Chapter 26

"Signorino," he began at once, in a low voice that was full of the pressure of an intense excitement. "Tell me! Where were you last night when we were making the fireworks go off?"

Maurice felt the blood mount to his face.

"Close to where you left me," he answered.

"Oh, signore! Oh, signore!"

It was almost a cry. The sweat was pouring down the boy's face.

"Ma non è mia colpa! Non è mia colpa!" he exclaimed.

"What do you mean? What has happened, Gaspare?"

"I have seen Salvatore."

His voice was more quiet now. He fixed his eyes almost sternly on his padrone, as if in the effort to read his very soul.

"Well? Well, Gaspare?"

Maurice was almost stammering now. He guessed--he knew what was coming.

"Salvatore came up to me just before I got to the village. I heard him calling, 'Stop!' I stood still. We were on the path not far from the fountain. There was a broken branch on the ground, a branch of olive. Salvatore said: 'Suppose that is your padrone, that branch there!' and he spat on it. He spat on it, signore, he spat--and he spat."

Maurice knew now.

"Go on!" he said.

And this time there was no uncertainty in his voice. Gaspare was breathing hard. His breast rose and fell.

"I was going to strike him in the face, but he caught my hand, and then--Signorino, signorino, what have you done?"

His voice rose. He began to look uncontrolled, distracted, wild, as if he might do some frantic thing.

"Gaspare! Gaspare!"

Maurice had him by the arms.

"Why did you?" panted the boy. "Why did you?"

"Then Salvatore knows?"

Maurice saw that any denial was useless.

"He knows! He knows!"

If Maurice had not held Gaspare tightly the boy would have flung himself down headlong on the ground, to burst into one of those storms of weeping which swept upon him when he was fiercely wrought up. But Maurice would not let him have this relief.

"Gaspare! Listen to me! What is he going to do? What is Salvatore going to do?"

"Santa Madonna! Santa Madonna!"

The boy rocked himself to and fro. He began to invoke the Madonna and the saints. He was beside himself, was almost like one mad.

"Gaspare--in the name of God----!"

"H'sh!"

Suddenly the boy kept still. His face changed, hardened. His body became tense. With his hand still held up in a warning gesture, he crept to the edge of the barn and looked round it.

"What is it?" Maurice whispered.

Gaspare stole back.

"It is only Lucrezia. She is spreading the linen. I thought----"

"What is Salvatore going to do?"

"Unless you go down to the sea to meet him this evening, signorino, he is coming up here to-night to tell everything to the signora."

Maurice went white.

"I shall go," he said. "I shall go down to the sea."

"Madonna! Madonna!"

"He won't come now? He won't come this morning?"

Maurice spoke almost breathlessly, with his hands on the boy's hands which streamed with sweat. Gaspare shook his head.

"I told him if he came up I would meet him in the path and kill him."

The boy had out a knife.

Maurice put his arm round Gaspare's shoulder. At that moment he really loved the boy.

"Will he come?"

"Only if you do not go."

"I shall go."

"I will come with you, signorino."

"No. I must go alone."

"I will come with you!"

A dogged obstinacy hardened his whole face, made even his shining eyes look cold, like stones.

"Gaspare, you are to stay with the signora. I may miss Salvatore going down. While I am gone he may come up here. The signora is not to speak with him. He is not to come to her."

Gaspare hesitated. He was torn in two by his dual affection, his dual sense of the watchful fidelity he owed to his padrone and to his padrona.

"Va bene," he said, at last, in a half whisper.

He hung down his head like one exhausted.

"How will it finish?" he murmured, as if to himself. "How will it finish?"

"I must go," Maurice said. "I must go now. Gaspare!"

"Si, signore?"

"We must be careful, you and I, to-day. We must not let the signora, Lucrezia, any one suspect that--that we are not just as usual. Do you see?"

"Si, signore."

The boy nodded. His eyes now looked tired.

"And try to keep a lookout, when you can, without drawing the attention of the signora. Salvatore might change his mind and come up. The signora is not to know. She is never to know. Do you think"--he hesitated--"do you think Salvatore has told any one?"

