Chapter 27

Something had happened to change Maurice while Hermione had been in Africa. He had heard, perhaps, the call of the blood. All that he had said, and all that he had felt, on the night when he had met Maurice for the first time in London, came back to Artois. He had prophesied, vaguely perhaps. Had his prophecy already been fulfilled? In this great and shining peace of nature Maurice was not at peace. And now all sense of peace deserted Artois. Again, and fiercely now, he felt the danger of the South, and he added to his light words some words that were not light.

"But I am really no longer an invalid," he said. "And I must be getting northward very soon. I need the bracing air, the Spartan touch of the cold that the Sybarite in me dreads. Perhaps we all need them."

"If you go on like this, you two," Hermione exclaimed, "you will make me feel as if it were degraded to wish to live anywhere except at Clapham Junction or the North Pole. Let us be happy as we are, where we are, to-day and--yes, call me weak if you like--and to-morrow!"

Maurice made no answer to this challenge, but Artois covered his silence, and kept the talk going on safe topics till Gaspare came to the terrace to lay the cloth for collazione.

It was past noon now, and the heat was brimming up like a flood over the land. Flies buzzed about the terrace, buzzed against the white walls and ceilings of the cottage, winding their tiny, sultry horns ceaselessly, musicians of the sun. The red geraniums in the stone pots beneath the broken columns drooped their dry heads. The lizards darted and stopped, darted and stopped upon the wall and the white seats where the tiles were burning to the touch. There was no moving figure on the baked mountains, no moving vessel on the shining sea. No smoke came from the snowless lips of Etna. It was as if the fires of the sun had beaten down and slain the fires of the earth.

Gaspare moved to and fro slowly, spreading the cloth, arranging the pots of flowers, the glasses, forks, and knives upon it. In his face there was little vivacity. But now and then his great eyes searched the hot world that lay beneath them, and Artois thought he saw in them the watchfulness, the strained anxiety that had been in Maurice's eyes.

"Some one must be coming," he thought. "Or they must be expecting some one to come, these two."

"Do you ever have visitors here?" he asked, carelessly.

"Visitors! Emile, why are we here? Do you anticipate a knock and 'If you please, ma'am, Mrs. and the Misses Watson'? Good Heavens--visitors on Monte Amato!"

He smiled, but he persisted.

"Never a contadino, or a shepherd, or"--he looked down at the sea--"or a fisherman with his basket of sarde?"

Maurice moved in his chair, and Gaspare, hearing a word he knew, looked hard at the speaker.

"Oh, we sometimes have the people of the hills to see us," said Hermione. "But we don't call them 'visitors.' As to fishermen--here they are!"

She pointed to her husband and Gaspare.

"But they eat all the fish they catch, and we never see the fin of even one at the cottage."

Collazione was ready now. Hermione helped Artois up from his chaise longue, and they went to the table under the awning.

"You must sit facing the view, Emile," Hermione said.

"What a dining-room!" Artois exclaimed.

Now he could see over the wall. His gaze wandered over the mountain-sides, travelled down to the land that lay along the edge of the sea.

"Have you been fishing much since I've been away, Maurice?" Hermione asked, as they began to eat.

"Oh yes. I went several times. What wine do you like, Monsieur Artois?"

He tried to change the conversation, but Hermione, quite innocently, returned to the subject.

"They fish at night, you know, Emile, all along that coast by Isola Bella and on to the point there that looks like an island, where the House of the Sirens is."

A tortured look went across Maurice's face. He had begun to eat, but now he stopped for a moment like a man suddenly paralyzed.

"The House of the Sirens!" said Artois. "Then there are sirens here? I could well believe it. Have you seen them, Monsieur Maurice, at night, when you have been fishing?"

He had been gazing at the coast, but now he turned towards his host. Maurice began hastily to eat again.

"I'm afraid not. But we didn't look out for them. We were prosaic and thought of nothing but the fish."

"And is there really a house down there?" said Artois.

"Yes," said Hermione. "It used to be a ruin, but now it's built up and occupied. Gaspare"--she spoke to him as he was taking a dish from the table--"who is it lives in the Casa delle Sirene now? You told me, but I've forgotten."

