Title: A Spirit in Prison
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Author: Robert Hichens
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A Spirit in Prison
Robert Hichens
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Table of Contents
A Spirit in Prison................................................................................................................................................1
A Spirit in Prison
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A Spirit in Prison
Robert Hichens
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
Chapter XXVII
Chapter XXVIII
Chapter XXIX
Chapter XXX
Chapter XXXI
Chapter XXXII
Chapter XXXIII
Chapter XXXIV
Chapter XXXV
Chapter XXXVI
Chapter XXXVII
Chapter XXXVIII
Chapter XXXIX
Chapter XL
Chapter XLI
Chapter XLII
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CHAPTER I
Somewhere, not far off on the still sea that held the tiny islet in a warm embrace, a boy's voice was singing
"Napoli Bella."
Vere heard the song as she sat in the sun with her face set towards Nisida and the distant peak of Ischia; and
instinctively she shifted her position, and turned her head, looking towards the calm and untroubled water
that stretched between her and Naples. For the voice that sang of the beautiful city was coming towards her
from the beautiful city, hymning the siren it had left perhaps but two hours ago.
On his pedestal set upon rock San Francesco seemed to be attentive to the voice. He stood beyond the
sheltered pool of the sea that divided the islet from the mainland, staring across at Vere as if he envied her; he
who was rooted in Italy and deprived of her exquisite freedom. His beard hung down to his waist, his cross
protruded over his left shoulder, and his robe of dusty grayish brown touched his feet, which had never
wandered one step since he was made, and set there to keep watch over the fishermen who come to sleep
under the lee of the island by night.
Now it was brilliant daylight. The sun shone vividly over the Bay of Naples, over the great and vital city,
over Vesuvius, the long line of the land towards Sorrento, over Capri with its shadowy mountain, and
Posilippo with its treeguarded villas. And in the sharp radiance of May the careless voice of the fisherboy
sang the familiar song that Vere had always known and seldom heeded.
Today, why she did not know, Vere listened to it attentively. Something in the sound of the voice caught her
attention, roused within her a sense of sympathy.
Carelessness and happiness make a swift appeal to young hearts, and this voice was careless, and sounded
very happy. There was a deliberate gruffness in it, a determination to be manly, which proved the vocalist to
be no man. Vere knew at once that a boy was singing, and she felt that she must see him.
She got up, went into the little garden at the edge of the cliff, and looked over the wall.
There was a boat moving slowly towards her, not very far away. In it were three figures, all stripped for
diving, and wearing white cotton drawers. Two were sitting on the gunwale with their knees drawn up nearly
to their chins. The third was standing, and with a languid, but strong and regular movement, was propelling
the boat forward with big bladed oars. This was the singer, and as the boat drew nearer Vere could see that
he had the young, lithe form of a boy.
While she watched, leaning down from her eyrie, the boat and the song stopped, and the singer let go his oars
and turned to the men behind him. The boat had reached a place near the rocks that was good ground for
frutti di mare.
Vere had often seen the divers in the Bay of Naples at their curious toil. Yet it never ceased to interest her.
She had a passion for the sea, and for all things connected with it. Now she leaned a little lower over the wall,
with her eyes fixed on the boat and its occupants.
Upon the water she saw corks floating, and presently one of the men swung himself round and sat facing the
sea, with his back to the boat and his bare legs dipping into the water. The boy had dropped down to the
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bottom of the craft. His hands were busy arranging clothes, or tackle, and his lusty voice again rang out to the
glory of "Napoli, bella Napoli." There was something infectious in his happygolucky lightheartedness.
Vere smiled as she listened, but there was a wistfulness in her heart. At that moment a very common desire of
young and vigorous girls assailed herthe desire to be a boy; not a boy born of rich parents, destined to the
idle, aimless life of aristocratic young Neapolitans, but a brown, badly dressed, or scarcely dressed at all boy
of the people.
She was often lighthearted, careless. But was she ever as light hearted and careless as that singing boy?
She supposed herself to be free. But was she, could she ever be at liberty as he was?
The man who had been dipping his feet in the sea rested one hand on the gunwale, let his body droop
forward, dropped into the water, paddled for a moment, reached one of the floating corks, turned over head
downwards, describing a circle which showed his chocolatecolored back arched, kicked up his feet and
disappeared. The second man lounged lazily from the boat into the sea and imitated him. The boy sat still and
went on singing. Vere felt disappointed. Was not he going to dive too? She wanted him to dive. If she were
that boy she would go in, she felt sure of it, before the men. It must be lovely to sink down into the
underworld of the sea, to rifle from the rocks their fruit, that grew thick as fruit on the trees. But the boyhe
was lazy, good for nothing but singing. She was half ashamed of him. Whimsically, and laughing to herself at
her own absurdity, she lifted her two hands, brown with the sun, to her lips, and cried with all her might:
"Va dentro, pigro! Va dentro!"
As her voice died away, the boy stopped singing, sprang into the sea, kicked up his feet and disappeared.
Vere was conscious of a thrill that was like a thrill of triumph.
"He obeyed me!" she thought.
A pleasant feeling of power came to her. From her eyrie on the rock she was directing these strange sea
doings. She was ruling over the men of the sea.
The empty boat swayed softly on the water, but its three former occupants were all hidden by the sea. It
seemed as if they would never come up again. Vere began to hold her breath as they were holding theirs. At
last a dark head rose above the surface, then another. The two men paddled for a minute, drawing the air into
their lungs. But the boy did not reappear.
As the seconds passed, Vere began to feel proud of him. He was doing that which she would have tried to do
had she been a boy. He was rivalling the men.
Another second slipped awayand another. He was more than rivalling, he was beating the men.
They dived once more. She saw the sun gleam on their backs, which looked polished as they turned slowly
over, almost like brown porpoises.
But the boy remained hidden beneath the veil of water.
Vere began to feel anxious. What if some accident had happened? What if he had been caught by the
seaweed, or if his groping hand had been retained by some crevice of the rock? There was a pain at her heart.
