois, too, was on the sea. She did not know it. She
was, almost desperately, seeking a refuge in the past. The present
failed her. That was her feeling. Then she would cling to the past. And
in that song, prompted now by her always eager imagination, she seemed
to hear it. For she was almost fiercely, feverishly, beginning to
find resemblances in Ruffo to Maurice. At first she had noticed none,
although she had been strangely attracted by the boy. Then she had seen
that look, fleeting but vivid, that seemed for a moment to bring Maurice
before her. Then, on the cliff, she had discerned a likeness of line, a
definite similarity of features.
And now--was not that voice like Maurice’s? Had it not his wonderful
thrill of youth in it, that sound of the love of life which wakes all
the pulses of the body and stirs all the depths of the heart?
“Oh, dolce luna bianca de l’ estate----”
The voice upon the sea was singing always the song of Mergellina. But
to Hermione it began to seem that the song was changing to another song,
and that the voice that was dying away across the shrouded water was
sinking into the shadows of a ravine upon a mountainside.
“Ciao, Ciao, Ciao,
Morettina bella, ciao----”
Maurice was going to the fishing under the sweet white moon of Sicily.
And she--she was no longer leaning down from the terrace of the Casa del
Mare, but from the terrace of the House of the Priest.
“Prima di partire
Un bacio ti voglio da!”
That kiss, which he had given her before he had gone away from her
forever! She seemed to feel it on her lips again, and she shut her eyes,
giving herself up to a passion of the imagination.
When she opened them again she felt exhausted and terribly alone.
Maurice had gone down into the ravine. He was never coming back. Ruffo
was taken by the mists and by the night. She lifted herself up from
the balustrade and looked round, remembering suddenly that she had left
Artois upon the terrace. He had disappeared silently, without a word of
good-bye.
And now, seeing the deserted terrace, she recollected her fierce attack
upon Artois, she remembered how she had stood in the black room
watching the two darknesses outside, listening to their silence. And she
remembered her conversation with Ruffo.
Actualities rushed back upon her memory. She felt as if she heard them
coming like an army to the assault. Her brain was crowded with jostling
thoughts, her heart with jostling feelings and fears. She was like one
trying to find a safe path through a black troop of threatening secrets.
What had happened that night between Vere and Emile? Why had Vere fled?
Why had she wept? And the previous night with the Marchesino--Vere had
not spoken of it to her mother. Hermione had found it impossible to ask
her child for any details. There was a secret too. And there were the
two secrets, which now she knew, but which Vere and Artois thought
were unknown to her still. And then--that mystery of which Ruffo had
innocently spoken that night.
As Hermione, moving in imagination through the black and threatening
troop, came to that last secret, she was again assailed by a curious,
and horrible, sensation of apprehension. She again felt very little and
very helpless, like a child.
She moved away from the balustrade and turned towards the house. Above,
in her sitting-room, the light still shone. The other windows on this
side of the Casa del Mare were dark. She felt that she must go to that
light quickly, and she hastened in, went cautiously--though now almost
panic-stricken--through the black room with the French windows, and came
into the dimly lighted passage that led to the front door.
Gaspare was there locking up. She came to him.
“Good-night, Gaspare,” she said, stopping.
“Good-night, Signora,” he answered, slightly turning his head, but not
looking into her face.
Hermione turned to go up-stairs. She went up two or three steps. She
heard a bolt shot into its place below her, and she stopped again.
To-night she felt for the first time almost afraid of Gaspare. She
trusted him as she had always trusted him--completely. Yet that trust
was mingled with this new and dreadful sensation of fear bred of her
conviction that he held some secret from her in his breast. Indeed, it
was her trust in Gaspare which made her fear so keen. As she stood on
the staircase she knew that. If Gaspare kept things, kept anything from
her that at all concerned her life, it must be because he was faithfully
trying to save her from some pain or misery.
But perhaps she was led astray by her depression of to-night. Perhaps
this mystery was her own creation, and he would be quite willing to
explain, to clear it away with a word.
“Gaspare,” she said, “have you finished locking up?”
“Not quite, Signora. I have the front of the house to do.”
“Of course. Well, when you have finished come up to my room for a
minute, will you?”
“Va bene, Signora.”
