for Artois was a traveller, and studied many lands.
In the years that had elapsed since the tragedy in Sicily, when the husband of Hermione had met his death suddenly in the sea, almost in sight of the home of the girl he had betrayed, the fame of Artois had grown steadily. And he was jealous of his fame almost as a good woman is jealous of her honor. This jealousy had led him to a certain selfishness of which he was quite aware—even to a certain hardness such as he had hinted to Hermione. Those who strove, or seemed likely to strive to interrupt him in his work, he pushed out of his life. Even if they were charming women he got rid of them. And the fact that he did so proved to him, and not improbably to them, that he was more wrapped up in the gratification of the mind than in the gratification of the heart, or of the body. It was not that the charm of charming women had ceased to please him, but it seemed to have ceased really to fascinate him.
Long ago, before Hermione married, he had felt for her a warm and intimate friendship. He had even been jealous of Maurice. Without being at all in love, he had cared enough for Hermione to be jealous. Before her marriage he had looked forward in imagination down a vista of long years, and had seen her with a husband, then with children, always more definitely separated from himself.
And he had seen himself exceptionally alone, even almost miserably alone.
Then fate had spun tragedy into her web. He had nearly died in Africa, and had been nursed back to life by this friend of whom he had been jealous. And they had gone together to Sicily, to the husband whose memory Hermione still adored. And then had followed swiftly the murder, the murderer’s departure to America, saved by the silence of Gaspare, and the journey of the bereaved woman to Italy, where Artois had left her and returned to France.
Once more Artois had his friend, released from the love of another man. But he wished it were not so. Hermione’s generosity met with a full response of generosity from him. All his egotism and selfishness dropped from him then, shaken down like dead leaves by the tempest of a genuine emotion. His knowledge of her grief, his understanding of its depth, brought to him a sorrow that was keen, and even exquisitely painful. For a long while he was preoccupied by an intense desire to assuage it. He strove to do so by acting almost in defiance of his nature, by fostering deception. From the Abetone Hermione had written him letters, human documents—the tale of the suffering of a woman’s heart. Many reserves she had from him and from every one. The most intimate agony was for her alone, and she kept it in her soul as the priest keeps the Sacred Host in its tabernacle. But some of her grief she showed in her letters, and some of her desire for comfort. And without any definite intention, she indicated to her subtle and devoted friend the only way in which he could console her.
For once, driven by his emotion, he took that way.
He allowed Hermione to believe that he agreed with her in the conception she had formed of her husband’s love for her. It was difficult for him to do this, for he had an almost cruel passion for truth, and generally a clear insight into human character. Far less than many others would have condemned did he, in his mind, condemn the man who was dead for the sin against love that he had committed. He had understood Maurice as Hermione had not understood him, and knowledge is full of pardon. But though he could pardon easily he could not easily pretend. By pretending he sinned against himself, and helped his friend some steps along the way to peace. He thought he had helped her to go much farther along that way than she had gone. And he thought that Vere had helped her, too.
Now the hollow mutterings of the rock in Virgil’s Grotto seemed to be in his heart, as he realized how permanent was the storm in Hermione’s nature. Something for her he had done. And something—much more, no doubt—Vere had done. But how little it all was!
Their helplessness gave him a new understanding of woman.
Hermione had allowed him great privileges, had allowed him to protect her, had taken his advice. After Vere was born she had wished to go back again to Sicily. The house of the priest, where she had been so happy, and so sad, drew her. She longed for it. She desired to make it her home. He had fought against her in this matter, and had been aided by Gaspare.
There had been a subtle understanding, never expressed, between the boy and him.
Artois had played upon her intellect, had appealed, too, to her mother’s heart.
He had not urged her to try to forget, but he had urged her not morbidly to remember, not to cherish and to foster the memory of the tragedy which had broken her life. To go back to that tiny home, solitary in its beautiful situation, in the changed circumstances which were hers, would be, he told her, to court and to summon sorrow. He was even cruel to be kind. When Hermione combated his view, assuring him that to her Monte Amato was like a sacred place, a place hallowed by memories of happiness, he recalled the despair in which that happiness had ended. With all the force at his command, and it was great, he drew the picture of the life that would be in comparison with the life that had been. And he told her finally that what she wished to do was morbid, was unworthy of her strength of character, was even wicked now that she was a mother. He brought before her mind those widows who make a cult of their dead. Would she be one of them? Would she steep a little child in such an atmosphere of memories, casting a young and tender mind backward into a cruel past instead of leading it forward into a joyous present? Maurice had been the very soul of happiness. Vere must be linked with the sunbeams. With his utmost subtlety Artois described and traced the effect upon a tiny and sensitive child of a mother’s influence, whether for good or evil, until Hermione, who had a deep reverence for his knowledge of all phases of human nature, at last, almost in despite of the truth within her, of the interior voice which said to her, “With you and Vere it would not be so,” caught alarm from his apparent alarm, drew distrust of herself from his apparent distrust of her.
Gaspare, too, played his part. When Hermione spoke to him of returning to the priest’s house, almost wildly, and with the hot energy that bursts so readily up in Sicilians, he begged her not to go back to the maledetta casa in which his Padrone’s dead body had lain. As he spoke a genuine fear of the cottage came upon him. All the latent superstition that dwells in the contadino was stirred as dust by a wind. In clouds it flew up about his mind. Fear looked out of his great eyes. Dread was eloquent in his gestures. And he, too, referred to the child, to the povera piccola bambina. It would cast ill-luck on the child to bring her up in a chamber of death. Her saint would forsake her. She too would die. The boy worked himself up into a fever. His face was white. Drops of sweat stood on his forehead.
He had set out to be deceptive—what he would have called un poco birbante, and he had even deceived himself. He knew that it would be dangerous for his Padrona to live again near Marechiaro. Any day a chance scrap of gossip might reach her ears. In time she would be certain almost to hear something of the dead Padrone’s close acquaintance with the dwellers in the Casa delle Sirene. She would question him, perhaps. She would suspect something. She would inquire. She would search. She would find out the hideous truth. It was this fear which made him argue on the same side as Artois. But in doing so he caught another fear from his own words. He became really natural, really truthful in his fear. And—she scarcely knew why—Hermione was even more governed by him than by Artois. He had lived with them in the Casa del Prete, had been an intimate part of their life there. And he was Sicilian of the soil. The boy had a real power to move, to dominate her, which he did not then suspect.
Again and again he repeated those words, “La povera bambina—la povera piccola bambina.” And at last Hermione was overcome.
“I won’t go to Sicily,” she said to Artois. “For if I went there I could only go to Monte Amato. I won’t go until Vere is old enough to wish to go, to wish to see the house where her father and I were happy.”
And she had never gone back. For Artois had not been satisfied with this early victory.
