The Call of the Blood Part 72

"You could hardly expect me to wish to have Artois with us here, could you, Hermione?" he said, slowly.

She scarcely knew whether she were most pained or pleased. She was pained that anything she had done had clouded his happiness, but she was intensely glad to think he loved to be quite alone with her.

"No, I felt that. But I felt, too, as if it would be cruel to stop short, unworthy in us."

"In us?"

"Yes. You let me go to Africa. You might have asked me, you might even have told me, not to go. I did not think of it at the time. Everything went so quickly. But I have thought of it since. And, knowing that, realizing it, I feel that you had your part, a great part, in Emile's rescue. For I do believe, Maurice, that if I had not gone he would have died."

"Then I am glad you went."

He spoke perfunctorily, almost formally. Hermione felt chilled.

"It seemed to me that, having begun to do a good work, it would be finer, stronger, to carry it quite through, to put aside our own desires and think of another who had pa.s.sed through a great ordeal. Was I wrong, Maurice? Emile is still very weak, very dependent. Ought I to have said, 'Now I see you're not going to die, I'll leave you at once.' Wouldn't it have been rather selfish, even rather brutal?"

His reply startled her.

"Have you--have you ever thought of where we are?" he said.

"Where we are!"

"Of the people we are living among?"

"I don't think I understand."

He cleared his throat.

"They're Sicilians. They don't see things as the English do," he said.

There was a silence. Hermione felt a heat rush over her, over all her body and face. She did not speak, because, if she had, she might have said something vehement, even headstrong, such as she had never said, surely never would say, to Maurice.

"Of course I understand. It's not that," he added.

"No, it couldn't be that," she said. "You needn't tell me."

The hot feeling stayed with her. She tried to control it.

"You surely can't mind what ignorant people out here think of an utterly innocent action!" she said, at last, very quietly.

But even as she spoke she remembered the Sicilian blood in him.

"You have minded it!" she said. "You do mind now."

And suddenly she felt very tender over him, as she might have felt over a child. In his face she could not see the boy to-day, but his words set the boy, the inmost nature of the boy that he still surely was, before her.

The sense of humor in her seemed to be laughing and wiping away a tear at the same time.

She moved her chair close to his.

"Maurice," she said. "Do you know that sometimes you make me feel horribly old and motherly?"

"Do I?" he said.

"You do to-day, and yet--do you know that I have been thinking since I came back that you are looking older, much older than when I went away?"

"Is that Artois?" he said, looking over the wall to the mountain-side beyond the ravine.

Hermione got up, leaned upon the wall, and followed his eyes.

"I think it must be. I told Gaspare to go to the hotel when he fetched the provisions in Marechiaro and tell Emile it would be best to come up in the cool. Yes, it is he, and Gaspare is with him! Maurice, you don't mind so very much?"

She put her arm through his.

"These people can't talk when they see how ill he looks. And if they do--oh, Maurice, what does it matter? Surely there's only one thing in the world that matters, and that is whether one can look one's own conscience in the face and say, 'I've nothing to be ashamed of!'"

Maurice longed to get away from the touch of her arm. He remembered the fragment of paper he had seen among the stones on the mountain-side. He must go up there alone directly he had a moment of freedom. But now--Artois! He stared at the distant donkeys. His brain felt dry and shrivelled, his body both feverish and tired. How could he support this long day's necessities? It seemed to him that he had not the strength and resolution to endure them. And Artois was so brilliant! Maurice thought of him at that moment as a sort of monster of intellectuality, terrifying and repellent.

"Don't you think so?" Hermione said.

"I dare say," he answered. "But I dare say, I suppose--very few of us can do that. We can't expect to be perfect, and other people oughtn't to expect it of us."

His voice had changed. Before, it had been almost an accusing voice and insincere. Now it was surely a voice that pleaded, and it was absolutely sincere. Hermione remembered how in London long ago the humility of Maurice had touched her. He had stood out from the ma.s.s of conceited men because of his beauty and his simple readiness to sit at the feet of others. And surely the simplicity, the humility, still persisted beautifully in him.

"I don't think I should ever expect anything of you that you wouldn't give me," she said to him. "Anything of loyalty, of straightness, or of manhood. Often you seem to me a boy, and yet, I know, if a danger came to me, or a trouble, I could lean on you and you would never fail me. That's what a woman loves to feel when she has given herself to a man, that he knows how to take care of her, and that he cares to take care of her."

Her body was touching his. He felt himself stiffen. The mental pain he suffered under the lash of her words affected his body, and his knowledge of the necessity to hide all that was in his mind caused his body to long for isolation, to shrink from any contact with another.

"I hope," he said, trying to make his voice natural and simple----"I hope you'll never be in trouble or in danger, Hermione."

"I don't think I could mind very much if you were there, if I could just touch your hand."

"Here they come!" he said. "I hope Artois isn't very tired with the ride.

We ought to have had Sebastiano here to play the 'Pastorale' for him."

"Ah! Sebastiano!" said Hermione. "He's playing it for some one else in the Lipari Islands. Poor Lucrezia! Maurice, I love Sicily and all things Sicilian. You know how much! But--but I'm glad you've got some drops of English blood in your veins. I'm glad you aren't all Sicilian."

"Come," he said. "Let us go to the arch and meet him."

XIX

"So this is your Garden of Paradise?" Artois said.

He got off his donkey slowly at the archway, and stood for a moment, after shaking them both by the hand, looking at the narrow terrace, bathed in sunshine despite the shelter of the awning, at the columns, at the towering rocks which dominated the grove of oak-trees, and at the low, white-walled cottage.

"The garden from which you came to save my life," he added.

He turned to Maurice.