Was there reluctance in his voice? She thought there was. She went
up-stairs and waited in her sitting-room. It seemed to her that Gaspare
was a very long time locking up. She leaned out of the window that
overlooked the terrace to hear if he was shutting the French windows.
When she did so she saw him faintly below, standing by the balustrade.
She watched him, wondering what he was doing, till at last she could not
be patient any longer.
“Gaspare!” she called out.
He started violently.
“I am coming, Signora.”
“I am waiting for you.”
“A moment, Signora!”
Yes, his voice was reluctant; but he went at once towards the house and
disappeared. Directly afterwards she heard the windows being shut and
barred, then a step coming rather slowly up the staircase.
“Che vuole, Signora?”
How many times she had heard that phrase from Gaspare’s lips? How many
times in reply she had expressed some simple desire! To-night she found
a difficulty in answering that blunt question. There was so much that
she wished, wanted--wide and terrible want filled her heart.
“Che vuole?” he repeated.
As she heard it a second time, suddenly Hermione knew that for the
moment she was entirely dominated by Ruffo and that, which concerned,
which was connected with him. The fisher-boy had assumed an abrupt and
vast importance in her life.
“Gaspare,” she said, “you know me pretty well by this time, don’t you?”
“Know you, Signora! Of course I know you!” He gazed at her, then added,
“Who should know you, Signora, if I do not?”
“That is just what I mean, Gaspare. I wonder--I wonder--” She broke off.
“Do you understand, Gaspare, how important you are to me, how necessary
you are to me?”
An expressive look that was full of gentleness dawned in his big eyes.
“Si, Signora, I understand.”
“And I think you ought to understand my character by this time.” She
looked at him earnestly. “But I sometimes wonder--I mean lately--I
sometimes wonder whether you do quite understand me.”
“Why, Signora?”
“Do you know what I like best from the people who are near me, who live
with me?”
“Si, Signora.”
“What?”
“Affection, Signora. You like to be cared for, Signora.”
She felt tears rising again in her eyes.
“Yes, I love affection. But--there’s something else, too. I love to be
trusted. I’m not curious. I hate to pry into people’s affairs. But I
love to feel that I am trusted, that those I trust and care for would
never keep me in the dark--”
She thought again of Emile and of the night and her outburst.
“The dark, Signora?”
“Don’t you understand what I mean? When you are in the dark you can’t
see anything. You can’t see the things you ought to see.”
“You are not in the dark, Signora.”
He spoke rather stupidly, and looked towards the lamp, as if he
misunderstood her explanation. But she knew his quickness of mind too
well to be deceived.
“Gaspare,” she said, “I don’t know whether you are going to be frank
with me, but I am going to be frank with you. Sit down for a minute,
and--please shut the door first.”
He looked at her, looked down, hesitated, then went slowly to the door,
and shut it softly. Hermione was sitting on the sofa when he turned. He
came back and stood beside her.
“Si, Signora?”
“I’d rather you sat too, Gaspare.”
He took a seat on a hard chair. His face had changed. Generally it was
what is called “an open face.” Now it looked the opposite to that. When
she glanced at him, almost furtively, Hermione was once more assailed
by fear. She began to speak quickly, with determination, to combat her
fear.
“Gaspare, I may be wrong, but for some time I have felt now and then as
if you and I were not quite as we used to be together, as if--well, now
and then it seems to me as if there was a wall, and I was on one side
of the wall and you were on the other. I don’t like that feeling, after
having you with me so long. I don’t like it, and I want to get rid of
it.”
She paused.
“Si, Signora,” he said, in a low voice.
He was now looking at the floor. His arms were resting on his knees, and
his hands hung down touching each other.
“It seems to me that--I never noticed the thing between us until--until
Ruffo came to the island.”
“Ruffo?”
“Yes, Gaspare, Ruffo.”
She spoke with increasing energy and determination, still combating her
still formless fear. And because of this interior combat her manner and
voice were not quite natural, though she strove to keep them so, knowing
well how swiftly a Sicilian will catch the infection of a strange mood,
will be puzzled by it, be made obstinate, even dogged by it.
“I am sure that all this--I mean that this has something to do with
Ruffo.”
Gaspare said nothing.
“I know you like Ruffo, Gaspare. I believe you like him very much. Don’t
you?”
“Signora, Ruffo has never done me any harm.”