A heavy, obstinate look came into the boy's face, transforming it. The question startled him, and he had not understood a word of the conversation which had led up to it. What had they been talking about? He glanced furtively at his master. Maurice did not look at him.

"Salvatore and Maddalena, signora," he answered, after a pause.

Then he took the dish and went into the house.

"What's the matter with Gaspare?" said Hermione. "I never saw him look like that before--quite ugly. Doesn't he like these people?"

"Oh yes," replied Maurice. "Why--why, they're quite friends of ours. We saw them at the fair only yesterday."

"Well, then, why should Gaspare look like that?"

"Oh," said Artois, who saw the discomfort of his host, "perhaps there is some family feud that you know nothing of. When I was in Sicily I found the people singularly subtle. They can gossip terribly, but they can keep a secret when they choose. If I had won the real friendship of a Sicilian, I would rather trust him with my secret than a man of any other race. They are not only loyal--that is not enough--but they are also very intelligent."

"Yes, they are both--the good ones," said Hermione. "I would trust Gaspare through thick and thin. If they were only as stanch in love as they can be in friendship!"

Gaspare came out again with another course. The ugly expression had gone from his face, but he still looked unusually grave.

"Ah, when the senses are roused they are changed beings," Artois said. "They hate and resent governance from outside, but their blood governs them."

"Our blood governs us when the time comes--do you remember?"

Hermione had said the words before she remembered the circumstances in which they had been spoken and of whom they were said. Directly she had uttered them she remembered.

"What was that?" Maurice asked, before Artois could reply.

He had seen a suddenly conscious look in Hermione's face, and instantly he was aware of a feeling of jealousy within him.

"What was that?" he repeated, looking quickly from one to the other.

"Something I remember saying to your wife," Artois answered. "We were talking about human nature--a small subject, monsieur, isn't it?--and I think I expressed the view of a fatalist. At any rate, I did say that--that our blood governs us when the time comes."

"The time?" Maurice asked.

His feeling of jealousy died away, and was replaced by a keen personal interest unmingled with suspicions of another.

"Well, I confess it sometimes seems to me as if, when a certain hour strikes, a certain deed must be committed by a certain man or woman. It is perhaps their hour of madness. They may repent it to the day of their death. But can they in that hour avoid that deed? Sometimes, when I witness the tragic scenes that occur abruptly, unexpectedly, in the comedy of life, I am moved to wonder."

"Then you should be very forgiving, Emile," Hermione said.

"And you?" he asked. "Are you, or would you be, forgiving?"

Maurice leaned forward on the table and looked at his wife with intensity.

"I hope so, but I don't think it would be for that--I mean because I thought the deed might not have been avoided. I think I should forgive because I pitied so, because I know how desperately unhappy I should be myself if I were to do a hateful thing, a thing that was exceptional, that was not natural to my nature as I had generally known it. When one really does love cleanliness, to have thrown one's self down deliberately in the mud, to see, to feel, that one is soiled from head to foot--that must be terrible. I think I should forgive because I pitied so. What do you say, Maurice?"

It was like a return to their talk in London at Caminiti's restaurant, when Hermione and Artois discussed topics that interested them, and Maurice listened until Hermione appealed to him for his opinion. But now he was more deeply interested than his companions.

"I don't know," he said. "I don't know about pitying and forgiving, but I expect you're right, Hermione."

"How?"

"In what you say about--about the person who's done the wrong thing feeling awful afterwards. And I think Monsieur Artois is right, too--about the hour of madness. I'm sure he is right. Sometimes an hour comes and one seems to forget everything in it. One seems not to be really one's self in it, but somebody else, and--and--"

Suddenly he seemed to become aware that, whereas Hermione and Artois had been considering a subject impersonally, he was introducing the personal element into the conversation. He stopped short, looked quickly from Hermione to Artois, and said:

"What I mean is that I imagine it's so, and that I've known fellows--in London, you know--who've done such odd things that I can only explain it like that. They must have--well, they must have gone practically mad for the moment. You--you see what I mean, Hermione?"