Her quick imagination was at work. It seemed to her as if she felt his agony, took part in his struggle to regain
his freedom. She clinched her small hands and set her teeth. She held her breath, trying to feel exactly as he
was feeling. And then suddenly she lifted her hands up to her face, covering her nostrils. What a horrible
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sensation it was, this suffocation, this pressing of the life out of the body, almost as one may push a person
brutally out of a room! She could bear it no more, and she dropped her hands. As she did so the boy's dark
head rose above the sea.
Vere uttered a cry of joy.
"Brave! Bravo!"
She felt as if he had returned from the dead. He was a wonderful boy.
"Bravo! Bravissimo!"
Serenely unconscious of her enthusiasm, the boy swam slowly for a moment, breathing the air into his lungs,
then serenely dived again.
"Vere!" called a woman's voice from the house"Vere!"
"Madre!" cried the girl in reply, but without turning away from the sea. "I am here! Do come out! I want to
show you something."
On a narrow terrace looking towards Naples a tall figure appeared.
"Where are you?"
"Here! here!"
The mother smiled and left the terrace, passed through a little gate, and almost directly was standing beside
the girl, saying:
"What is it? Is there a school of whales in the Bay, or have you sighted the seaserpent coming from Capri?"
"No, no! Butyou see that boat?"
"Yes. The men are diving for frutti di mare, aren't they?"
Vere nodded.
"The men are nothing. But there is a boy who is wonderful."
"Why? What does he do?"
"He stays under water an extraordinary time. Now wait. Have you got a watch, Madre?"
"Yes."
"Take it out, there's a darling, and time him. I want to knowthere he is! You see!"
"Yes."
"Have you got your watch? Wait till he goes under! Wait a minute! There! He's gone! Now begin."
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She drew into her lungs a long breath, and held it. The mother smiled, keeping her eyes obediently on the
watch which lay in her hand.
There was a silence between them as the seconds passed.
"Really," began the mother presently, "he must be"
"Hush, Madre, hush!"
The girl had clasped her hands tightly. Her eyes never left the sea. The tick, tick of the watch was just audible
in the stillness of the May morning. At last
"There he is!" cried the girl. "Quick! How long has he been under?"
"Just fifty seconds."
"I wonderI'm sure it's a record. If only Gaspare were here! When will he be back from Naples with
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 trulyseawater on your lips, as the fishermen saynow 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 Marechiaroof other days and nights in Italy, when, isolated with the Sicilian boy, Gaspare,
she had waited patiently for the coming of her child.
"Seawater, Madre, seawater on your lips!"
Her mother looked down at her.
"Do you think I wished it, Vere?"
"Today I do."
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"Why today?"
"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 eyesalmost Sicilian eyes they wereopened 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
himwell, 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 todaybecause,
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.
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"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 middleaged, 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, lowgrowing
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 halfhidden 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."
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A soft look came into Hermione's face.
"Gaspare and I know each other," she said, quietly.
"But he could be jealoushorribly 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 a little hall, came out again into the air by a door on its farther side, and made
their way to a small pavilion that looked upon the Pool of San Francesco. Almost immediately below, in the
cool shadow of the cliff, the boat was moored. The two men, lying at full length in it, their faces buried in
their hands, were already asleep. But the boy, sitting astride on the prow, with his bare feet dangling on each
side of it to the clear green water, was munching slowly, and rather seriously, a hunch of yellow bread, from
which he cut from time to time large pieces with a clasp knife. As he ate, lifting the pieces of bread to his
mouth with the knife, against whose blade he held them with his thumb, he stared down at the depths below,
transparent here almost to the sea bed. His eyes were wide with reverie. He seemed another boy, not the gay
singer of five minutes ago. But then he had been in the blaze of the sun. Now he was in the shade. And
swiftly he had caught the influence of the dimmer light, the lack of motion, the delicate hush at the feet of
San Francesco.
This time he did not know that he was being watched. His reverie, perhaps, was too deep, or their gaze less
concentrated than it had been before. And after a moment, Hermione moved away.
"You are going in, Madre?"
"Yes."
"Do you mind if I give something to that boy?"
"Do you mean money?"
"Oh no. But the poor thing's eating dry bread, and"
"And what, you puss?"
"Well, he's a very obedient boy."
"How can you know that?"
"He was idling in the boat, and I called out to him to jump into the sea, and he jumped in immediately."
"Do you think because he heard you?"
"Certainly I do."
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"You conceited little creature! Perhaps he was only pleasing himself!"
"No, Madre, no. I think I should like to give him a little reward presentlyfor his singing too."
"Get him a dolce, then, from Carmela, if there is one. And you can give him some cigarettes."
"I will. He'll love that. Oh dear! I wish he didn't make me dissatisfied with myself!"
"Nonsense, Vere!"
Hermione bent down and kissed her child. Then she went rather quickly away from the pavilion and entered
the Casa del Mare.
CHAPTER II
After her mother had gone, Vere waited for a moment, then ran lightly to the house, possessed herself of a
dolce and a packet of cigarettes, and went down the steps to the Pool of San Francesco, full of hospitable
intentions towards the singing boy. She found him still sitting astride of the boat's prow, not yet free of his
reverie apparently; for when she gave a low call of "Pescator!" prolonging the last syllable with the emphasis
and the accent of Naples, but always softly, he started, and nearly dropped into the sea the piece of bread he
was lifting to his mouth. Recovering himself in time to save the bread deftly with one brown hand, he turned
half round, leaning on his left arm, and stared at Vere with large, inquiring eyes. She stood by the steps and
beckoned to him, lifting up the packet of cigarettes, then pointing to his sleeping companions:
"Come here for a minute!"
The boy smiled, sprang up, and leaped onto the islet. As he came to her, with the easy, swinging walk of the
barefooted seapeople, he pulled up his white trousers, and threw out his chest with an obvious desire to "fare
figura" before the pretty Padrona of the islet. When he reached her he lifted his hand to his bare head
forgetfully, meaning to take off his cap to her. Finding that he had no cap, he made a laughing grimace, threw
up his chin and, thrusting his tongue against his upper teeth and opening wide his mouth, uttered a little
sound most characteristically Neapolitana sound that seemed lightly condemnatory of himself. This done,
he stood still before Vere, looking at the cigarettes and at the dolce.