"Non lo so."

The boy was silent. Then he lifted his hands again and said:

"Signorino! Signorino!"

And Maurice seemed to hear at that moment the voice of an accusing angel.

"Gaspare," he said, "I was mad. We men--we are mad sometimes. But now I must be sane. I must do what I can to--I must do what I can--and you must help me."

He held out his hand. Gaspare took it. The grasp of it was strong, that of a man. It seemed to reassure the boy.

"I will always help my padrone," he said.

Then they went down the mountain-side.

It was perhaps very strange--Maurice thought it was--but he felt now less tired, less confused, more master of himself than he had before he had spoken with Gaspare. He even felt less miserable. Face to face with an immediate and very threatening danger, courage leaped up in him, a certain violence of resolve which cleared away clouds and braced his whole being. He had to fight. There was no way out. Well, then, he would fight. He had played the villain, perhaps, but he would not play the poltroon. He did not know what he was going to do, what he could do, but he must act, and act decisively. His wild youth responded to this call made upon it. There was a new light in his eyes as he went down to the cottage, as he came upon the terrace.

Artois noticed it at once, was aware at once that in this marvellous peace to which Hermione had brought him there were elements which had nothing to do with peace.

"What hast thou to do with peace? Turn thee behind me."

These words from the Bible came into his mind as he looked into the eyes of his host, and he felt that Hermione and he were surely near to some drama of which they knew nothing, of which Hermione, perhaps, suspected nothing.

Maurice acted his part. The tonic of near danger gave him strength, even gave him at first a certain subtlety. From the terrace he could see far over the mountain flanks. As one on a tower he watched for the approach of his enemy from the sea, but he did not neglect his two companions. For he was fighting already. When he seemed natural in his cordiality to his guest, when he spoke and laughed, when he apologized for the misfortune of the previous day, he was fighting. The battle with circumstances was joined. He must bear himself bravely in it. He must not allow himself to be overwhelmed.

Nevertheless, there came presently a moment which brought with it a sense of fear.

Hermione got up to go into the house.

"I must see what Lucrezia is doing," she said. "Your collazione must not be a fiasco, Emile."

"Nothing could be a fiasco here, I think," he answered.

She laughed happily.

"But poor Lucrezia is not in paradise," she said. "Ah, why can't every one be happy when one is happy one's self? I always think of that when I----"

She did not finish her sentence in words. Her look at the two men concluded it. Then she turned and went into the house.

"What is the matter with Lucrezia?" asked Artois.

"Oh, she--she's in love with a shepherd called Sebastiano."

"And he's treating her badly?"

"I'm afraid so. He went to the Lipari Isles, and he doesn't come back."

"A girl there keeps him captive?"

"It seems so."

"Faithful women must not expect to have a perfect time in Sicily," Artois said.

As he spoke he noticed that a change came in his companion's face. It was fleeting, but it was marked. It made Artois think:

"This man understands Sicilian faithlessness in love."

It made him, too, remember sharply some words of his own said long ago in London:

"I love the South, but I distrust what I love, and I see the South in him."

There was a silence between the two men. Heat was growing in the long summer day, heat that lapped them in the influence of the South. Africa had been hotter, but this seemed the breast of the South, full of glory and of languor, and of that strange and subtle influence which inclines the heart of man to passion and the body of man to yield to its desires. It was glorious, this wonderful magic of the South, but was it wholesome for Northern men? Was it not full of danger? As he looked at the great, shining waste of the sea, purple and gold, dark and intense and jewelled, at the outline of Etna, at the barbaric ruin of the Saracenic castle on the cliff opposite, like a cry from the dead ages echoing out of the quivering blue, at the man before him leaning against the blinding white wall above the steep bank of the ravine, Artois said to himself that the South was dangerous to young, full-blooded men, was dangerous, to such a man as Delarey. And he asked himself the question, "What has this man been doing here in this glorious loneliness of the South, while his wife has been saving my life in Africa?" And a sense of reproach, almost of alarm, smote him. For he had called Hermione away. In the terrible solitude that comes near to the soul with the footfalls of death he had not been strong enough to be silent. He had cried out, and his friend had heard and had answered. And Delarey had been left alone with the sun.

