The Call of the Blood Part 48

"No, signorino. I can see in your face that you do not like it. Your face got quite black just now. But if you do not like it why do you let him come? You are the padrone here."

"You don't understand. The signore is a friend of mine."

"But you said he was the friend of the signora."

"So he is. He is the friend of both of us."

Gaspare said nothing for a moment. His mind was working busily. At last he said:

"Then Maddalena--when the signora comes will she be the friend of the signora, as well as your friend?"

"Maddalena--that has nothing to do with it."

"But Maddalena is your friend!"

"That's quite different."

"I do not understand how it is in England," Gaspare said, gravely.

"But"--and he nodded his head wisely and spread out his hands--"I understand many things, signorino, perhaps more than you think. You do not want the signore to come. You are angry at his coming."

"He is a very kind signore," said Maurice, hastily. "And he can speak dialetto."

Gaspare smiled and shook his head again. But he did not say anything more. For a moment Maurice had an impulse to speak to him frankly, to admit him into the intimacy of a friend. He was a Sicilian, although he was only a boy. He was Sicilian and he would understand.

"Gaspare," he began.

"Si, signore."

"As you understand so much--"

"Si, signore?"

"Perhaps you--" He checked himself, realizing that he was on the edge of doing an outrageous thing. "You must know that the friends of the signora are my friends and that I am always glad to welcome them."

"Va bene, signorino! Va bene!"

The boy began to look glum, understanding at once that he was being played with.

"I must go to give t.i.to his food."

And he stuck his hands in his pockets and went away round the corner of the cottage, whistling the tune of the "Canzone di Marechiaro."

Maurice began to feel as if he were in the dark, but as if he were being watched there. He wondered how clearly Gaspare read him, how much he knew. And Artois? When he came, with his watchful eyes, there would be another observer of the Sicilian change. He did not much mind Gaspare, but he would hate Artois. He grew hot at the mere thought of Artois being there with him, observing, a.n.a.lyzing, playing the literary man's part in this out-door life of the mountains and of the sea.

"I'm not a specimen," he said to himself, "and I'm d.a.m.ned if I'll be treated as one!"

It did not occur to him that he was antic.i.p.ating that which might never happen. He was as unreasonable as a boy who foresees possible interference with his pleasures.

This decision of Hermione to bring with her to Sicily Artois, and its communication to Maurice, pushed him on to the recklessness which he had previously resolved to hold in check. Had Hermione been returning to him alone he would have felt that a gay and thoughtless holiday time was coming to an end, but he must have felt, too, that only tenderness and strong affection were crossing the sea from Africa to bind him in chains that already he had worn with happiness and peace. But the knowledge that with Hermione was coming Artois gave to him a definite vision of something that was like a cage. Without consciously saying it to himself, he had in London been vaguely aware of Artois's coldness of feeling towards him. Had any one spoken of it to him he would probably have denied that this was so. There are hidden things in a man that he himself does not say to himself that he knows of. But Maurice's vision of a cage was conjured up by Artois's mental att.i.tude towards him in London, the att.i.tude of the observer who might, in certain circ.u.mstances, be cruel, who was secretly ready to be cruel. And, antic.i.p.ating the unpleasant probable, he threw himself with the greater violence into the enjoyment of his few more days of complete liberty.

He wrote to Hermione, expressing as naturally as he could his ready acquiescence in her project, and then gave himself up to the light-heartedness that came with the flying moments of these last days of emanc.i.p.ation in the sun. His mood was akin to the mood of the rich man, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." The music, he knew, must presently fail. The tarantella must come to an end. Well, then he would dance with his whole soul. He would not husband his breath nor save his strength. He would be thoughtless because for a moment he had thought too much, too much for his nature of the dancing faun who had been given for a brief s.p.a.ce of time his rightful heritage.

Each day now he went down to the sea.

"How hot it is!" he would say to Gaspare. "If I don't have a bath I shall be suffocated."

"Si, signore. At what time shall we go?"

"After the siesta. It will be glorious in the sea to-day."

"Si, signore, it is good to be in the sea."

The boy smiled, at last would sometimes laugh. He loved his padrona, but he was a male and a Sicilian. And the signora had gone across the sea to her friend. These visits to the sea seemed to him very natural. He would have done the same as his padrone in similar circ.u.mstances with a light heart, with no sense of doing wrong. Only sometimes he raised a warning voice.

"Signorino," he would say, "do not forget what I have told you."

"What, Gaspare?"

"Salvatore is birbante. You think he likes you."

"Why shouldn't he like me?"

"You are a forestiere. To him you are as nothing. But he likes your money."

"Well, then? I don't care whether he likes me or not. What does it matter?"

"Be careful, signorino. The Sicilian has a long hand. Every one knows that. Even the Napoletano knows that. I have a friend who was a soldier at Naples, and--"

"Come, now, Gaspare! What reason will there ever be for Salvatore to turn against me?"

"Va bene, signorino, va bene! But Salvatore is a bad man when he thinks any one has tried to do him a wrong. He has blood in his eyes then, and when we Sicilians see through blood we do not care what we do--no, not if all the world is looking at us."

"I shall do no wrong to Salvatore. What do you mean?"

"Niente, signorino, niente!"

"Stick the cloth on t.i.to, and put something in the pannier. Al mare! Al mare!"

The boy's warning rang in deaf ears. For Maurice really meant what he said. He was reckless, perhaps, but he was going to wrong no one, neither Salvatore, nor Hermione, nor Maddalena. The coming of Artois drove him into the arms of pleasure, but it would never drive him into the arms of sin. For it was surely no sin to make a little love in this land of the sun, to touch a girl's hand, to s.n.a.t.c.h a kiss sometimes from the soft lips of a girl, from whom he would never ask anything more, whatever leaping desire might prompt him.

And Salvatore was always at hand. He seldom put to sea in these days unless Maurice went with him in the boat. His greedy eyes shone with a light of satisfaction when he saw t.i.to coming along the dusty white road from Isola Bella, and at night, when he crossed himself superst.i.tiously before Maria Addolorata, he murmured a prayer that more strangers might be wafted to his "Paese," many strangers with money in their pockets and folly in their hearts. Then let the sea be empty of fish and the wind of the storm break up his boat--it would not matter. He would still live well. He might even at the last have money in the bank at Marechiaro, houses in the village, a larger wine-shop than Oreste in the Corso.

But he kept his small eyes wide open and seldom let Maddalena be long alone with the forestiere, and this supervision began to irritate Maurice, to make him at last feel hostile to Salvatore. He remembered Gaspare's words about the fisherman--"To him you are as nothing. But he likes your money"--and a longing to trick this fox of the sea, who wanted to take all and make no return, came to him.

"Why can one never be free in this world?" he thought, almost angrily.

"Why must there always be some one on the watch to see what one is doing, to interfere with one's pleasure?"

He began presently almost to hate Salvatore, who evidently thought that Maurice was ready to wrong him, and who, nevertheless, grasped greedily at every soldo that came from the stranger's pocket, and touted perpetually for more.