"I've brought these for you," she said.
"Grazie, Signorina."
He did not hold out his hand, but his eyes, now devoted entirely to the cigarettes, began to shine with
pleasure. Vere did not give him the presents at once. She had something to explain first.
"We mustn't wake them," she said, pointing towards the boat in which the men were sleeping. "Come a little
way with me."
She retreated a few steps from the sea, followed closely by the eager boy.
"We sha'n't disturb them now," she said, stopping. "Do you know why I've brought you these?"
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She stretched out her hands, with the dolce and the cigarettes.
The boy threw his chin up again and half shut his eyes.
"No, Signorina."
"Because you did what I told you."
She spoke rather with the air of a little queen.
"I don't understand."
"Didn't you hear me call out to you from up there?"she pointed to the cliff above their heads"when you
were sitting in the boat? I called to you to go in after the men."
"Why?"
"Why! Because I thought you were a lazy boy."
He laughed. All his brown face gave itself up to laughtereyes, teeth, lips, cheeks, chin. His whole body
seemed to be laughing. The idea of his being lazy seemed to delight his whole spirit.
"You would have been lazy if you hadn't done what I told you," said Vere, emphatically, forcing her words
through his merriment with determination. "You know you would."
"I never heard you call, Signorina."
"You didn't?"
He shook his head several times, bent down, dipped his fingers in the sea, put them to his lips: "I say it."
"Really?"
There was a note of disappointment in her voice. She felt dethroned.
"But then, you haven't earned these," she said, looking at him almost with rebuke, "if you went in of your
own accord."
"I go in because it is my mestiere, Signorina," the boy said, simply. "I go in by force."
He looked at her and then again at the cigarettes. His expression said, "Can you refuse me?" There was a
quite definite and conscious attempt to cajole her to generosity in his eyes, and in the pose he assumed. Vere
saw it, and knew that if there had been a mirror within reach at that moment the boy would have been looking
into it, frankly admiring himself.
In Italy the narcissus blooms at all seasons of the year.
She was charmed by the boy, for he did his luring well, and she was susceptible to all that was naturally
picturesque. But a gay little spirit of resistance sprang up like a flame and danced within her.
She let her hands fall to her sides.
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"But you like going in?"
"Signorina?"
"You enjoy diving?"
He shrugged his shoulders, and again used what seemed with him a favorite expression.
"Signorina, I must enjoy it, by force."
"You do it wonderfully. Do you know that? You do it better than the men."
Again the conscious look came into the boy's face and body, as if his soul were faintly swaggering.
"There is no one in the Bay who can dive better than I can," he answered. "Giovannino thinks he can. Well,
let him think so. He would not dare to make a bet with me."
"He would lose it if he did," said Vere. "I'm sure he would. Just now you were under water nearly a minute
by my mother's watch."
"Where is the Signora?" said the boy, looking round.
"Why d'you ask?"
"WhyI can stay under longer than that."
"Now, look here!" said the girl, eagerly. "Never mind Madre! Go down once for me, won't you? Go down
once for me, and you shall have the dolce and two packets of cigarettes."
"I don't want the dolce, Signorina; a dolce is for women," he said, with the complete bluntness characteristic
of Southern Italians and of Sicilians.
"The cigarettes, then."
"Va bene. But the water is too shallow here."
"We'll take my boat."
She pointed to a small boat, white with a green line, that was moored close to them.
"Va bene," said the boy again.
He rolled his white trousers up above his knees, stripped off his blue jersey, leaving the thin vest that was
beneath it, folded the jersey neatly and laid it on the stones, tightened his trousers at the back, then caught
hold of the rope by which Vere's boat was moored to the shore and pulled the boat in.
Very carefully he helped Vere into it.
"I know a good place," he said, "where you can see right down to the bottom."
Taking the oars he slowly paddled a little way out to a deep clear pool of the sea.
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"I'll go in here, Signorina."
He stood up straight, with his feet planted on each side of the boat's prow, and glanced at the water
intimately, as might a fish. Then he shot one more glance at Vere and at the cigarettes, made the sign of the
cross, lifted his brown arms above his head, uttered a cry, and dived cleanly below the water, going down
obliquely till he was quite dim in the water.
Vere watched him with deep attention. This feat of the boy fascinated her. The water between them made him
look remote, delicate and unearthlyneither boy nor fish. His head, she could see, was almost touching the
bottom. She fancied that he was actually touching bottom with his hands. Yes, he was. Bending low over the
water she saw his brown fingers, stretched out and well divided, promenading over the basin of the sea as
lightly and springily as the claws of a crab tip toeing to some hidingplace. Presently he let himself down a
little more, pressed his flat palms against the ground, and with the impetus thus gained made his body shoot
back towards the surface feet foremost. Then bringing his body up till it was in a straight line with his feet, he
swam slowly under water, curving first in this direction then in that, with a lithe ease that was enchantingly
graceful. Finally, he turned over on his back and sank slowly down until he looked like a corpse lying at the
bottom of the sea.
Then Vere felt a sickness of fear steal over her, and leaning over the sea till her face almost touched the
water, she cried out fiercely:
"Come up! Come up! Presto! Presto!"
As the boy had seemed to obey her when she cried out to him from the summit of the cliff, so he seemed to
obey her now.
When her voice died down into the seadepths he rose from those depths, and she saw his eyes laughing, his
lips laughing at her, freed from the strange veil of the water, which had cast upon him a spectral aspect, the
likeness of a thing deserted by its soul.
"Did you hear me that time?" Vere said, rather eagerly.
The boy lifted his dark head from the water to shake it, drew a long breath, trod water, then threw up his chin
with the touch of tongue against teeth which is the Neapolitan negative.
"You didn't! Then why did you come up?"
He swam to the boat.
"It pleased me to come."
She looked doubtful.
"I believe you are birbante," she said, slowly. "I am nearly sure you are."
The boy was just getting out, pulling himself up slowly to the boat by his arms, with his wet hands grasping
the gunwale firmly. He looked at Vere, with the salt drops running down his sunburnt face, and dripping from
his thick, matted hair to his strong neck and shoulders. Again his whole face laughed, as, nimbly, he brought
his legs from the water and stood beside her.