"I'm afraid you must feel as if I were your enemy," he said.

And as he spoke he was thinking, "Have I been this man's enemy?"

"Oh no. Why?"

"I deprived you of your wife. You've been all alone here."

"I made friends of the Sicilians."

Maurice spoke lightly, but through his mind ran the thought, "What an enemy this man has been to me, without knowing it!"

"They are easy to get on with," said Artois. "When I was in Sicily I learned to love them."

"Oh, love!" said Maurice, hastily.

He checked himself.

"That's rather a strong word, but I like them. They're a delightful race."

"Have you found out their faults?"

Both men were trying to hide themselves in their words.

"What are their faults, do you think?" Maurice said.

He looked over the wall and saw, far off on the path by the ravine, a black speck moving.

"Treachery when they do not trust; sensuality, violence, if they think themselves wronged."

"Are--are those faults? I understand them. They seem almost to belong to the sun."

Artois had not been looking at Maurice. The sound of Maurice's voice now made him aware that the speaker had turned away from him. He glanced up and saw his companion staring over the wall across the ravine. What was he gazing at? Artois wondered.

"Yes, the sun is perhaps partly responsible for them. Then you have become such a sun-worshipper that----"

"No, no, I don't say that," Maurice interrupted.

He looked round and met Artois's observant eyes. He had dreaded having those eyes fixed upon him.

"But I think--I think things done in such a place, such an island as this, shouldn't be judged too severely, shouldn't be judged, I mean, quite as we might judge them, say, in England."

He looked embarrassed as he ended, and shifted his gaze from his companion.

"I agree with you," Artois said.

Maurice looked at him again, almost eagerly. An odd feeling came to him that this man, who unwittingly had done him a deadly harm, would be able to understand what perhaps no woman could ever understand, the tyranny of the senses in a man, their fierce tyranny in the sunlit lands. Had he been so wicked? Would Artois think so? And the punishment that was perhaps coming--did he deserve that it should be terrible? He wondered, almost like a boy. But Hermione was not with them. When she was there he did not wonder. He felt that he deserved lashes unnumbered.

And Artois--he began to feel almost clairvoyant. The new softness that had come to him with the pain of the body, that had been developed by the blessed rest from pain that was convalescence, had not stricken his faculty of seeing clear in others, but it had changed, at any rate for a time, the sentiments that followed upon the exercise of that faculty. Scorn and contempt were less near to him than they had been. Pity was nearer. He felt now almost sure that Delarey had fallen into some trouble while Hermione was in Africa, that he was oppressed at this moment by some great uneasiness or even fear, that he was secretly cursing some imprudence, and that his last words were a sort of surreptitious plea for forgiveness, thrown out to the Powers of the air, to the Spirits of the void, to whatever shadowy presences are about the guilty man ready to condemn his sin. He felt, too, that he owed much to Delarey. In a sense it might be said that he owed to him his life. For Delarey had allowed Hermione to come to Africa, and if Hermione had not come the end for him, Artois, might well have been death.

"I should like to say something to you, monsieur," he said. "It is rather difficult to say, because I do not wish it to seem formal, when the feeling that prompts it is not formal."

Maurice was again looking over the wall, watching with intensity the black speck that was slowly approaching on the little path.

"What is it, monsieur?" he asked, quickly.

"I owe you a debt--indeed I do. You must not deny it. Through your magnanimous action in permitting your wife to leave you, you, perhaps indirectly, saved my life. For, without her aid, I do not think I could have recovered. Of her nobility and devotion I will not, because I cannot adequately, speak. But I wish to say to you that if ever I can do you a service of any kind I will do it."

As he finished Maurice, who was looking at him now, saw a veil over his big eyes. Could it--could it possibly be a veil of tears!

"Thank you," he answered.

He tried to speak warmly, cordially. But his heart said to him: "You can do nothing for me now. It is all too late!"

