How we hide ourselves from those we love best and live with most intimately! You, her mother, are a stranger to Vere. Does not to-day prove it?”
“Ah, but Vere is not a stranger to me. That is where the mother has the advantage of the child.”
Artois did not make any response to this remark. To cover his silence, perhaps, he grasped the oars more firmly and began to back the boat out of the cave. Both felt that it was no longer necessary to stay in this confessional of the rock.
As they came out under the grayness of the sky, Hermione, with a change of tone, said:
“And your friend? The Marchese—what is his name?”
“Isidoro Panacci.”
“Tell me about him.”
“He is a very perfect type of a complete Neapolitan of his class. He has scarcely travelled at all, except in Italy. Once he has been in Paris, where I met him, and once to Lucerne for a fortnight. Both his father and mother are Neapolitans. He is a charming fellow, utterly unintellectual, but quite clever; shrewd, sharp at reading character, marvellously able to take care of himself, and hold his own with anybody. A cat to fall on his feet! He is apparently born without any sense of fear, and with a profound belief in destiny. He can drive four-in-hand, swim for any number of hours without tiring, ride—well, as an Italian cavalry officer can ride, and that is not badly. His accomplishments? He can speak French—abominably, and pick out all imaginable tunes on the piano, putting instinctively quite tolerable basses. I don’t think he ever reads anything, except the Giorno and the Mattino. He doesn’t care for politics, and likes cards, but apparently not too much. They’re no craze with him. He knows Naples inside out, and is as frank as a child that has never been punished.”
“I should think he must be decidedly attractive?”
“Oh, he is. One great attraction he has—he appears to have no sense at all that difference of age can be a barrier between two men. He is twenty-four, and I am what I am. He is quite unaware that there is any gulf between us. In every way he treats me as if I were twenty-four.”
“Is that refreshing or embarrassing?”
“I find it generally refreshing. His family accepts the situation with perfect naivete. I am welcomed as Doro’s chum with all the good-will in the world.”
Hermione could not help laughing, and Artois echoed her laugh.
“Merely talking about him has made you look years younger,” she declared. “The influence of the day has lifted from you.”
“It would not have fallen upon Isidoro, I think. And yet he is full of sentiment. He is a curious instance of a very common Neapolitan obsession.”
“What is that?”
“He is entirely obsessed by woman. His life centres round woman. You observe I use the singular. I do that because it is so much more plural than the plural in this case. His life is passed in love-affairs, in a sort of chaos of amours.”
“How strange that is!”
“You think so, my friend?”
“Yes. I never can understand how human beings can pass from love to love, as many of them do. I never could understand it, even before I—even before Sicily.”
“You are not made to understand such a thing.”
“But you do?”
“I? Well, perhaps. But the loves of men are not as your love.”
“Yet his was,” she answered. “And he was a true Southerner, despite his father.
“Yes, he was a true Southerner,” Artois replied.
For once he was off his guard with her, and uttered his real thought of Maurice, not without a touch of the irony that was characteristic of him.
Immediately he had spoken he was aware of his indiscretion. But Hermione had not noticed it. He saw by her eyes that she was far away in Sicily. And when the boat slipped into the Saint’s Pool, and Gaspare came to the water’s edge to hold the prow while they got out, she rose from her seat slowly, and almost reluctantly, like one disturbed in a dream that she would fain continue.
“Have you seen the Signorina, Gaspare?” she asked him. “Has she been out?”
“No, Signora. She is still in the house.”
“Still reading!” said Artois. “Vere must be quite a book-worm!”
“Will you stay to dinner, Emile?”
“Alas, I have promised the Marchesino Isidoro to dine with him. Give me a cup of tea a la Russe, and one of Ruffo’s cigarettes, and then I must bid you adieu. I’ll take the boat to the Antico Giuseppone, and then get another there as far as the gardens.”
“One of Ruffo’s cigarettes!” Hermione echoed, as they went up the steps. “That boy seems to have made himself one of the family already.”
“Yet I wish, as I said in the cave, that I had put a knife into him under the left shoulder-blade—before this morning.”
They spoke lightly. It seemed as if each desired for the moment to get away from their mood in the confessional of Virgil’s Grotto, and from the sadness of the white and silent day.
As to Ruffo, about whom they jested, he was in sight of Naples, and not far from Mergellina, still rowing with tireless young arms, and singing to “Bella Napoli,” with a strong resolve in his heart to return to the Saint’s Pool on the first opportunity and dive for more cigarettes.
CHAPTER IV
At the Antico Giuseppone, Artois left the boat from the islet and, taking another, was rowed towards the public gardens of Naples, whose trees were faintly visible far off across the Bay. Usually he talked familiarly to any Neapolitan with whom he found himself, but to-day he was taciturn, and sat in the stern of the broad-bottomed craft looking towards the city in silence while the boatman plied his oars. The memory of his conversation with Hermione in the Grotto of Virgil, of her manner, the look in her eyes, the sound of her voice there, gave him food for thought that was deep and serious.
Although Artois had an authoritative, and often an ironical manner that frightened timid people, he was a man capable of much emotion and of great loyalty. He did not easily trust or easily love, but in those whose worth he had thoroughly proved he had a confidence as complete as that of a child. And where he placed his complete confidence he placed also his affection. The one went with the other almost as inevitably as the wave goes with the wind.
In their discussion about the emotion of the heart Artois had spoken the truth to Hermione. As he had grown older he had felt the influence of women less. The pleasures of sentiment had been gradually superceded in his nature—or so at least he honestly believed—by the purely intellectual pleasures. More and more completely and contentedly had he lived in his work, and in