"Birbante, Signorina?"
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"Yes. Are you from Naples?"
"I come from Mergellina, Signorina."
Vere looked at him halfdoubtfully, but still with innocent admiration. There was something perfectly
fearless and capable about him that attracted her.
He rowed in to shore.
"How old are you?" she asked.
"Sixteen years old, Signorina."
"I am sixteen, too."
They reached the islet, and Vere got out. The boy followed her, fastened the boat, and moved away a few
steps. She wondered why, till she saw him stop in a sunpatch and let the beams fall full upon him.
"You aren't afraid of catching cold?" she asked.
He threw up his chin. His eyes went to the cigarettes.
"Yes," said Vere, in answer to the look, "you shall have one. Here!"
She held out the packet. Very carefully and neatly the boy, after holding his right hand for a moment to the
sun to get dry, drew out a cigarette.
"Oh, you want a match!"
He sprang away and ran lightly to the boat. Without waking his companions he found a matchbox and lit the
cigarette. Then he came back, on the way stopping to get into his jersey.
Vere sat down on a narrow seat let into the rock close to the sun patch. She was nursing the dolce on her
knee.
"You won't have it?" she asked.
He gave her his usual negative, again stepping full into the sun.
"Well, then, I shall eat it. You say a dolce is for women!"
"Si, Signorina," he answered, quite seriously.
She began to devour it slowly, while the boy drew the cigarette smoke into his lungs voluptuously.
"And you are only sixteen?" she asked.
"Si, Signorina."
"As young as I am! But you look almost a man."
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"Signorina, I have always worked. I am a man."
He squared his shoulders. She liked the determination, the resolution in his face; and she liked the face, too.
He was a very handsome boy, she thought, but somehow he did not look quite Neapolitan. His eyes lacked
the round and staring impudence characteristic of many Neapolitans she had seen. There was something at
times impassive in their gaze. In shape they were long, and slightly depressed at the corners by the cheeks,
and they had full, almost heavy, lids. The features of the boy were small and straight, and gave no promise of
eventual coarseness. He was splendidly made. When Vere looked at him she thought of an arrow. Yet he was
very muscular, and before he dived she had noticed that on his arms the biceps swelled up like smooth balls
of iron beneath the shining brown skin.
"What month were you born in?" she asked.
"Signorina, I believe I was born in March. I believe I was sixteen last March."
"Then I am older than you are!"
This seemed to the boy a matter of indifference, though it was evidently exercising the girl beside him. She
had finished the dolce now, and he was smoking the last fraction of an inch of the cigarette, economically
determined to waste none of it, even though he burnt his fingers.
"Have another cigarette," Vere added, after a pause during which she considered him carefully. "You can't
get anything more out of that one."
"Grazie, Signorina."
He took it eagerly.
"Do tell me your name, won't you?" Vere went on.
"Ruffo, Signorina."
"Ruffothat's a nice name. It sounds strong and bold. And you live at Mergellina?"
"Si, Signorina. But I wasn't born there. I wasn't born in Naples at all."
"Where were you born?"
"In America, Signorina, near New York. I am a Sicilian."
"A Sicilian, are you!"
"Si, Signorina."
"I am a little bit Sicilian, too; only a little tiny bitbut still"
She waited to see the effect upon him. He looked at her steadily with his long bright eyes.
"You are Sicilian, Signorina?"
"My greatgrandmother was."
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"Si?"
His voice sounded incredulous.
"Don't you believe me?" she cried, rather hotly.
"Ma si, Signorina! Onlythat's not very Sicilian, if the rest is English. You are English, Signorina, aren't
you?"
"The rest of me is. Are you all Sicilian?"
"Signorina, my mother is Sicilian."
"And your father, too?"
"Signorina, my father is dead," he said, in a changed voice. "Now I live with my mother and my stepfather.
HePatrignohe is Neapolitan."
There was a movement in the boat. The boy looked round.
"I must go back to the boat, Signorina," he said.
"Oh, must you?" Vere said. "What a pity! But look, they are really still asleep."
"I must go back, Signorina," he protested.
"You want to sleep, too, perhaps?"
He seized the excuse.
"Si, Signorina. Being under the sea so muchit tires the head and the eyes. I want to sleep, too."
His face, full of life, denied his words, but Vere only said:
"Here are the cigarettes."
"Grazie, Signorina."
"And I promised you another packet. Well, wait herejust here, d'you see?under the bridge, and I'll throw
it down, and you must catch it."
"Si, Signorina."
He took his stand on the spot she pointed out, and she disappeared up the steps towards the house.
"Madre! Madre!"
Hermione heard Vere's voice calling below a moment later.
"What is it?"
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There was a quick step on the stairs, and the girl ran in.
"One more packet of cigarettesmay I? It's instead of the dolce. Ruffo says only women eat sweet things."
"Ruffo!"
"Yes, that's his name. He's been diving for me. You never saw anything like it! And he's a Sicilian. Isn't it
odd? And sixteenjust as I am. May I have the cigarettes for him?"
"Yes, of course. In that drawer there's a whole box of the ones Monsieur Emile likes."
"There would be ten cigarettes in a packet. I'll give him ten."
She counted them swiftly out.
"There! And I'll make him catch them all, one by one. It will be more fun than throwing only a packet. Addio,
mia bella Madre! Addiio! Addiio!"
And singing the words to the tune of "Addio, mia bella Napoli," she flitted out of the room and down the
stairs.
"Ruffo! Ruffo!"
A minute later she was leaning over the bridge to the boy, who stood sentinel below. He looked up, and saw
her laughing face full of merry mischief, and prepared to catch the packet she had promised him.
"Ruffo, I'm so sorry, but I can't find another packet of cigarettes."
The boy's bright face changed, looked almost sad, but he called up:
"Non fa niente, Signorina!" He stood still for a moment, then made a gesture of salutation, and added; "Thank
you, Signorina. A rivederci!"
He moved to go to the boat, but Vere cried out, quickly:
"Wait, Ruffo! Can you catch well?"
"Signorina?"
"Look out now!"
