A Spirit in Prison Part 34

"I don't know. I don't think so. Somehow it depressed me. Perhaps it was my mood just then. Was it?"

"Perhaps it was merely mine."

"But why--'I feel specially this summer I should like to be near you'?

What does that mean exactly?"

"I did feel that."

"Why?"

"I don't think I can tell you now. I am not sure that I could even have told you at the time I wrote that letter."

She took it from him and put it away again in the drawer.

"Perhaps we shall both know later on," she said, quietly. "I believe we shall."

He did not say anything.

"I saw that boy, Ruffo, this afternoon," she said, after a moment of silence.

"Did you?" said Artois, with a change of tone, a greater animation. "I forgot to ask Vere about him. I suppose he has been to the island again while I have been away?"

"Not once. Poor boy, I find he has been ill. He has had fever. He was out to-day for the first time after it. We met him close to Mergellina.

He was in a boat, but he looked very thin and pulled down. He seemed so delighted to see me. I was quite touched."

"Hasn't Vere been wondering very much why he did not come again?"

"She has never once mentioned him. Vere is a strange child sometimes."

"But you--haven't you spoken of him to her?"

"No, I don't think so."

"Vere's silence made you silent?"

"I suppose so. I must tell her. She likes the boy very much."

"What is it that attracts her to this boy, do you think?"

The question was ordinary enough, but there was a peculiar intonation in Artois' voice as he asked it, an intonation that awakened surprise in Hermione.

"I don't know. He is an attractive boy."

"You think so too?"

"Why, yes. What do you mean, Emile?"

"I was only wondering. The sea breeds a great many boys like Ruffo, you know. But they don't all get Khali Targa cigarettes given to them, for all that."

"That's true. I have never seen Vere pay any particular attention to the fishermen who come to the island. In a way she loves them all because they belong to the sea, she loves them as a decor. But Ruffo is different. I felt it myself."

"Did you?"

He looked at her, then looked out of the window and pulled his beard slowly.

"Yes. In my case, perhaps, the interest was roused partly by what Vere told me. The boy is a Sicilian, you see, and just Vere's age."

"Vere's interest perhaps comes from the same reason."

"Very likely it does."

Hermione spoke the last words without conviction. Perhaps they both felt that they were not talking very frankly--were not expressing their thoughts to each other with their accustomed sincerity. At any rate, Artois suddenly introduced another topic of conversation, the reason of his hurried visit to Paris, and for the next hour they discussed literary affairs with a gradually increasing vivacity and open-heartedness. The little difficulty between them--of which both had been sensitive and fully conscious--pa.s.sed away, and when at length Hermione got up to go to her bedroom and change her dress for the evening, there was no cloud about them.

When Hermione had gone Artois took up a book, but he sat till the evening was falling and Giulia came smiling to light the lamp, without reading a word of it. Her entry roused him from his reverie, and he took out his watch. It was already past eight. The Marchesino would soon be coming. And then--the dinner at Frisio's!

He got up and moved about the room, picking up a book here and there, glancing at some pages, then putting it down. He felt restless and uneasy.

"I am tired from the journey," he thought. "Or--I wonder what the weather is this evening. The heat seems to have become suffocating since Hermione went away."

He went to one of the windows and looked out. Twilight was stealing over the sea, which was so calm that it resembled a huge sheet of steel.

The sky over the island was clear. He turned and went to the opposite window. Above Ischia there was a great blackness like a pall. He stood looking at it for some minutes. His erring thoughts, which wandered like things fatigued that cannot rest, went to a mountain village in Sicily, through which he had once ridden at night during a terrific thunder-storm. In a sudden, fierce glare of lightning he had seen upon the great door of a gaunt Palazzo, which looked abandoned, a strip of black cloth. Above it were the words, "Lutto in famiglia."

That was years ago. Yet now he saw again the palace door, the strip of cloth soaked by the pouring rain, the dreary, almost sinister words which he had read by lightning:

"Lutto in famiglia."

He repeated them as he gazed at the blackness above Ischia.

"Monsieur Emile!"

"Vere!"

The girl came towards him, a white contrast to what he had been watching.

"I'm all ready. It seems so strange to be going out to a sort of party.

I've had such a bother with my hair."

"You have conquered," he said. "Undine has disappeared."

"What?"

"Come quite close to the lamp."

She came obediently.

"Vere transformed!" he said. "I have seen three Veres to-day already.

How many more will greet me to-night?"

She laughed gently, standing quite still. Her dress and her gloves were white, but she had on a small black hat, very French, and at the back of her hair there was a broad black ribbon tied in a big bow. This ribbon marked her exact age clearly, he thought.