A Spirit in Prison Part 112

Then let him--let the dead man himself--speak out of that temple which he had created in a moment of lawless pa.s.sion, out of that son whom he had made to live by the action which had brought upon him death.

Ruffo--all was in the hands of Ruffo, to whom Hermione, weeping, bent for consolation.

The song died away. Yet Hermione did not move, but still leaned over the sea. She scarcely knew where she was. The soul of her, the suffering soul, was voyaging through the mist with Ruffo, was voyaging through the mist and through the night with--her Sicilian and all the perfect past.

It seemed to her at that moment that she had lost Vere in the dark, that she had lost Emile in the dark, that even Gaspare was drifting from her in a mist of secrecy which he did not intend that she should penetrate.

There was only Ruffo left.

He had no secrets. He threw no darkness round him and those who loved him. In his happy, innocent song was his happy, innocent soul.

She listened, she leaned down, almost she stretched out her arms towards the sea. And in that moment she knew in her mind and she felt in her heart that Ruffo was very near to her, that he meant very much to her, even that she loved him.

CHAPTER x.x.xIV

Artois left the island that night without speaking to Hermione. He waited a long time. But she did not move to come to him. And he did not dare to go to her. He did not dare! In all their long friendship never before had his spirit bent before, or retreated as if in fear from Hermione's. To-night he was conscious that in her fierce anger, and afterwards in her tears, she had emanc.i.p.ated herself from him. He was conscious of her force as he had never been conscious of it before.

Something within him almost abdicated to her intensity. And at last he turned and went softly away from the terrace. He descended to the sea.

He left the island.

Were they no longer friends?

As the boat gave itself to the mist he wondered. It had come to this, then--that he did not know whether Hermione and he were any longer friends. Almost imperceptibly, with movement so minute that it had seemed like immobility, they had been drifting apart through these days and nights of the summer. And now abruptly the gulf appeared between them.

He felt just then that they could never more be friends, that their old happy camaraderie could never be reestablished.

That they could ever be enemies was unthinkable. Even in Hermione's bitterness and anger Artois felt her deep affection. In her cry, "Take care, Emile, or I shall hate you for keeping me in the dark!" he heard only the hatred that is the other side of love.

But could they ever be comrades again? And if they could not, what could they be?

As the boat slipped on, under the Saint's light, which was burning although the mist had hidden it from Hermione's searching eyes, and out to the open sea, Artois heard again her fierce exclamation. It blended with Vere's sob. He looked up and saw the faint lights of the Casa del Mare fading from him in the night. And an immense sadness, mingled with an immense, but chaotic, longing invaded him. He felt horribly lonely, and he felt a strange, new desire for the nearness to him of life. He yearned to feel life close to him, pulsing with a rhythm to which the rhythm of his being answered. He yearned for that strange and exquisite satisfaction, compounded of mystery and wonder, and thrilling with something akin to pain, that is called forth in the human being who feels another human being centring all its highest faculties, its strongest powers, its deepest hopes in him. He desired intensely, as he had never desired before, true communion with another, that mingling of bodies, hearts, and spirits, that is the greatest proof of G.o.d to man.

The lights of the Casa del Mare were lost to his eyes in the night.

He looked for them still. He strained his eyes to see them. But the powerful night would not yield up its prey.

And now, in the darkness and with Hermione's last words ringing in his ears, he felt almost overwhelmed by the solitariness of his life in the world of lives.

That day, before he came to the island, he had met himself face to face like a man meeting his double. He had stripped himself bare. He had searched himself for the truth. Remembering all the Marchesino had said, he had demanded of his heart the truth, uncertain whether it would save or slay him. It had not slain him. When the colloquy was over he was still upright.

But he had realized as never before the delicate poise of human nature, set, without wings, on a peak with gulfs about it. Had he not looked in time, and with clear, steadfast eyes, might he not have fallen?

His affection for Vere was perfectly pure, was the love of a man without desire for a gracious and charming child. It still was that. He knew it for that by the wave of disgust that went over him when his imagination, prompted by the Marchesino's brutality, set pictures before him of himself in other relations with Vere. The real man in him recoiled so swiftly, so uncontrollably, that he was rea.s.sured as to his own condition. And yet he found much to condemn, something to be contemptuous of, something almost to weep over--that desire to establish a monopoly--that almost sickly regret for his vanished youth, that bitterness against the community to which all young things instinctively belong, whatever their differences of intellect, temperament, and feeling.

Could he have fallen?

Even now he did not absolutely know whether such a decadence might have been possible to him or not. But that now it would not be possible he felt that he did know.

Age could never complete youth, and Vere must be complete. He had desired to make her gift for song complete. He could never desire to mutilate her life. Had he not said to himself one day, as his boat glided past the sloping gardens of Posilipo, "Vere must be happy."

Yet that evening he had made her unhappy.

He had come to the island from his self-examination strong in the determination to be really himself, no longer half self-deceived and so deceiving. He had gone out upon the terrace, and waited there. But when Vere had come to join him, he had not been able to be natural. In his desire to rehabilitate himself thoroughly and swiftly in his own opinion he must have been almost harsh to the child. She had approached him a little doubtfully. She had needed specially just then to be met with even more than the usual friendship. Artois had seen in her face, in her expressive eyes, a plea not for forgiveness--there was no need for that, but for compa.s.sion, an appeal to him to ignore and yet to sympathise, that was exquisitely young and winning. But, because of his self-examination, and because he was feeling acutely, he had been abrupt, cold, changed in his manner. They had sat down together in the dark, and after some uneasy conversation, Vere, perhaps eager to make things easier between herself and "Monsieur Emile," had brought up the subject of her poems with a sort of anxious simplicity, and a touch of timidity that yet was confidential. And Artois, still recoiling secretly from that which might possibly have become a folly but could never have been anything more, had told Vere plainly and almost sternly that she must go to her literary path unaided, unadvised by him.