The question was uneasy.

"Yes, but I think we can control ourselves. If we couldn't, remorse would lose half its meaning. I could never feel remorse because I had been mad--horror, perhaps, but not remorse. It seems to me that remorse is our sorrow for our own weakness, the heart's cry of 'I need not have done the hateful thing, and I did it, I chose to do it!' But I could pity, I could pity, and forgive because of my pity."

Gaspare came out with coffee.

"And then, Emile, you must have a siesta," said Hermione. "This is a tiring day for you. Maurice and I will leave you quite alone in the sitting-room."

"I don't think I could sleep," said Artois.

He was feeling oddly excited, and attributed the sensation to his weak state of health. For so long he had been shut up, isolated from the world, that even this coming out was an event. He was accustomed to examine his feelings calmly, critically, to track them to their sources. He tried to do so now.

"I must beware of my own extra sensitiveness," he said to himself. "I'm still weak. I am not normal. I may see things distorted. I may exaggerate, turn the small into the great. At least half of what I think and feel to-day may come from my peculiar state."

Thus he tried to raise up barriers against his feeling that Delarey had got into some terrible trouble during the absence of Hermione, that he was now stricken with remorse, and that he was also in active dread of something, perhaps of some Nemesis.

"All this may be imagination," Artois thought, as he sipped his coffee. But he said again:

"I don't think I could sleep. I feel abnormally alive to-day. Do you know the sensation, as if one were too quick, as if all the nerves were standing at attention?"

"Then our peace here does not soothe you?" Hermione said.

"If I must be truthful--no," he answered.

He met Maurice's restless glance.

"I think I've had enough coffee," he added. "Coffee stimulates the nerves too much at certain times."

Maurice finished his and asked for another cup.

"He isn't afraid of being overstimulated," said Hermione. "But, Emile, you ought to sleep. You'll be dead tired this evening when you ride down."

"This evening," Hermione had said. Maurice wondered suddenly how late Artois was going to stay at the cottage.

"Oh no, it will be cool," Artois said.

"Yes," Maurice said. "Towards five we get a little wind from the sea nearly always, even sooner sometimes. I--I usually go down to bathe about that time."

"I must begin to bathe, too," Hermione said.

"What--to-day!" Maurice said, quickly.

"Oh no. Emile is here to-day."

Then Artois did not mean to go till late. But he--Maurice--must go down to the sea before nightfall.

"Unless I bathe," he said, trying to speak naturally--"unless I bathe I feel the heat too much at night. A dip in the sea does wonders for me."

"And in such a sea!" said Artois. "You must have your dip to-day. I shall go directly that little wind you speak of comes. I told a boy to come up from the village at four to lead the donkey down."

He smiled deprecatingly.

"Dreadful to be such a weakling, isn't it?" he said.

"Hush. Don't talk, like that. It's all going away. Strength is coming. You'll soon be your old self. But you've got to look forward all the time."

Hermione spoke with a warmth, an energy that braced. She spoke to Artois, but Maurice, eager to grasp at any comfort, strove to take the words to himself. This evening the climax of his Sicilian tragedy must come. And then? Beyond, might there not be the calm, the happiness of a sane life? He must look forward, he would look forward.

But when he looked, there stood Maddalena weeping.

He hated himself. He loved happiness, he longed for it, but he knew he had lost his right to it, if any man ever has such a right. He had created suffering. How dared he expect, how dared he even wish, to escape from suffering?

"Now, Emile," Hermione said, "you have really got to go in and lie down whether you feel sleepy or not. Don't protest. Maurice and I have hardly seen anything of each other yet. We want to get rid of you."

She spoke laughingly, and laughingly he obeyed her. When she had settled him comfortably in the sitting-room she came out again to the terrace where her husband was standing, looking towards the sea. She had a rug over her arm and was holding two cushions.

"I thought you and I might go down and take our siesta under the oak-trees, Maurice. Would you like that?"