Yet the words and the emotion of Artois were some slight relief to him. He was able to feel that in this man he had no secret enemy, but, if need be, a friend.

"You have a nice fellow as servant," Artois said, to change the conversation.

"Gaspare--yes. He's loyal. I intend to ask Hermione to let me take him to England with us."

He paused, then added, with an anxious curiosity:

"Did you talk to him much as you came up?"

He wondered whether the novelist had noticed Gaspare's agitation or whether the boy had been subtle enough to conceal it.

"Not very much. The path is narrow, and I rode in front. He sang most of the time, those melancholy songs of Sicily that came surely long ago across the sea from Africa."

"They nearly always sing on the mountains when they are with the donkeys."

"Dirges of the sun. There is a sadness of the sun as well as a joy."

"Yes."

As Maurice answered, he thought, "How well I know that now!" And as he looked at the black figure drawing nearer in the sunshine it seemed to him that there was a terror in that gold which he had often worshipped. If that figure should be Salvatore! He strained his eyes. At one moment he fancied that he recognized the wild, free, rather strutting walk of the fisherman. At another he believed that his fear had played him a trick, that the movements of the figure were those of an old man, some plodding contadino of the hills. Artois wondered increasingly what he was looking at. A silence fell between them. Artois lay back in the chaise longue and gazed up at the blue, then at the section of distant sea which was visible above the rim of the wall though the intervening mountain land was hidden. It was a paradise up here. And to have it with the great love of a woman, what an experience that must be for any man! It seemed to him strange that such an experience had been the gift of the gods to their messenger, their Mercury. What had it meant to him? What did it mean to him now? Something had changed him. Was it that? In the man by the wall Artois did not see any longer the bright youth he remembered. Yet the youth was still there, the supple grace, the beauty, bronzed now by the long heats of the sun. It was the expression that had changed. In cities one sees anxious-looking men everywhere. In London Delarey had stood out from the crowd not only because of his beauty of the South, but because of his light-hearted expression, the spirit of youth in his eyes. And now here, in this reality that seemed almost like a dream in its perfection, in this reality of the South, there was a look of strain in his eyes and in his whole body. The man had contradicted his surroundings in London--now he contradicted his surroundings here.

While Artois was thinking this Maurice's expression suddenly changed, his attitude became easier. He turned round from the wall, and Artois saw that the keen anxiety had gone out of his eyes. Gaspare was below with his gun pretending to look for birds, and had made a sign that the approaching figure was not that of Salvatore. Maurice's momentary sense of relief was so great that it threw him off his guard.

"What can have been happening beyond the wall?" Artois thought.

He felt as if a drama had been played out there and the dénouement had been happy.

Hermione came back at this moment.

"Poor Lucrezia!" she said. "She's plucky, but Sebastiano is making her suffer horribly."

"Here!" said Artois, almost involuntarily.

"It does seem almost impossible, I know."

She sat down again near him and smiled at her husband.

"You are coming back to health, Emile. And Maurice and I--well, we are in our garden. It seems wrong, terribly wrong, that any one should suffer here. But Lucrezia loves like a Sicilian. What violence there is in these people!"

"England must not judge them."

He looked at Maurice.

"What's that?" asked Hermione. "Something you two were talking about when I was in the kitchen?"

Maurice looked uneasy.

"I was only saying that I think the sun--the South has an influence," he said, "and that----"

"An influence!" exclaimed Hermione. "Of course it has! Emile, you would have seen that influence at work if you had been with us on our first day in Sicily. Your tarantella, Maurice!"

She smiled again happily, but her husband did not answer her smile.

"What was that?" said Artois. "You never told me in Africa."

"The boys danced a tarantella here on the terrace to welcome us, and it drove Maurice so mad that he sprang up and danced too. And the strange thing was that he danced as well as any of them. His blood called him, and he obeyed the call."

She looked at Artois to remind him of his words.