Her arm was thrust out over the bridge, and Ruffo, staring up, saw a big cigarettea cigarette such as he had
never seenin her small fingers. Quickly he made a receptacle of his joined hands, his eyes sparkling and
his lips parted with happy anticipation.
"One!"
The cigarette fell and was caught.
"Two!"
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A second fell. But this time Ruffo was unprepared, and it dropped on the rock by his bare feet.
"Stupido!" laughed the girl.
"Ma, Signorina!"
"Three!"
It had become a game between them, and continued to be a game until all the ten cigarettes had made their
journey through the air.
Vere would not let Ruffo know when a cigarette was coming, but kept him on the alert, pretending, holding it
poised above him between his finger and thumb until even his eyes blinked from gazing upward; then
dropping it when she thought he was unprepared, or throwing it like a missile. But she soon knew that she
had found her match in the boy. And when he caught the tenth and last cigarette in his mouth she clapped her
hands, and cried out so enthusiastically that one of the men in the boat heaved himself up from the bottom,
and, choking down a yawn, stared with heavy amazement at the young virgin of the rocks, and uttered a "Che
Diavolo!" under his stiff mustache.
Vere saw his astonishment, and swiftly, with a parting wave of her hand to Ruffo, she disappeared, leaving
her protégé to run off gayly with his booty to his comrades of the Sirena del Mare.
CHAPTER III
"I can see the boat, Vere," said Hermione, when the girl came back, her eyes still gleaming with memories of
the fun of the cigarette game with Ruffo.
"Where, Madre?"
She sat down quickly beside her mother on the windowseat, leaning against her confidentially and looking
out over the sea. Hermione put her arm round the girl's shoulder.
"There! Don't you see!" She pointed. "It has passed Casa Pantano."
"I see! Yes, that is Gaspare, and Monsieur Emile in the stern. They won't be late for lunch. I almost wish they
would, Madre."
"Why?"
"I'm not a bit hungry. Ruffo wouldn't eat the dolce, so I did."
"Ruffo! You seem to have made great friends with that boy."
She did not speak rebukingly, but with a sort of tender amusement.
"I really have," returned Vere.
She put her head against her mother's shoulder.
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"Isn't this odd, Madre? Twice in the short time I've known Ruffo, he's obeyed me. The first time he was in the
boat. I called out to him to dive in, and he did it instantly. The second time he was under water, at the very
bottom of the sea. He looked as if he were dead, and for a minute I felt frightened. So I called out to him to
come up, and he came up directly."
"But that only shows that he's a polite boy and does what you wish."
"No, no. He didn't hear me either time. He had no idea I had called. But each time I did, without hearing me
he had the sudden wish to do what I wanted. Now, isn't that curious?"
She paused.
"Madre?" she added.
"You think you influenced him?"
"Don't you think I did?"
"Perhaps so. There's a sympathetic link of youth between you. You are gloriously young, both of you, little
daughter. And youth turns naturally to youth, though I'm afraid old age doesn't always turn naturally to old
age."
"What do you know about old age, Madre? You haven't a gray hair."
She spoke with anxious encouragement.
"It's true. My hair declines to get gray."
"I don't believe you'll ever be gray."
"Probably not. But there's another graynessLife behind one instead of before; the emotional"
She stopped herself. This was not for Vere.
"They're close in," she said, looking out of the window.
She waved her hand. The big man in the stern of the boat took off his hat in reply, and waved his hand, too.
The rower pulled with the vivacity that comes to men near the end of a task, and the boat shot into the Pool of
the Saint, where Ruffo was at that moment enjoying his third cigarette.
"I'll run down and meet Monsieur Emile," said Vere.
And she disappeared as swiftly as she had come.
The big man who got out of the boat could not claim Hermione's immunity from gray hairs. His beard was
lightly powdered with them, and though much of the still thick hair on his head was brown, and his figure
was erect, and looked strong and athletiche seemed what he was, a man of middle age, who had lived, and
thought, and observed much. His eyes had the peculiar expression of eyes that have seen very many and very
various sights. It was difficult to imagine them not looking keenly intelligent. The vivacity of youth was no
longer in them, but the vividness of intellect, of an intellect almost fiercely alive and tenacious of its life, was
never absent from them.
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As Artois got out, the boat's prow was being held by the Sicilian, Gaspare, now a man of thirtyfive, but still
younglooking. Many Sicilians grow old quicklyhard life wears them out. But Gaspare's fate had been
easier than that of most of his contemporaries and friends of Marechiaro. Ever since the tragic death of the
beloved master, whom he still always spoke of as "mio Padrone," he had been Hermione's faithful attendant
and devoted friend. Yes, she knew him to be thatshe wished him to be that. Their stations in life might be
different, but they had come to sorrow together. They had suffered together and been in sympathy while they
suffered. He had loved what she had loved, lost it when she had lost it, wept for it when she had wept.
And he had been with her when she had waited for the coming of the child.
Hermione really cared for three people: Gaspare was one of them. He knew it. The other two were Vere and
Emile Artois.
"Vere," said Artois, taking her two hands closely in his large hands, and gazing into her face with the kind,
even affectionate directness that she loved in him: "do you know that today you are looking insolent?"
"Insolent!" said the girl. "How dare you!"
She tried to take her hands away.
"Insolently young," he said, keeping them authoritatively.
"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.
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"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 cocked up, and one hand drooping into
the Saint's Pool."
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Hermione smiled.
"My cigarettes! They're common property here," she said.
"That boy can't be a purebred 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 youthalmost 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 boywho 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 substitute, an understudy?"
An energy that was not free from passion 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 beI 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
sexI sometimes think so. I have my strength, believe me. But don't require of me the peculiar strength that
is male."
"The truth is that you love living in the past as the Bedouin loves living in the desert."
"It was my oasis," she answered, simply.
"And all these yearsthey have made no difference?"
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"Did you think they would? Did you think they had?"
"I hoped so. I thoughtI had begun to think that you lived again in Vere."
"Emile, you can always stand the truth, can't you? Don't say you can't. That would hurt me horribly. Perhaps
you do not know how sometimes I mentally lean on you. And I like to feel that if you knew the absolute truth
of me you would still look upon me with the same kind, understanding eyes as now. Perhaps no one else
would. Would you, do you think?"