He was longing to get away, to go up to the heap of stones on the mountain-top and set a match to the fragments of Hermione's letter, which the dangerous wind might disturb, might bring out into the light of day. But he acquiesced at once. He would go later--if not this afternoon, then at night when he came back from the sea. They went down and spread the rug under the shadow of the oaks.

"I used to read to Gaspare here," he said. "When you were away in Africa."

"What did you read?"

"The _Arabian Nights_."

She stretched herself on the rug.

"To lie here and read the _Arabian Nights_! And you want to go away, Maurice?"

"I think it's time to go. If I stayed too long here I should become fit for nothing."

"Yes, that's true, I dare say. But--Maurice, it's so strange--I have a feeling as if you would always be in Sicily. I know it's absurd, and yet I have it. I feel as if you belonged to Sicily, and Sicily did not mean to part from you."

"That can't be. How could I stay here always?"

"I know."

"Unless," he said, as if some new thought had started suddenly into his mind--"unless I were--"

He stopped. He had remembered his sensation in the sea that gray morning of sirocco. He had remembered how he had played at dying.

"What?"

She looked at him and understood.

"Maurice--don't! I--I can't bear that!"

"Not one of us can know," he answered.

"I--I thought of that once," she said--"long ago, on the first night that we were here. I don't know why--but perhaps it was because I was so happy. I think it must have been that. I suppose, in this world, there must aways be dread in one's happiness, the thought it may stop soon, it may end. But why should it? Is God cruel? I think He wants us to be happy."

"If he wants us--"

"And that we prevent ourselves from being happy. But we won't do that, Maurice--you and I--will we?"

He did not answer.

"This world--nature--is so wonderfully beautiful, so happily beautiful. Surely we can learn to be happy, to keep happy in it. Look at that sky, that sea! Look at the plain over there by the foot of Etna, and the coast-line fading away, and Etna. The God who created it all must have meant men to be happy in such a world. It isn't my brain tells me that, Maurice, it's my heart, my whole heart that you have made whole. And I know it tells the truth."

Her words were terrible to him. The sound of a step, a figure standing before her, a few Sicilian words--and all this world in which she gloried would be changed for her. But she must not know. He felt that he would be willing to die to keep her ignorant of the truth forever.

"Now we must try to sleep," he said, to prevent her from speaking any more of the words that were torturing him. "We must have our siesta. I had very little sleep last night."

"And I had none at all. But now--we're together."

He arranged the cushion for her. They lay in soft shadow and could see the shining world. The distant gleams upon the sea spoke to her. She fancied them voices rising out of the dream of the waters, voices from the breast of nature that was the breast of God, saying that she was not in error, that God did mean men to be happy, that they could be happy if they would learn of Him.

She watched those gleams until she fell asleep.

XX

When Hermione woke it was four o'clock. She sat up on the rug, looked down over the mountain flank to the sea, then turned and saw her husband. He was lying with his face half buried in his folded arms.

"Maurice!" she said, softly.

"Yes," he answered, lifting his face.

"Then you weren't asleep!"

"No."

"Have you been asleep?"

"No."

She looked at her watch.

"All this time! It's four. What a disgraceful siesta! But I was really tired after the long journey and the night."

She stood up. He followed her example and threw the rug over his arm.

"Emile will think we've deserted him and aren't going to give him any tea."

"Yes."

They began to walk up the track towards the terrace.

"Maurice," Hermione said, presently, more thoroughly wide-awake now. "Did you get up while I was asleep? Did you begin to move away from me, and did I stop you, or was it a dream? I have a kind of vague recollection--or is it only imagination?--of stretching out my hand and saying, 'Don't leave me alone--don't leave me alone!'"

"I moved a little," he answered, after a slight pause.

"And you did stretch out your hand and murmur something."

"It was that--'don't leave me alone.'"

"Perhaps. I couldn't hear. It was such a murmur."

"And you only moved a little? How stupid of me to think you were getting up to go away!"

"When one is half asleep one has odd ideas often."

He did not tell her that he had been getting up softly, hoping to steal away to the mountain-top and destroy the fragments of her letter, hidden there, while she slept.

