The Call of the Blood Part 55

"Here is the ristorante!"

They had reached a long room with doors open onto the square, opposite to the rows of booths which were set up under the shadow of the church.

Outside of it were many small tables and numbers of chairs on which people were sitting, contemplating the movement of the crowd of buyers and sellers, smoking, drinking syrups, gazzosa, and eating ices and flat biscuits.

Gaspare guided them through the throng to a long table set on a sanded floor.

"Ecco, signorino!"

He installed Maurice at the top of the table.

"And you sit here, Donna Maddalena."

He placed her at Maurice's right hand, and was going to sit down himself on the left, when Salvatore roughly pushed in before him, seized the chair, sat in it, and leaned his arms on the table with a loud laugh that sounded defiant. An ugly look came into Gaspare's face.

"Macche--" he began, angrily.

But Maurice silenced him with a quick look.

"Gaspare, you come here, by Maddalena!"

"Ma--"

"Come along, Gasparino, and tell us what we are to have. You must order everything. Where's the cameriere? Cameriere! Cameriere!"

He struck on his gla.s.s with a fork. A waiter came running.

"Don Gaspare will order for us all," said Maurice to him, pointing to Gaspare.

His diplomacy was successful. Gaspare's face cleared, and in a moment he was immersed in an eager colloquy with the waiter, another friend of his from Marechiaro. Amedeo Buccini took a place by Gaspare, and all those from Marechiaro, who evidently considered that they belonged to the Inglese's party for the day, arranged themselves as they pleased and waited anxiously for the coming of the macaroni.

A certain formality now reigned over the a.s.sembly. The movement of the road in the outside world by the sea had stirred the blood, had loosened tongues and quickened spirits. But a meal in a restaurant, with a rich English signore presiding at the head of the table, was an unaccustomed ceremony. Dark faces that had been lit up with laughter now looked almost ludicrously discreet. Brown hands which had been in constant activity, talking as plainly, and more expressively, than voices, now lay limply upon the white cloth or were placed upon knees motionless as the knees of statues. And all eyes were turned towards the giver of the feast, mutely demanding of him a signal of conduct to guide his inquiring guests. But Maurice, too, felt for the moment tongue-tied. He was very sensitive to influences, and his present position, between Maddalena and her father, created within him a certain confusion of feelings, an odd sensation of being between two conflicting elements. He was conscious of affection and of enmity, both close to him, both strong, the one ready to show itself, the other determined to remain in hiding. He glanced at Salvatore, and met the fisherman's keen gaze. Behind the instant smile in the glittering eyes he divined, rather than saw, the shadow of his hatred. And for a moment he wondered. Why should Salvatore hate him? It was reasonable to hate a man for a wrong done, even for a wrong deliberately contemplated with intention--the intention of committing it. But he had done no real wrong to Salvatore. Nor had he any evil intention with regard to him or his. So far he had only brought pleasure into their lives, his life and Maddalena's--pleasure and money. If there had been any secret pain engendered by their mutual intercourse it was his. And this day was the last of their intimacy, though Salvatore and Maddalena did not know it.

Suddenly a desire, an almost weak desire, came to him to banish Salvatore's distrust of him, a distrust which he was more conscious of at this moment than ever before.

He did not know of the muttered comments of the fishermen from Catania as he and Maddalena pa.s.sed down the steps of the church of Sant' Onofrio.

But Salvatore's sharp ears had caught them and the laughter that followed them, and his hot blood was on fire. The words, the laughter had touched his sensitive Sicilian pride--the pride of the man who means never to be banished from the Piazza--as a knife touches a raw wound. And as Maurice had set a limit to his sinning--his insincerity to Hermione, his betrayal of her complete trust in him, nothing more--so Salvatore now, while he sat at meat with the Inglese, mentally put a limit to his own complaisance, a complaisance which had been born of his intense avarice.

To-day he would get all he could out of the Inglese--money, food, wine, a donkey--who knew what? And then--good-bye to soft speeches. Those fishermen, his friends, his comrades, his world, in fact, should have their mouths shut once for all. He knew how to look after his girl, and they should know that he knew, they and all Marechiaro, and all San Felice, and all Cattaro. His limit, like Maurice's, was that day of the fair, and it was nearly reached. For the hours were hurrying towards the night and farewells.

Moved by his abrupt desire to stand well with everybody during this last festa, Maurice began to speak to Salvatore of the donkey auction. When would it begin?

"Chi lo sa?"

No one knew. In Sicily all feasts are movable. Even ma.s.s may begin an hour too late or an hour too early. One thought the donkey auction would start at fourteen, another at sixteen o'clock. Gaspare was imperiously certain, over the macaroni, which had now made its appearance, that the hour was seventeen. There were to be other auctions, auctions of wonderful things. A clock that played music--the "Marcia Reale" and the "Tre Colori"--was to be put up; suits of clothes, too; boots, hats, a chair that rocked like a boat on the sea, a revolver ornamented with ivory. Already--no one knew when, for no one had missed him--he had been to view these treasures. As he spoke of them tongues were loosed and eyes shone with excitement. Money was in the air. Prices were pa.s.sionately discussed, values debated. All down the table went the words "soldi,"

"lire," "lire sterline," "biglietti da cinque," "biglietti da dieci."

