A Spirit in Prison. Robert Hichens
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Pool of the Saint would have been calm. With them, its stillness seemed almost ineffably profound. The hint of life bound in the cores of sleep, prisoner to rest, deepened Nature’s impression and sent Vere into reverie. There were no trees here. No birds sang, for although it was the month of the nightingales, none ever came to sing to San Francesco. No insects chirped or hummed. All was stark and almost fearfully still as in a world abandoned; and the light fell on the old faces of the rocks faintly, as if it feared to show the ravages made in them by the storms of the long ages they had confronted and defied.
Vere had a sensation of sinking very slowly down into a gulf, as she stood there, not falling, but sinking, down into some world of quiet things, farther and farther down, leaving all the sounds of life far up in light above her. And descent was exquisite, easy and natural, and, indeed, inevitable. Nothing called her from below. For where she was going there were no voices. Yet she felt that at last there would be something to receive her; mystical stillness, mystical peace.
A silky sound—far off—checked that imaginative descent that seemed so physical, first merely arrested it, then, always silky, but growing louder, took her swiftly and softly back to the summit she had left. Now she was conscious again of herself and of the night. She was listening. The sound that had broken her reverie was the gentle sweep of big-bladed oars through the calm sea. As she knew this she saw, away to the right, a black shadow stealing across the silver waste beyond the islet. It pushed its way to the water at her very feet, and chose that as its anchorage.
The figure of the rower stood up straight and black for a moment, looking lonely in the night.
Vere could not see his face, but she knew at once that he was Ruffo. Her inclination was to bend down with the soft cry of “Pescator!” which she had sent to him on the sunny morning of their meeting. She checked it, why she scarcely knew, in obedience to some imperious prompting of her nature. But she kept her eyes on him. And they were full of will. She was willing him not to lie down in the bottom of the boat and sleep. She knew that he and his companions must have come to the pool at that hour to rest. There were three other men in the boat. Two had been sitting on the gunwale of it, and now lay down. The third, who was in the bows, exchanged some words with the rower, who replied. Vere could hear the sound of their voices, but not what they said. The conversation continued for two or three minutes, while Ruffo was taking in the oars and laying them one on each side of the boat. When he had done this he stretched up his arms to their full length above his head, and a loud noise of a prolonged yawn came up to Vere, and nearly made her laugh. Long as it was, it seemed to her to end abruptly. The arms dropped down.
She felt sure he had seen her watching, and stayed quite still, wondering what he was going to do. Perhaps he would tell the other man. She found herself quickly hoping that he would not. That she was there ought to be their little secret.
All this that was passing through her mind was utterly foreign to any coquetry. Vere had no more feeling of sex in regard to Ruffo than she would have had if she had been a boy herself. The sympathy she felt with him was otherwise founded, deep down in mysteries beyond the mysteries of sex.
Again Ruffo and the man who had not lain down spoke together. But the man did not look up to Vere. He must have looked if his attention had been drawn to the fact that she was there—a little spy upon the men of the sea, considering them from her eminence.
Ruffo had not told. She was glad.
Presently the man moved from his place in the bows. She saw him lift a leg to get over into the stern, treading carefully in order not to trample on his sleeping companions. Then his black figure seemed to shut up like a telescope. He had become one with the dimness in the boat, was no longer detached from it. Only Ruffo was still detached. Was he going to sleep, too?
A certain tenseness came into Vere’s body. She kept her eyes, which she had opened very wide, fixed upon the black figure. It remained standing. The head moved. He was certainly looking up. She realized that he was not sleepy, despite that yawn—that he would like to speak to her—to let her know that he knew she was there.
Perhaps he did not dare to—or, not that, perhaps fishermen’s etiquette, already enshrined in his nature, did not permit him to come ashore. The boat was so close to the land that he could step on to it easily.
She leaned down.
“Pescator!”
It was scarcely more than a whisper. But the night was so intensely still that he heard it. Or, if not that, he felt it. His shadow—so it seemed in the shadow of the cliff—flitted out of the boat and disappeared.
He was coming—to have that talk about the sea.
CHAPTER IX
“Buona sera, Signorina.”
“Buona sera, Ruffo.”
She did not feign surprise when he came up to her.
“So you fish at night?” she said. “I thought the divers for frutti di mare did not do that.”
“Signorina, I have been taken into the boat of Mandano Giuseppe.”
He spoke rather proudly, and evidently thought she would know of whom he was telling her. “I fish for sarde now.”
“Is that better for you?”
“Si, Signorina, of course.”
“I am glad of that.”
“Si, Signorina.”
He stood beside her quite at his ease. To-night he had on a cap, but it was pushed well off his brow, and showed plenty of his thick, dark hair.
“When did you see me?” she asked.
“Almost directly, Signorina.”
“And what made you look up?”
“Signorina?”
“Why did you look up directly?”
“Non lo so, Signorina.”
“I think it was because I made you feel that I was there,” she said. “I think you obey me without knowing it. You did the same the other day.”
“Perhaps, Signorina.”
“Have you smoked all the cigarettes?”
She saw him smile, showing his teeth.
“Si, Signorina, long ago. I smoked them the same day.”
“You shouldn’t. It is bad for a boy, and you are younger than I am, you know.”
The smile grew wider.
“What are you laughing at?”
“I don’t know, Signorina.”
“Do you think it is funny to be younger than I am?”
“Si, Signorina.”
“I suppose you feel quite as if you were a man?”
“If I could not work as well as a man Giuseppe would not have taken me into his boat. But of course with a lady it is all different. A lady does not have to work. Poor women get old very soon, Signorina.”
“Your mother, is she old?”
“My mamma! I don’t know. Yes, I suppose she is rather old.”
He seemed to be considering.
“Si, Signorina, my mamma is rather old. But then she has had a lot of trouble, my poor