"You won't mind," he added, "if I go down to bathe this evening. I sha'n't sleep properly to-night unless I do."

"Of course--go. But won't it be rather late after tea?"

"Oh no. I've often been in at sunset."

"How delicious the water must look then! Maurice!"

"Yes?"

"Shall I come with you? Shall I bathe, too? It would be lovely, refreshing, after this heat! It would wash away all the dust of the train!"

Her face was glowing with the anticipation of pleasure. Every little thing done with him was an enchantment after the weeks of separation.

"Oh, I don't think you'd better, Hermione," he answered, hastily. "I--you--there might be people. I--I must rig you up something first, a tent of some kind. Gaspare and I will do it. I can't have my wife--"

"All right," she said.

She tried to keep the disappointment out of her voice.

"How lucky you men are! You can do anything. And there's no fuss. Ah, there's poor Emile, patiently waiting!"

Artois was already established once more in the chaise longue. He greeted them with a smile that was gentle, almost tender. Those evil feelings to which he had been a prey in London had died away. He loved now to see the happiness in Hermione's face. His illness had swept out his selfishness, and in it he had proved her affection. He did not think that he could ever be jealous of her again.

"Sleeping all this time?" he said.

"I was. I'm ashamed of myself. My hair is full of mountain-side, but you must forgive me, Emile. Ah, there's Lucrezia! Is tea ready, Lucrezia?"

"Si, signora."

"Then ask Gaspare to bring it."

"Gaspare--he isn't here, signora. But I'll bring it."

She went away.

"Where's Gaspare, I wonder?" said Hermione. "Have you seen him, Emile?"

"No."

"Perhaps he's sleeping, too. He sleeps generally among the hens."

She looked round the corner into the out-house.

"No, he isn't there. Have you sent him anywhere, Maurice?"

"I? No. Where should I--"

"I only thought you looked as if you knew where he was."

"No. But he may have gone out after birds and forgotten the time. Here's tea!"

These few words had renewed in Maurice the fever of impatience to get away and meet his enemy. This waiting, this acting of a part, this suspense, were almost unbearable. All the time that Hermione slept he had been thinking, turning over again and again in his mind the coming scene, trying to imagine how it would be, how violent or how deadly, trying to decide exactly what line of conduct he should pursue. What would Salvatore demand? What would he say or do? And where would they meet? If Salvatore waited for his coming they would meet at the House of the Sirens. And Maddalena? She would be there. His heart sickened. He was ready to face a man--but not Maddalena. He thought of Gaspare's story of the fallen olive-branch upon which Salvatore had spat. It was strange to be here in this calm place with these two happy people, wife and friend, and to wonder what was waiting for him down there by the sea.

How lonely our souls are!--something like that he thought. Circumstances were turning him away from his thoughtless youth. He had imagined it sinking down out of his sight into the purple sea, with the magic island in which it had danced the tarantella and heard the voice of the siren. But was it not leaving him, vanishing from him while still his feet trod the island and his eyes saw her legendary mountains?

Gaspare, he knew, was on the watch. That was why he was absent from his duties. But the hour was at hand when he would be relieved. The evening was coming. Maurice was glad. He was ready to face even violence, but he felt that he could not for much longer endure suspense and play the quiet host and husband.

Tea was over and Gaspare had not returned. The clock he had bought at the fair struck five.

"I ought to be going," Artois said.

There was reluctance in his voice. Hermione noticed it and knew what he was feeling.

"You must come up again very soon," she said.

"Yes, monsieur, come to-morrow, won't you?" Maurice seconded her.

The thought of what was going to happen before to-morrow made it seem to him a very long way off.

Hermione looked pleased.

"I must not be a bore," Artois answered. "I must not remind you and myself of limpets. There are rocks in your garden which might suggest the comparison. I think to-morrow I ought to stay quietly in Marechiaro."

"No, no," said Maurice. "Do come to-morrow."

"Thank you very much. I can't pretend that I do not wish to come. And, now that donkey-boy--has he climbed up, I wonder?"

"I'll go and see," said Maurice.