"I hope and believe I could," he said. "You do not live in Vere. Is that it?"
"I know it is considered the right, the perfectly natural thing that a mother, stricken as I have been, should
find in time perfect peace and contentment in her child. Even youyou spoke of 'living again.' It's the
consecrated phrase, Emile, isn't it? I ought to be living again in Vere. Well, I'm not doing that. With my
nature I could never do that. Is that horrible?"
"Ma pauvre amie!" he said.
He bent down and touched her hand.
"I don't know," she said, more calmly, as if relieved, but still with an undercurrent of passion, "whether I
could ever live again in the life of another. But if I did it would be in the life of a man. I am not made to live
in a woman's life, really to live, giving out the force that is in me. I know I'm a middleaged womanto
these Italians here more than that, an old woman. But I'm not a finished woman, and I never shall be till I die.
Vere is my child. I love her tenderly; more than thatpassionately. She has always been close to me, as you
know. But no, Emile, my relation to Vere, hers to me, does not satisfy all my need of love, my power to love.
No, no, it doesn't. There's something in me that wants more, much more than that. There's something in me
thatI think only a son of his could have satisfied my yearning. A son might have been Maurice come back
to me, come back in a different, beautiful, wonderfully pure relation. I prayed for a son. I needed a son. Don't
misunderstand me, Emile; in a way a son could never have been so close to me as Vere is,but I could have
lived in him as I can never live in Vere. I could have lived in him almost as once I lived in Maurice. And
today I"
She got up suddenly from her chair, put her arms on the windowframe, and leaned out to the strange, white
day.
"Emile," she said, in a moment, turning round to him, "I want to get away, on to the sea. Will you row me
out, into the Grotto of Virgil?[*] It's so dreadfully white here, white and ghastly. I can't talk naturally here.
And I should like to go on a little farther, now I've begun. It would do me good to make a clean breast of it,
dear brother confessor. Shall we take the little boat and go?"
[*] The grotto described in this book is not really the Grotto of Virgil, but it is often called so by the
fishermen along the coast.
"Of course," he said.
"I'll get a hat."
She was away for two or three minutes. During that time Artois stood by the window that looked towards
Ischia. The stillness of the day was intense, and gave to his mind a sensation of dream. Far off across the
grayandwhite waters, partially muffled in clouds that almost resembled mist, the mountains of Ischia were
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rather suggested, mysteriously indicated, than clearly seen. The gray cliffs towards Bagnoli went down into
motionless water gray as they were, but of a different, more pathetic shade.
There was a luminous whiteness in the sky that affected the eyes, as snow does.
Artois, as he looked, thought this world looked very old, a world arranged for the elderly to dwell in. Was it
not, therefore, an appropriate setting for him and for Hermione? As this idea came into his mind it sent a
rather bitter smile to his lips, and Hermione, coming in just then, saw the smile and said,
"What is it, Emile? Why are you smiling?"
"Perhaps I will tell you when we are on the sea," he answered.
He looked at her. She had on a black hat, over which a white veil was fastened. It was tied beneath her chin,
and hung down in a cloud over her breast. It made him think of the strange misty clouds which brooded about
the breasts of the mountains of Ischia.
"Shall we go?" she said.
"Yes. What is Vere doing?"
"She is in her room."
"What is she doing there?"
"Reading, I suppose. She often shuts herself up. She loves reading almost more than I do."
"Well?"
Hermione led the way downstairs. When they were outside, on the crest of the islet, the peculiar sickliness
of the weather struck them both more forcibly.
"This is the strangest scirocco effect I think I have ever seen," said Artois. "It is as if nature were under the
influence of a drug, and had fallen into a morbid dream, with eyes wide open, and pale, inert and folded
hands. I should like to see Naples today, and notice if this weather has any effect upon that amazing
population. I wonder if my young friend, Marchese Isidoro Panacci Bytheway, I haven't told you about
him?"
"No."
"I must. But not now. We will continue our former conversation. Where shall we find the boat, the small
one?"
"Gaspare will bring itGaspare! Gaspare!"
"Signora!" cried a strong voice below.
"La piccola barca!"
"Va bene, Signora!"
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They descended slowly. It would have been almost impossible to do anything quickly on such a day. The
smallest movement, indeed, seemed almost an outrage, likely to disturb the great white dreamer of the sea.
When they reached the foot of the cliff Gaspare was there, holding the little craft in which Vere had gone out
with Ruffo.
"Do you want me, Signora?"
"No, thank you, Gaspare. Don Emilio will row me. We are only going a very little way."
She stepped in. As Artois followed her he said to Gaspare:
"Those fishermen have gone?"
"Five minutes ago, Signore. There they are!"
He pointed to a boat at some distance, moving slowly in the direction of Posilipo.
"I have been talking with them. One says he is of my country, a Sicilian."
"The boy?"
"Si, Signore, the giovinotto. But he cannot speak Sicilian, and he has never been in Sicily, poveretto!"
Gaspare spoke with an accent of pity in which there was almost a hint of contempt.
"A rivederci, Signore," he added, pushing off the little boat.
"A rivederci, Gaspare."
Artois took the oars and paddled very gently out, keeping near to the cliffs of the opposite shore.
"Even San Francesco looks weary today," he said, glancing across the pool at the Saint on his pedestal. "I
should not be surprised if, when we return, we find that he has laid down his cross and is reclining like the
tired fishermen who come here in the night. Where shall we go?"
"To the Grotto of Virgil."
"I wonder if Virgil was ever in his grotto? I wonder if he ever came here on such a day of scirocco as this,
and felt that the world was very old, and he was even older than the world?"
"Do you feel like that today?"
"I feel that this is a world suitable for the old, for those who have white hairs to accord with the white waters,
and whose nights are the white nights of age."
"Was that why you were smiling so strangely just now when I came in?"
"Yes."
He rowed on softly. The boat slipped out of the Pool of the Saint, and then they saw the Capo Coroglio and
the Island of Nisida with its fort. On their right, and close to them, rose the wearylooking cliffs,
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honeycombed with caverns, and seamed with fissures as an old and haggard face is seamed with wrinkles
that tell of many cares.