"I was glad to advise you at the beginning, Vere," he had said, finally; "but now I must leave you to yourself to work out your own salvation.

You have talent. Trust it. Trust yourself. Do no lean on any one, least of all on me."

"No, Monsieur Emile," she had answered.

Those were the last words exchanged between them before Hermione came and questioned Vere. And only when Vere slipped into the house, leaving that sound of pain behind her, did Artois realize how cruel he must have seemed in his desire quickly to set things right.

He realized that; but, subtle though he was, he did not understand the inmost and root-cause of Vere's loss of self-control.

Vere was feeling bitterly ashamed, had been bending under this sense of undeserved shame, ever since the Marchesino's stratagem on the preceding night. Although she was gay and fearless, she was exquisitely sensitive.

Peppina's confession had roused her maidenhood to a theoretical knowledge of certain things in life, of certain cruel phases of man's selfishness and l.u.s.t which, till then, she had never envisaged. The Marchesino's madness had carried her one step further. She had not actually looked into the abyss. But she had felt herself near to something that she hated even more than she feared it. And she had returned to the hotel full of a shrinking delicacy, not to be explained, intense as snow, which had made the meeting with her mother and Artois a torture to her, which had sealed her lips to silence that night, which had made her half apology to Gaspare in the morning a secret agony, which had even set a flush on her face when she looked at San Francesco.

The abrupt change in Monsieur Emile's demeanor towards her made her feel as if she were despised by him because she had been the victim of the Marchesino's trick. Or perhaps Monsieur Emile completely misunderstood her; perhaps he thought--perhaps he dared to think, that she had helped the Marchesino in his manoeuvre.

Vere felt almost crucified, but was too proud to speak of the pain and bitterness within her. Only when her mother came out upon the terrace did she suddenly feel that she could bear no more.

That night, directly she was in her room, she locked her door. She was afraid that her mother might follow her, to ask what was the matter.

But Hermione did not come. She, too, wished to be alone that night. She, too, felt that she could not be looked at by searching eyes that night.

She did not know when Artois left the terrace. Long after Ruffo's song had died away she still leaned over the sea, following his boat with her desirous heart. Artois, too, was on the sea. She did not know it. She was, almost desperately, seeking a refuge in the past. The present failed her. That was her feeling. Then she would cling to the past. And in that song, prompted now by her always eager imagination, she seemed to hear it. For she was almost fiercely, feverishly, beginning to find resemblances in Ruffo to Maurice. At first she had noticed none, although she had been strangely attracted by the boy. Then she had seen that look, fleeting but vivid, that seemed for a moment to bring Maurice before her. Then, on the cliff, she had discerned a likeness of line, a definite similarity of features.

And now--was not that voice like Maurice's? Had it not his wonderful thrill of youth in it, that sound of the love of life which wakes all the pulses of the body and stirs all the depths of the heart?

"Oh, dolce luna bianca de l' estate----"

The voice upon the sea was singing always the song of Mergellina. But to Hermione it began to seem that the song was changing to another song, and that the voice that was dying away across the shrouded water was sinking into the shadows of a ravine upon a mountainside.

"Ciao, Ciao, Ciao, Morettina bella, ciao----"

Maurice was going to the fishing under the sweet white moon of Sicily.

And she--she was no longer leaning down from the terrace of the Casa del Mare, but from the terrace of the House of the Priest.

"Prima di partire Un bacio ti voglio da!"

That kiss, which he had given her before he had gone away from her forever! She seemed to feel it on her lips again, and she shut her eyes, giving herself up to a pa.s.sion of the imagination.

When she opened them again she felt exhausted and terribly alone.

Maurice had gone down into the ravine. He was never coming back. Ruffo was taken by the mists and by the night. She lifted herself up from the bal.u.s.trade and looked round, remembering suddenly that she had left Artois upon the terrace. He had disappeared silently, without a word of good-bye.

And now, seeing the deserted terrace, she recollected her fierce attack upon Artois, she remembered how she had stood in the black room watching the two darknesses outside, listening to their silence. And she remembered her conversation with Ruffo.

Actualities rushed back upon her memory. She felt as if she heard them coming like an army to the a.s.sault. Her brain was crowded with jostling thoughts, her heart with jostling feelings and fears. She was like one trying to find a safe path through a black troop of threatening secrets.

What had happened that night between Vere and Emile? Why had Vere fled?

Why had she wept? And the previous night with the Marchesino--Vere had not spoken of it to her mother. Hermione had found it impossible to ask her child for any details. There was a secret too. And there were the two secrets, which now she knew, but which Vere and Artois thought were unknown to her still. And then--that mystery of which Ruffo had innocently spoken that night.

As Hermione, moving in imagination through the black and threatening troop, came to that last secret, she was again a.s.sailed by a curious, and horrible, sensation of apprehension. She again felt very little and very helpless, like a child.