The Call of the Blood Part 47

"Why do you want to stay?"

For once Maurice felt as if he could not meet the boy's great, steady eyes frankly. He looked away.

"I like the sun," he answered. "I love it! I should like to live in the sunshine forever."

"And I should like to live always in London," reiterated Gaspare. "You want to live here because you have always been in London, and I want to live in London because I have always been here. Ecco!"

Maurice tried to laugh.

"Perhaps that is it. We wish for what we can't have. Dio mio!"

He threw out his arms.

"But, anyhow, I've not done with Sicily yet! Come on, Gaspare! Now for the rocks! Ciao! Ciao! Ciao! Morettina bella ciao!"

He burst out into a song, but his voice hardly rang true, and Gaspare looked at him again with a keen inquiry.

Artois was not yet destined to die. He said that Hermione would not let him die, that with her by his side it was useless for Death to approach him, to desire him, to claim him. Perhaps her courage gave to him the will to struggle against his enemy. The French doctor, deeply, almost sentimentally interested in the ardent woman who spoke his language with perfection and carried out such instructions of his as she considered sensible, with delicate care and strong thoroughness, thought and said so.

"But for madame," he said to Artois, "you would have died, monsieur. And why? Because till she came you had not the will to live. And it is the will to live that a.s.sists the doctor."

"I cannot be so ungallant as to die now," Artois replied, with a feeble but not sad smile. "Were I to do so, madame would think me ungrateful.

No, I shall live. I feel now that I am going to live."

And, in fact, from the night of Maurice's visit with Gaspare to the house of the sirens he began to get better. The inflammation abated, the temperature fell till it was normal, the agony died away gradually from the tormented body, and slowly, very slowly, the strength that had ebbed began to return. One day, when the doctor said that there was no more danger of any relapse, Artois called Hermione and told her that now she must think no more of him, but of herself; that she must pack up her trunk and go back to her husband.

"You have saved me, and I have killed your honeymoon," he said, rather sadly. "That will always be a regret in my life. But, now go, my dear friend, and try to a.s.suage your husband's wrath against me. How he must hate me!"

"Why, Emile?"

"Are you really a woman? Yes, I know that. No man could have tended me as you have. Yet, being a woman, how can you ask that question?"

"Maurice understands. He is blessedly understanding."

"Don't try his blessed comprehension of you and of me too far. You must go, indeed."

"I will go."

A shadow that he tried to keep back flitted across Artois's pale face, over which the unkempt beard straggled in a way that would have appalled his Parisian barber. Hermione saw it.

"I will go," she repeated, quietly, "when I can take you with me."

"But--"

"Hush! You are not to argue. Haven't you an utter contempt for those who do things by halves? Well, I have. When you can travel we'll go together."

"Where?"

"To Sicily. It will be hot there, but after this it will seem cool as the Garden of Eden under those trees where--but you remember! And there is always the breeze from the sea. And then from there, very soon, you can get a ship from Messina and go back to France, to Ma.r.s.eilles. Don't talk, Emile. I am writing to-night to tell Maurice."

And she left the room with quick softness.

Artois did not protest. He told himself that he had not the strength to struggle against the tenderness that surrounded him, that made it sweet to return to life. But he wondered silently how Maurice would receive him, how the dancing faun was bearing, would bear, this interference with his new happiness.

"When I am in Sicily I shall see at once, I shall know," he thought. "But till then--"

And he gave up the faint attempt to a.n.a.lyze the possible feelings of another, and sank again into the curious peace of convalescence.

And Hermione wrote to her husband, telling him of her plan, calling upon him with the fearless enthusiasm that was characteristic of her to welcome it and to rejoice, with her, in Artois's returning health and speedy presence in Sicily.

Maurice read this letter on the terrace alone. Gaspare had gone down on the donkey to Marechiaro to buy a bottle of Marsala, which Lucrezia demanded for the making of a zampaglione, and Lucrezia was upon the mountain-side spreading linen to dry in the sun. It was nearly the end of May now, and the trees in the ravine were thick with all their leaves.

The stream that ran down through the shadows towards the sea was a tiny trickle of water, and the long, black snakes were coming boldly forth from their winter hiding-places to sun themselves among the bowlders that skirted the mountain tracks.

"I can't tell for certain," Hermione wrote, "how soon we shall arrive, but Emile is picking up strength every day, and I think, I pray, it may not be long. I dare to hope that we shall be with you about the second week of June. Oh, Maurice, something in me is almost mad with joy, is like Gaspare dancing the tarantella, when I think of coming up the mountain-side again with you as I came that first day, that first day of my real life. Tell Sebastiano he must play the 'Pastorale' to welcome me.

And you--but I seem to feel your dear welcome here, to feel your hands holding mine, to see your eyes looking at me like Sicily. Isn't it strange? I feel out here in Africa as if you were Sicily. But you are, indeed, for me. You are Sicily, you are the sun, you are everything that means joy to me, that means music, that means hope and peace. Buon riposo, my dearest one. Can you feel--can you--how happy I am to-night?"

The second week in June! Maurice stood holding the letter in his hand.

The fair of San Felice would take place during the second week in June.

That was what he was thinking, not of Artois's convalescence, not of his coming to Sicily. If Hermione arrived before June 11th, could he go to the fair with Maddalena? He might go, of course. He might tell Hermione.

She would say "Go!" She believed in him and had never tried to curb his freedom. A less suspicious woman than she was had surely never lived. But if she were in Sicily, if he knew that she was there in the house of the priest, waiting to welcome him at night when he came back from the fair, it would--it would--He laid the letter down. There was a burning heat of impatience, of anxiety, within him. Now that he had received this letter he understood with what intensity he had been looking forward to this day at the fair, to this last festa of his Sicilian life.

"Perhaps they will not come so soon!" he said to him self. "Perhaps they will not be here."

And then he began to think of Artois, to realize the fact that he was coming with Hermione, that he would be part of the final remnant of these Sicilian days.

His feeling towards Artois in London had been sympathetic, even almost reverential. He had looked at him as if through Hermione's eyes, had regarded him with a sort of boyish reverence. Hermione had said that Artois was a great man, and Maurice had felt that he was a great man, had mentally sat at his feet. Perhaps in London he would be ready to sit at his feet again. But was he ready to sit at his feet here in Sicily? As he thought of Artois's penetrating eyes and cool, intellectual face, of his air of authority, of his close intimacy with Hermione, he felt almost afraid of him. He did not want Artois to come here to Sicily. He hated his coming. He almost dreaded it as the coming of a spy. The presence of Artois would surely take away all the savor of this wild, free life, would import into it an element of the library, of the shut room, of that intellectual existence which Maurice was learning to think of as almost hateful.

And Hermione called upon him to rejoice with her over the fact that Artois would be able to accompany her. How she misunderstood him! Good G.o.d! how she misunderstood him! It seemed really as if she believed that his mind was cast in precisely the same mould as her own, as if she thought that because she and he were married they must think and feel always alike. How absurd that was, and how impossible!

A sense of being near a prison door came upon him. He threw Hermione's letter onto the writing-table, and went out into the sun.

When Gaspare returned that evening Maurice told him the news from Africa.

The boy's face lit up.

"Oh, then shall we go to London?" he said.

"Why not?" Maurice exclaimed, almost violently. "It will all be different! Yes, we had better go to London!"

"Signorino."

"Well, what is it, Gaspare?"

"You do not like that signore to come here."

"I--why not? Yes, I--"