"Here is the grotto," said Hermione, almost directly. "Row in gently."
He obeyed her and turned the boat, sending it in under the mighty roof of rock.
A darkness fell upon them. They had a safe, enclosed sensation in escaping for a moment from the white day,
almost as if they had escaped from a white enemy.
Artois let the oars lie still in the water, keeping his hands lightly upon them, and both Hermione and he were
silent for a few minutes, listening to the tiny sounds made now and then by drops of moisture which fell from
the cavern roof softly into the almost silent sea. At last Artois said:
"You are out of the whiteness now. This is a shadowed place like a confessional, where murmuring lips tell to
strangers the stories of their lives. I am not a stranger, but tell me, my friend, about yourself and Vere.
Perhaps you scarcely know how deeply the mother and child problem interests methat is, when mother and
child are two real forces, as you and Vere are."
"Then you think Vere has force?"
"Do not you?"
"What kind of force?"
"You mean physical, intellectual, or moral? Suppose I say she has the force of charm!"
"Indeed she has that, as he had. That is one of the attributes she derives from Maurice."
"Yes. He had a wonderful charm. And then, Vere has passion."
"You think so?"
"I am sure of it. Where does she get that from?"
"He was full of the passion of the South."
"I think Vere has a touch of Northern passion in her, too, combined perhaps with the other. And that, I think,
she derives from you. Then I discern in Vere intellectual force, immature, embryonic if you like, but
unmistakable."
"That does not come from me," Hermione said, suddenly, almost with bitterness.
"Whywhy will you be unnecessarily humiliated?" Artois exclaimed.
His voice was confusedly echoed by the cavern, which broke into faint, but deep mutterings. Hermione
looked up quickly to the mysterious vault which brooded above them, and listened till the chaotic noises died
away. Then she said:
"Do you know what they remind me of?"
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"Of what?"
"My efforts. Those efforts I made long ago to live again in work."
"When you wrote?"
"Yes, when I tried to throw my mind and my heart down upon paper. How strange it was! I had Verebut
she wasn't enough to still the ache. And I knew what work can be, what a consolation, because I knew you.
And I stretched out my hands to itI stretched out my soul. And it was no use; I wasn't made to be a
successful writer. When I spoke from my heart to try and move men and save myself, my words were seized,
as yours were just now by the rockseized, and broken, and flung back in confusion. They struck my heart
like stones. Emile, I'm one of those people who can only do one thing: I can only feel."
"It is true that you could never be an artist. Perhaps you were made to be an inspiration."
"But that's not enough. The role of starter to those who raceI haven't the temperament to reconcile myself
to that. It's not that I have in me a conceit which demands to be fed. But I have in me a force that clamors to
exercise itself. Only when I was living on Monte Amato with Maurice did I feel that the force was being used
as God meant it to be used."
"In loving?"
"In loving passionately something that was utterly worthy to be loved."
Artois was silent. He knew Hermione's mistake. He knew what had never been told him: that Maurice had
been false to her for the love of the peasant girl Maddalena. He knew that Maurice had been done to death by
the betrayed girl's father, Salvatore. And Gaspare knew these things, too. But through all these years these
two men had so respected silence, the nobility of it, the grand necessity of it in certain circumstances of life,
that they had never spoken to each other of the black truth known to them both. Indeed, Artois believed that
even now, after more than sixteen years, if he ventured one word against the dead man Gaspare would be
ready to fly at his throat in defence of the loved Padrone. For this divined and persistent loyalty Artois had a
sensation of absolute love. Between him and Gaspare there must always be the barrier of a great and mutual
reserve. Yet that very reserve, because there was something truly delicate, and truly noble in it, was as a link
of steel between them. They were watchdogs of Hermione. They had been watchdogs through all these years,
guarding her from the knowledge of a truth. And so well had they done her service that now today she was
able to say, with clasped hands and the light of passion in her eyes:
"Something that was utterly worthy to be loved."
When Artois spoke again he said:
"And that force cannot be fully used in loving Vere?"
"No, Emile. Is that very horrible, very unnatural?"
"Why should it be?"
"I have triedI have tried for years, Emile, to make Vere enough. I have even been false with myself. I have
said to myself that she was enough. I did that after I knew that I could never produce work of any value.
When Vere was a baby I lived only for her. Again, when she was beginning to grow up, I tried to live, I did
live only for her. And I remember I used to say, I kept on saying to myself, 'This is enough for me. I do not
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need any more than this. I have had my life. I am now a middleaged woman. I must live in my child. This
will be my satisfaction. This is my satisfaction. This is using rightly and naturally all that force I feel within
me.' I kept on saying this. But there is something within one which rises up and defies a liehowever
beautiful the lie is, however noble it is. And I think even a lie can sometimes be both. Don't you, Emile?"
It almost seemed to him for a moment that she knew his lie and Gaspare's.
"Yes," he said. "I do think so."
"Well, that lie of mineit was defied. And it had no more courage."
"I want you to tell me something," he said, quietly. "I want you to tell me what has happened today."
"Today?"
"Yes. Something has happened either today or very recentlyI am sure of itthat has stirred up within
you this feeling of acute dissatisfaction. It was always there. But something has called it into the open. What
has done that?"
Hermione hesitated.
"Perhaps you don't know," he said.
"I was wonderingyes, I do know. I must be truthful with myselfwith you. I do know. But it seems so
strange, so almost inexplicable, and even rather absurd."
"Truth often seems absurd."
"It was that boy, that diver for frutti di mareRuffo."
"The boy with the Arab eyes?"
"Yes. Of course I have seen many boys full of life and gayety and music. There are so many in Italy.
Butwell, I don't knowperhaps it was partly Vere."
"How do you mean?"