“Ruffo is very fond of you.”
She saw Gaspare redden.
“He respects and admires you more than other people. I have noticed
that.”
Gaspare cleared his throat but did not look up or make any remark.
“Both the Signorina and I like Ruffo, too. We feel--at least I feel--I
feel as if he had become one of the family.”
Gaspare looked up quickly and his eyes were surely fierce.
“One of the family!” he exclaimed.
Hermione wondered if he were jealous.
“I don’t mean that I put him with you, Gaspare. No--but he seems to me
quite a friend. Tell me--do you know anything against Ruffo?”
“Non, Signora.”
It came very slowly from his lips.
“Absolutely nothing?”
“Signora, I don’t know anything bad of Ruffo.”
“I felt sure not. Don’t you like his coming to the island?”
Gaspare’s face was still flushed.
“Signora, it is nothing to do with me.”
A sort of dull anger seemed to be creeping into his voice, an accent
of defiance that he was trying to control. Hermione noticed it, and it
brought her to a resolve that, till now, she had avoided. Her secret
fear had prompted her to delay, to a gradual method of arriving at
the truth. Now she sat forward, clasping her hands together hard, and
speaking quickly:
“Gaspare, I feel sure that you noticed long ago something very strange
in Ruffo. Perhaps you noticed it almost at once. I believe you did. It
is this. Ruffo has an extraordinary look in his face sometimes, a look
of--of your dead Padrone. I didn’t see it for some time, but I think you
saw it directly. Did you? Did you, Gaspare?”
There was no answer. Gaspare only cleared his throat again more
violently. Hermione waited for a minute. Then, understanding that he was
not going to answer, she went on:
“You have seen it--we have both noticed it. Now I want to tell you
something--something that happened to-night.”
Gaspare started, looked up quickly, darted at his Padrona a searching
glance of inquiry.
“What is it?” she said.
“Niente!”
He kept his eyes on her, staring with a tremendous directness that was
essentially southern. And she returned his gaze.
“I was with Ruffo this evening. We talked, and he told me that he met
you at the Festa last night. He told me, too, that he was with his
mother.”
She waited to give him a chance of speaking, of forestalling any
question. But he only stared at her with dilated eyes.
“He told me that you knew his mother, and that his mother knew you.”
“Why not?”
“Of course, there is no reason. What surprised me rather”--she was
speaking more slowly now, and more unevenly--“was this--”
“Si?”
Gaspare’s voice was loud. He lifted up his hands and laid them heavily
on his knees.
“Si?” he repeated.
“After you had spoken with her, she cried, Ruffo’s mother cried,
Gaspare. And she said, ‘To think of its being Gaspare on the island!’”
“Is that all?”
“No.”
A look that was surely a look of fear came into his face, rendering it
new to Hermione. Never before had she seen such an expression--or had
she once--long ago--one night in Sicily?
“That isn’t all. Ruffo took his mother home, and when they got home she
said to him this, ‘Has Gaspare ever said you were like somebody?’”
Gaspare said nothing.
“Did you hear, Gaspare?”
“Si, Signora.”
“Gaspare, it seems to me”--Hermione was speaking now very slowly, like
one shaping a thought in her mind while she spoke--“it seems to me
strange that you and Ruffo’s mother should have known each other so well
long before Ruffo was born, and that she should cry because she met you
at the Festa, and that--afterwards--she should ask Ruffo that.”
“Strange?”
The fear that had been formless was increasing now in Hermione, and
surely it was beginning at last to take a form, but as yet only a form
that was vague and shadowy.
“Yes. I think it very strange. Did you”--an intense curiosity was alive
in her now--“did you know Ruffo’s mother in Sicily?”
“Signora, it does not matter where I knew her.”
“Why should she say that?”
“What?”
“Has Gaspare ever said you were like somebody?”
“I have never said Ruffo was like anybody!” Gaspare exclaimed, with
sudden and intense violence. “May the Madonna let me die--may I die”--he
held up his arms--“may I die to-morrow if I have ever said Ruffo was
like anybody!”
He got up from his chair. His face was red in patches, like the face of
a man stricken with fever.
“Gaspare, I know that, but what could this woman have meant?”