"It's good when the blood calls one to the tarantella, isn't it?" she asked him. "I think it's the most wildly innocent expression of extreme joy in the world. And yet"--her expressive face changed, and into her prominent brown eyes there stole a half-whimsical, half-earnest look--"at the end--Maurice, do you know that I was almost frightened that day at the end?"

"Frightened! Why?" he said.

He got up from the terrace-seat and sat down in a straw chair.

"Why?" he repeated, crossing one leg over the other and laying his brown hands on the arms of the chair.

"I had a feeling that you were escaping from me in the tarantella. Wasn't it absurd?"

He looked slightly puzzled. She turned to Artois.

"Can you imagine what I felt, Emile? He danced so well that I seemed to see before me a pure-blooded Sicilian. It almost frightened me!"

She laughed.

"But I soon learned to delight in--in my Sicilian," she said, tenderly.

She felt so happy, so at ease, and she was so completely natural, that it did not occur to her that though she was with her husband and her most intimate friend the two men were really strangers to each other.

"You'll find that I'm quite English, when we are back in London," Maurice said. There was a cold sound of determination in his voice.

"Oh, but I don't want you to lose what you have gained here," Hermione protested, half laughingly, half tenderly.

"Gained!" Maurice said, still in the prosaic voice. "I don't think a Sicilian would be much good in England. We--we don't want romance there. We want cool-headed, practical men who can work, and who've no nonsense about them."

"Maurice!" she said, amazed. "What a cold douche! And from you! Why, what has happened to you while I've been away?"

"Happened to me?" he said, quickly. "Nothing. What should happen to me here?"

"Do you--are you beginning to long for England and English ways?"

"I think it's time I began to do something," he said, resolutely. "I think I've had a long enough holiday."

He was trying to put the past behind him. He was trying to rush into the new life, the life in which there would be no more wildness, no more yielding to the hot impulses that were surely showered down out of the sun. Mentally he was leaving the Enchanted Island already. It was fading away, sinking into its purple sea, sinking out of his sight with his wild heart of youth, while he, cold, calm, resolute man, was facing the steady life befitting an Englishman, the life of work, of social duties, of husband and father, with a money-making ambition and a stake in his country.

"Perhaps you're right," Hermione said.

But there was a sound of disappointment in her voice. Till now Maurice had always shared her Sicilian enthusiasms, had even run before them, lighter-footed than she in the race towards the sunshine. It was difficult to accommodate herself to this abrupt change.

"But don't let us think of going to-day," she added. "Remember--I have only just come back."

"And I!" said Artois. "Be merciful to an invalid, Monsieur Delarey!"

He spoke lightly, but he felt fully conscious now that his suspicion was well founded. Maurice was uneasy, unhappy. He wanted to get away from this peace that held no peace for him. He wanted to put something behind him. To a man like Artois, Maurice was a boy. He might try to be subtle, he might even be subtle--for him. But to this acute and trained observer of the human comedy he could not for long be deceptive.

During his severe illness the mind of Artois had often been clouded, had been dispossessed of its throne by the clamor of the body's pain. And afterwards, when the agony passed and the fever abated, the mind had been lulled, charmed into a stagnant state that was delicious. But now it began to go again to its business. It began to work with the old rapidity that had for a time been lost. And as this power came back and was felt thoroughly, very consciously by this very conscious man, he took alarm. What affected or threatened Delarey must affect, threaten Hermione. Whether he were one with her or not she was one with him. The feeling of Artois towards the woman who had shown him such noble, such unusual friendship was exquisitely delicate and intensely strong. Unmingled with any bodily passion, it was, or so it seemed to him, the more delicate and strong on that account. He was a man who had an instinctive hatred of heroics. His taste revolted from them as it revolted from violence in literature. They seemed to him a coarseness, a crudity of the soul, and almost inevitably linked with secret falseness. But he was conscious that to protect from sorrow or shame the woman who had protected him in his dark hour he would be willing to make any sacrifice. There would be no limit to what he would be ready to do now, in this moment, for Hermione. He knew that, and he took the alarm. Till now he had been feeling curiosity about the change in Delarey. Now he felt the touch of fear.