Salvatore's hatred died away, suffocated for the moment under the weight of his avarice. A donkey--yes, he meant to get a donkey with the stranger's money. But why stop there? Why not have the clock and the rocking-chair and the revolver? His sharpness of the Sicilian, a sharpness almost as keen and sure as that of the Arab, divined the intensity, the recklessness alive in the Englishman to-day, bred of that limit, "my last day of the careless life," to which his own limit was twin-brother, but of which he knew nothing. And as Maurice was intense to-day, because there were so few hours left to him for intensity, so was Salvatore intense in a different way, but for a similar reason. They were walking in step without being aware of it. Or were they not rather racing neck to neck, like pa.s.sionate opponents?

There was little time. Then they must use what there was to the full.

They must not let one single moment find them lazy, indifferent.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'I AM CONTENT WITHOUT ANYTHING, SIGNORINO,' SHE SAID"]

Under the cover of the flood of talk Maurice turned to Maddalena. She was taking no part in it, but was eating her macaroni gently, as if it were a new and wonderful food. So Maurice thought as he looked at her.

To-day there was something strange, almost pathetic, to him in Maddalena, a softness, an innocent refinement that made him imagine her in another life than hers, and with other companions, in a life as free but less hard, with companions as natural but less ruthless to women.

"Maddalena," he said to her. "They all want to buy things at the auction."

"Si, signore."

"And you?"

"I, signorino?"

"Yes, don't you want to buy something?"

He was testing her, testing her memory. She looked at him above her fork, from which the macaroni streamed down.

"I am content without anything, signorino," she said.

"Without the blue dress and the ear-rings, longer than that?" He measured imaginary ear-rings in the air. "Have you forgotten, Maddalena?"

She blushed and bent over her plate. She had not forgotten. All the day since she rose at dawn she had been thinking of Maurice's old promise.

But she did not know that he remembered it, and his remembrance of it came to her now as a lovely surprise. He bent his head down nearer to her.

"When they are all at the auction, we will go to buy the blue dress and the ear-rings," he almost whispered. "We will go by ourselves. Shall we?"

"Si, signore."

Her voice was very small and her cheeks still held their flush. She glanced, with eyes that were unusually conscious, to right and left of her, to see if the neighbors had noticed their colloquy. And that look of consciousness made Maurice suddenly understand that this limit which he had put to his sinning--so he had called it with a sort of angry mental sincerity, summoned, perhaps, to match the tremendous sincerity of his wife which he was meeting with a lie to-day--his sinning against Hermione was also a limit to something else. Had he not sinned against Maddalena, sinned when he had kissed her, when he had shown her that he delighted to be with her? Was he not sinning now when he promised to buy for her the most beautiful things of the fair? For a moment he thought to himself that his fault against Maddalena was more grave, more unforgivable than his fault against Hermione. But then a sudden anger that was like a storm, against his own condemnation of himself, swept through him. He had come out to-day to be recklessly happy, and here he was giving himself up to gloom, to absurd self-torture. Where was his natural careless temperament? To-day his soul was full of shadows, like the soul of a man going to meet a doom.

"Where's the wine?" he called to Gaspare. "Wine, cameriere, wine!"

"You must not drink wine with the pasta, signorino!" cried Gaspare. "Only afterwards, with the vitello."

"Have you ordered vitello? Capital! But I've finished my pasta and I'm thirsty. Well, what do you want to buy at the auction, Gaspare, and you, Amedeo, and you Salvatore?"

He plunged into the talk and made Salvatore show his keen desires, encouraging and playing with his avarice, now holding it off for a moment, then coaxing it as one coaxes an animal, stroking it, tempting it to a forward movement. The wine went round now, for the vitello was on the table, and the talk grew more noisy, the laughter louder. Outside, too, the movement and the tumult of the fair were increasing. Cries of men selling their wares rose up, the hard melodies of a piano-organ, and a strange and ecclesiastical chant sung by three voices that, repeated again and again, at last attracted Maurice's attention.

"What's that?" he asked of Gaspare. "Are those priests chanting?"

"Priests! No, signore. Those are the Romani."

"Romans here! What are they doing?"

"They have a cart decorated with flags, signorino, and they are selling lemon-water and ices. All the people say that they are Romans and that is how they sing in Rome."

The long and lugubrious chant of the ice-venders rose up again, strident and melancholy as a song chanted over a corpse.

"It's funny to sing like that to sell ices," Maurice said. "It sounds like men at a funeral."

"Oh, they are very good ices, signorino. The Romans make splendid ices."