A Spirit in Prison Part 7

"But I am young. What do you mean, Monsieur Emile?"

"I? It is your meaning I am searching for."

"I sha'n't let you find it. You are much too curious about people.

But--I've been having a game this morning."

"A game! Who was your playmate?"

"Never mind."

But her bright eyes went for the fraction of a second to Ruffo, who close by in the boat was lying at his ease, his head thrown back, and one of the cigarettes between his lips.

"What! That boy there?"

"Nonsense! Come along! Madre has been sitting at the window for ages looking out for the boat. Couldn't you sail at all Gaspare?"

Artois had let go her hands, and now she turned to the Sicilian.

"To Naples, Signorina, and nearly to the Antico Giuseppone coming back."

"But we had to do a lot of tacking," said Artois. "Mon Dieu! That boy is smoking one of my cigarettes! You sacrilegious little creature! You have been robbing my box!"

Gaspare's eyes followed Artois' to Ruffo, who was watching them attentively, but who now looked suddenly sleepy.

"It belongs to Madre."

"It was bought for me."

"I like you better with a pipe. You are too big for cigarettes. And besides, artists always smoke pipes."

"Allow me to forget that I try to be an artist when I come to the island, Vere."

"Yes, yes, I will," she said, with a pretty air of relenting. "You poor thing, here you are a king incognito, and we all treat you quite familiarly. I'll even go first, regardless of etiquette." And she went off to the steps that led upward to the house.

Artois followed her. As he went he said to Ruffo in the Neapolitan dialect:

"It's a good cigarette, isn't it? You are in luck this morning."

"Si, Signore," said the boy, smiling. "The Signorina gave me ten."

And he blew out a happy cloud.

There was something in his welcoming readiness of response, something in his look and voice, that seemed to stir within the tenacious mind of Artois a quivering chord of memory.

"I wonder if I have spoken to that boy in Naples?" he thought, as he mounted the steps behind Vere.

Hermione met him at the door of her room, and they went in almost directly to lunch with Vere. When the meal was over Vere disappeared, without saying why, and Hermione and Artois returned to Hermione's room to have coffee. By this time the day was absolutely windless, the sky had become nearly white, and the sea was a pale gray, flecked here and there with patches of white.

"This is like a June day of scirocco," said Artois, as he lit his pipe with the air of a man thoroughly at home. "I wonder if it will succeed in affecting Vere's spirits. This morning, when I arrived, she looked wildly young. But the day held still some blue then."

Hermione was settling herself slowly in a low chair near the window that faced Capri. The curious, rather ghastly light from the sea fell over her.

"Vere is very sensitive to almost all influences," she said. "You know that, Emile."

"Yes," he said, throwing away the match he had been using; "and the influence of this morning roused her to joy. What was it?"

"She was very excited watching a diver for _frutti di mare_."

"A 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 c.o.c.ked 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 subst.i.tute, an understudy?"

An energy that was not free from pa.s.sion 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 s.e.x--I sometimes think so. I have my strength, believe me. But don't require of me the peculiar strength that is male."