A Spirit in Prison. Robert Hichens
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Monsieur Emile?”
“About twelve, I should think. But I doubt if they can sail.” She looked out to sea, and added: “I think the wind is changing to scirocco. They may be later.”
“He’s gone down again!”
“I never saw you so interested in a diver before,” said the mother. “What made you begin to look at the boy?”
“He was singing. I heard him, and his voice made me feel—” She paused.
“What?” said her mother.
“I don’t know. Un poco diavolesca, I’m afraid. One thing, though! It made me long to be a boy.”
“Did it?”
“Yes! Madre, tell me truly—sea-water on your lips, as the fishermen say—now truly, did you ever want me to be a boy?”
Hermione Delarey did not answer for a moment. She looked away over the still sea, that seemed to be slowly losing its color, and she thought of another sea, of the Ionian waters that she had loved so much. They had taken her husband from her before her child was born, and this child’s question recalled to her the sharp agony of those days and nights in Sicily, when Maurice lay unburied in the Casa del Prete, and afterwards in the hospital at Marechiaro—of other days and nights in Italy, when, isolated with the Sicilian boy, Gaspare, she had waited patiently for the coming of her child.
“Sea-water, Madre, sea-water on your lips!”
Her mother looked down at her.
“Do you think I wished it, Vere?”
“To-day I do.”
“Why to-day?”
“Because I wish it so much. And it seems to me as if perhaps I wish it because you once wished it for me. You thought I should be a boy?”
“I felt sure you would be a boy.”
“Madre! How strange!”
The girl was looking up at her mother. Her dark eyes—almost Sicilian eyes they were—opened very wide, and her lips remained slightly parted after she had spoken.
“I wonder why that was?” she said at length.
“I have wondered too. It may have been that I was always thinking of your father in those days, recalling him—well, recalling him as he had been in Sicily. He went away from me so suddenly that somehow his going, even when it had happened, for a long time seemed to be an impossibility. And I fancied, I suppose, that my child would be him in a way.”
“Come back?”
“Or never quite gone.”
The girl was silent for a moment.
“Povera Madre mia!” at last she said.
But she did not seem distressed for herself. No personal grievance, no doubt of complete love assailed her. And the fact that this was so demonstrated, very quietly and very completely, the relation existing between this mother and this child.
“I wonder, now,” Vere said, presently, “why I never specially wished to be a boy until to-day—because, after all, it can’t be from you that the wish came. If it had been it must have come long ago. And it didn’t. It only came when I heard that boy’s voice. He sings like all the boys, you know, that have ever enjoyed themselves, that are still enjoying themselves in the sun.”
“I wish he would sing once more!” said Hermione.
“Perhaps he will. Look! He’s getting into the boat. And the men are stopping too.”
The boy was very quick in his movements. Almost before Vere had finished speaking he had pulled on his blue jersey and white trousers, and again taken the big oars in his hands. Standing up, with his face set towards the islet, he began once more to propel the boat towards it. And as he swung his body slowly to and fro he opened his lips and sang lustily once more,
“O Napoli, bella Napoli!”
Hermione and Vere sat silently listening as the song grew louder and louder, till the boat was almost in the shadow of the islet, and the boy, with a strong stroke of the left oar turned its prow towards the pool over which San Francesco watched.
“They’re going into the Saint’s Pool to have a siesta,” said Vere. “Isn’t he a splendid boy, Madre?”
As she spoke the boat was passing almost directly beneath them, and they saw its name painted in red letters on the prow, Sirena del Mare. The two men, one young, one middle-aged, were staring before them at the rocks. But the boy, more sensitive, perhaps, than they were to the watching eyes of women, looked straight up to Vere and to her mother. They saw his level rows of white teeth gleaming as the song came out from his parted lips, the shining of his eager dark eyes, full of the careless merriment of youth, the black, low-growing hair stirring in the light sea breeze about his brow, bronzed by sun and wind. His slight figure swayed with an easy motion that had the grace of perfectly controlled activity, and his brown hands gripped the great oars with a firmness almost of steel, as the boat glided under the lee of the island, and vanished from the eyes of the watchers into the shadowy pool of San Francesco.
When the boat had disappeared, Vere lifted herself up and turned round to her mother.
“Isn’t he a jolly boy, Madre?”
“Yes,” said Hermione.
She spoke in a low voice. Her eyes were still on the sea where the boat had passed.
“Yes,” she repeated, almost as if to herself.
For the first time a little cloud went over Vere’s sensitive face.
“Madre, how horribly I must have disappointed you,” she said.
The mother did not break into protestations. She always treated her child with sincerity.
“Just for a moment, Vere,” she answered. “And then, very soon, you made me feel how much more intimate can be the relationship between a mother and a daughter than between a mother and any son.”
“Is that true, really?”
“I think it is.”
“But why should that be?”
“Don’t you think that Monsieur Emile can tell you much better than I? I feel all the things, you know, that he can explain.”
There was a touch of something that was like a half-hidden irony in her voice.
“Monsieur Emile! Yes, I think he understands almost everything about people,” said Vere, quite without irony. “But could a man explain such a thing as well as a woman? I don’t think so.”
“We have the instincts, perhaps, men the vocabulary. Come, Vere, I want to look over into the Saint’s Pool and see what those men are doing.”
Vere laughed.
“Take care, Madre, or Gaspare will be jealous.”
A soft look came into Hermione’s face.
“Gaspare and I know each other,” she said, quietly.
“But he could be jealous—horribly jealous.”
“Of you, perhaps, Vere, but never of me. Gaspare and I have passed through too much together for anything of that kind. Nobody could ever take his place with me, and he knows it quite well.”
“Gaspare’s a darling, and I love him,” said Vere, rather inconsequently. “Shall we look over into the Pool from the pavilion, or go down by the steps?”
“We’ll look over.”
They passed in through a gateway to the narrow terrace that fronted the Casa del Mare facing Vesuvius, entered the house, traversed