“Madonna! How should I know? Signora, how can I tell what a woman like
that means? Such women have no sense, they talk, they gossip--ah, ah,
ah, ah!”--he imitated the voice of a woman of the people--“they are
always on the door-step, their tongues are always going. Dio mio! Who is
to say what they mean, or what nonsense goes through their heads?”
Hermione got up and laid her hand heavily on his arm.
“I believe you know of whom Ruffo’s mother spoke, Gaspare. Tell me
this--did Ruffo’s mother ever know your Padrone?”
She looked straight into his eyes. It seemed to her as if, for the first
time, there came from them to her a look that had something in it of
dislike. This look struck her to a terrible melancholy, yet she met it
firmly, almost fiercely, with a glance that fought it, that strove to
beat it back. And with a steady voice she repeated the question he had
not answered.
“Did Ruffo’s mother ever know your Padrone?”
Gaspare moved his lips, passing his tongue over them. His eyes fell. He
moved his arm, trying to shift it from his Padrona’s hand. Her fingers
closed on it more tenaciously.
“Gaspare, I order you to tell me.”
“Signora,” he said, “such things are not in my service. I am here to
work, not to answer questions.”
He spoke quietly now, heavily, and moved his feet on the carpet.
“You disobey me?”
“Signora, I shall always obey all your orders as a servant.”
“And as a friend, Gaspare, as a friend! You are my friend, aren’t you?”
Her voice had suddenly changed, and in answer to it his face changed. He
looked into her face, and his eyes were full of a lustrous softness that
was like a gentle and warm caress.
“Signora, you know what I am for you. Then leave me alone, Signora.” He
spoke solemnly. “You ought to trust me, Signora, you ought to trust me.”
“I do trust you. But you--do you trust me?”
“Si, Signora.”
“In everything?”
“Signora, I trust you; I have always trusted you.”
“And my courage--do you trust that?”
He did not answer.
“I don’t think you do, Gaspare.”
Suddenly she felt that he was right not to trust it. Again she felt
beset by fear, and as if she had nothing within her that was strong
enough to stand up in further combat against the assaults of the world
and of destiny. The desire to know all, to probe this mystery, abruptly
left her, was replaced by an almost frantic wish to be always ignorant,
if only that ignorance saved her from any fresh sorrow or terror.
“Never mind,” she said. “You needn’t answer. I don’t want--What does it
all matter? It’s--it’s all so long ago.”
Having got hold of that phrase, she clung to it as if for comfort.
“It’s all so long ago,” she repeated. “Years and years ago. We’ve
forgotten it. We’ve forgotten Sicily, Gaspare. Why should we think of it
or trouble about it any more? Good-night, Gaspare.”
She smiled at him, but her face was drawn and looked old.
“Buona notte, Signora.”
He did not smile, but gazed at her with earnest gentleness, and still
with that lustrous look in his eyes, full of tenderness and protection.
“Buon riposo, Signora.”
He went away, surely relieved to go. At the door he said again:
“Buon riposo.”
The door was shut.
“Buon riposo!”
Hermione repeated the words to herself.
“Riposo!”
The very thought of repose was like the most bitter irony. She walked
up and down the room. To-night there was no stability in her. She
was shaken, lacerated mentally, by sharply changing moods that rushed
through her, one chasing another. Scarcely had Gaspare gone before she
longed to call him back, to force him to speak, to explain everything to
her. The fear that cringed was suddenly replaced by the fear that rushes
forward blindly, intent only on getting rid of uncertainty even at the
cost of death. Soldiers know that fear. It has given men to bayonet
points.
Now it increased rapidly within Hermione. She was devoured by a terror
that was acutely nervous, that gnawed her body as well as her soul.
Gaspare had known Ruffo’s mother in Sicily. And Maurice--he had known
Ruffo’s mother. He must have known her. But when? How had he got to know
her?
Hermione stood still.
“It must have been when I was in Africa!”
A hundred details of her husband’s conduct, from the moment of his
return from the fair till the last kiss he had given her before he went
away down the side of Monte Amato, flashed through her mind. And each
one seemed to burn her mind as a spark, touching flesh, burns the flesh.
“It was when I was in Africa!”
She went to the window and leaned out into the night over the misty sea.
Her lips moved. She was repeating to herself again and again:
“To-morrow I’ll go to Mergellina! To-morrow I’ll go to Mergellina!”