boy about seventeen or eighteen, black hair, Arab eyes, bronze skin, a smile difficult to refuse, and a figure almost as perfect as a Nubian’s, but rather squarer about the shoulders?”
“You have seen him, then?”
“Smoking ten of my special Khali Targa cigarettes, with his bare toes cocked up, and one hand drooping into the Saint’s Pool.”
Hermione smiled.
“My cigarettes! They’re common property here,” she said.
“That boy can’t be a pure-bred Neapolitan, surely. And yet he speaks the language. There’s no mistaking the blow he gives to the last syllable of a sentence.”
“He’s a Sicilian, Vere says.”
“Pure bred?”
“I don’t know.”
“I fancy I must have run across him somewhere in or about Naples. It is he who made Vere, as I told her, look so insolently young this morning.”
“Ah, you noticed! I, too, thought I had never seen her so full of the inner spirit of youth—almost as he was in Sicily.”
“Yes,” Artois said, gravely. “In some things she is very much his daughter.”
“In some things only?” asked Hermione.
“Don’t you think so? Don’t you think she has much of you in her also? I do.”
“Has she? I don’t know that I see it. I don’t know that I want to see it. I always look for him in Vere. You see, I dreamed of having a boy. Vere is instead of the boy I dreamed of, the boy—who never came, who will never come.”
“My friend,” said Artois, very seriously and gently, “are you still allowing your mind to dwell upon that old imagination? And with Vere before you, can you regard her merely as a substitute, an understudy?”
An energy that was not free from passion suddenly flamed up in Hermione.
“I love Vere,” she said. “She is very close to me. She knows it. She does not doubt me or my love.”
“But,” he quietly persisted, “you still allow your mind to rove ungoverned among those dangerous ways of the past?”
“Emile,” she said, still speaking with vehemence, “it may be very easy to a strong man like you to direct his thoughts, to keep them out of one path and guide them along another. It may be—I don’t know whether it is; but I don’t pretend to such strength. I don’t believe it is ever given to women. Perhaps even strength has its sex—I sometimes think so. I have my strength, believe me. But don’t require of me the peculiar strength that is male.”
“The truth is that you love living in the past as the Bedouin loves living in the desert.”
“It was my oasis,” she answered, simply.
“And all these years—they have made no difference?”
“Did you think they would? Did you think they had?”
“I hoped so. I thought—I had begun to think that you lived again in Vere.”
“Emile, you can always stand the truth, can’t you? Don’t say you can’t. That would hurt me horribly. Perhaps you do not know how sometimes I mentally lean on you. And I like to feel that if you knew the absolute truth of me you would still look upon me with the same kind, understanding eyes as now. Perhaps no one else would. Would you, do you think?”
“I hope and believe I could,” he said. “You do not live in Vere. Is that it?”
“I know it is considered the right, the perfectly natural thing that a mother, stricken as I have been, should find in time perfect peace and contentment in her child. Even you—you spoke of ‘living again.’ It’s the consecrated phrase, Emile, isn’t it? I ought to be living again in Vere. Well, I’m not doing that. With my nature I could never do that. Is that horrible?”
“Ma pauvre amie!” he said.
He bent down and touched her hand.
“I don’t know,” she said, more calmly, as if relieved, but still with an undercurrent of passion, “whether I could ever live again in the life of another. But if I did it would be in the life of a man. I am not made to live in a woman’s life, really to live, giving out the force that is in me. I know I’m a middle-aged woman—to these Italians here more than that, an old woman. But I’m not a finished woman, and I never shall be till I die. Vere is my child. I love her tenderly; more than that—passionately. She has always been close to me, as you know. But no, Emile, my relation to Vere, hers to me, does not satisfy all my need of love, my power to love. No, no, it doesn’t. There’s something in me that wants more, much more than that. There’s something in me that—I think only a son of his could have satisfied my yearning. A son might have been Maurice come back to me, come back in a different, beautiful, wonderfully pure relation. I prayed for a son. I needed a son. Don’t misunderstand me, Emile; in a way a son could never have been so close to me as Vere is—but I could have lived in him as I can never live in Vere. I could have lived in him almost as once I lived in Maurice. And to-day I—”
She got up suddenly from her chair, put her arms on the window-frame, and leaned out to the strange, white day.
“Emile,” she said, in a moment, turning round to him, “I want to get away, on to the sea. Will you row me out, into the Grotto of Virgil?[*] It’s so dreadfully white here, white and ghastly. I can’t talk naturally here. And I should like to go on a little farther, now I’ve begun. It would do me good to make a clean breast of it, dear brother confessor. Shall we take the little boat and go?”
[*] The grotto described in this book is not really the
Grotto of Virgil, but it is often called so by the fishermen
along the coast.
“Of course,” he said.
“I’ll get a hat.”
She was away for two or three minutes. During that time Artois stood by the window that looked towards Ischia. The stillness of the day was intense, and gave to his mind a sensation of dream. Far off across the gray-and-white waters, partially muffled in clouds that almost resembled mist, the mountains of Ischia were rather suggested, mysteriously indicated, than clearly seen. The gray cliffs towards Bagnoli went down into motionless water gray as they were, but of a different, more pathetic shade.
There was a luminous whiteness in the sky that affected the eyes, as snow does.
Artois, as he looked, thought this world looked very old, a world arranged for the elderly to dwell in. Was it not, therefore, an appropriate setting for him and for Hermione? As this idea came into his mind it sent a rather bitter smile to his lips, and Hermione, coming in just then, saw the smile and said—
“What is it, Emile? Why are you smiling?”
“Perhaps I will tell you when we are on the sea,” he answered.
He looked at her.