"Vere was so interested in him. It may have been that. Or perhaps it was something in his look and in his
voice when he was singing. I don't really know what it was. But that boy made me feelmore horribly than I
have ever felt beforethat Vere is not enough. Emile, there is some hunger, so persistent, so peculiar, so
intense, that one feels as if it must be satisfied eventually, as if it were impossible for it not to be satisfied. I
think that human hunger for immortal life is like that, and I think my hunger for a son is like that. I know my
hunger can never be satisfied. And yet it lives on in me just as if it knew more than I know, as if it knew that
it could and must. After all these years I can't, no, I can't reconcile myself to the fact that Maurice was taken
from me so utterly, that he died without stamping himself upon a son. It seems as if it couldn't be. And I feel
today that I cannot bear that it is."
There were tears standing in her eyes. She had spoken with a force of feeling, with a depth of sincerity, that
startled Artois, intimately as he knew her. Till this moment he had not quite realized the wonderful
persistence of love in the hearts of certain women, and not only the persistence of love's existence, but of its
existence undiminished, unabated by time.
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"How am I to bear it?" she said, as he did not speak.
"I cannot tell. I am not worthy to know. And besides, I must say to you, Hermione, that one of the greatest
mysteries in human life, at any rate to me, is this: how some human beings do bear the burdens laid upon
them. Christ bore His cross. But there has only been, since the beginning of things, one Christ, and it is
unthinkable that there can ever be another. But all those who are not Christ, how is it they bear what they do
bear? It is easy to talk of bravery, the necessity for it in life. It is always very easy to talk. The thing that is
impossible is to understand. How can you come to me to help you, my friend? And suppose I were to try.
How could I try, except by saying that I think Vere is very worthy to be loved with all your love?"
"You love Vere, don't you, Emile?"
"Yes."
"And I do. You don't doubt that?"
"Never."
"After all I have said, the way I have spoken, you might."
"I do not doubt it for a moment."
"I wonder if there is any mother who would not, if I spoke to her as I have spoken to you today?"
"I think there is a great deal of untruth spoken of mother's love, a great deal of misconception about it, as
there is about most very strange, and very wonderful and beautiful things. But are you so sure that if your
husband had stamped himself upon a boy this force within you could have been satisfied?"
"I have believed so."
She was silent. Then she added, quietly, "I do believe so."
He did not speak, but sat looking down at the sea, which was full of dim color in the cave.
"I think you are doubting that it would have been so?" she said, at last.
"Yes, that is true. I am doubting."
"I wonder why?"
"I cannot help feeling that there is passion in you, such passion as could not be satisfied in any strict, maternal
relationship."
"But I am old, dear Emile," she said, very simply.
"When I was standing by that window, looking at the mountains of Ischia, I was saying to myself, 'This is an
old, tired world, suitable for meand for you. We are in our right environment today.' I was saying that,
Hermione, but was I believing it, really? I don't think I was. And I am ten years older than you, and I have
been given a nature that was, I think, always older than yours could ever be."
"I wonder if that is so."
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She looked at him very directly, even searchingly, not with eager curiosity, but with deep inquiry.
"You know, Emile," she added, "I tell you very much, but you tell me very little. Not that I wish to ask
anythingno. I respect all your reserve. And about your work: you tell me all that. It is a great thing in my
life, your work. Perhaps you don't realize how sometimes I live in the book that you are doing, almost as if I
were writing it myself. But your inner life"
"But I have been frankness itself with you," said Artois. "To no one have I ever said so much as to you."
"Yes, I know, about many things. But about emotion, love,not friendship, the other lovedo you get on
without that? When you say your nature has always been older than mine, do you mean that it has always
been harder to move by love, that it has had less need of love?"
"I think so. For many years in my life I think that work has filled the place love occupies in many, perhaps in
most men's lives. Everything comes second to work. I know that, because if any one attempts to interfere
with my work, or to usurp any of the time that should be given to it, any regard I may have for that person
turns at once to irritation, almost to hatred."
"I have never done that?"
"Youno. Of course, I have been like other men. When I was young well, Hermione, after all I am a
Frenchman, and though I am of Normandy, still I passed many years in Paris, as you know."
"All that I understand. But the real thing? Such as I have known?"
"I have never broken my heart for any one, though I have known agitations. But even those were long ago.
And since I was thirtyfive I have never felt really dominated by any one. Before that time I occasionally
passed under the yoke, I believe, like other men. Why do you fix your eyes on me like that?"
"I was wondering if you could ever pass under the yoke again."
"Honestly, I do not think so. I am not sure. When can one be certain that one will never be, or do, this or that?
Surely,"he smiled, "you are not afraid for me?"
"I do not say that. But I think you have forces in you not fully exercised even by your work."
"Possibly. But there the years do really step in and count for something, even for much. There is no doubt
that as the years increase, the man who cares at all for intellectual pleasures is able to care for them more, is
able to substitute them, without keen regret, without wailing and gnashing of teeth, for certain other
pleasures, to which, perhaps, formerly he clung. That is why the man who is mentally and bodilyyou know
what I mean?"
"Yes."
"Has such an immense advantage in years of decline over the man who is merely a bodily man."
"I am sure that is true. But"
"What is it?"
"The heart? What about that?"
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"Perhaps there are some hearts that can fulfil themselves sufficiently in friendship."
As Artois said this his eyes rested upon Hermione with an expression in them that revealed much that he
never spoke in words. She put out her hand, and took his, and pressed it, holding hers over it upon the oar.
"Emile," she said, "sometimes you make me feel unworthy and ungrateful becausebecause I still need, I
dare to need more than I have been given. Without you I don't know how I should have faced it."
"Without me you would never have had to face it."
That was the cry that rose up perpetually in the heart of Artois, the cry that Hermione must never hear. He
said to her now:
"Without you, Hermione, I should be dust in the dust of Africa!"
"Perhaps we each owe something to the other," she said. "It is blessed to have a debt to a friend."
"Would to God that I could pay all my debt to you!" Artois exclaimed.
Again the cavern took up his voice and threw it back to the sea in confused and hollow mutterings. They both
looked up, as if some one were above them, warning them or rebuking them. At that instant they had the
feeling that they were being watched. But there was only the empty gray sea about them, and over their heads
the rugged, weary rock that had leaned over the sea for countless years.
"Hark!" said Artois, "it is telling me that my debt to you can never be paid: only in one way could it be
partially discharged. If I could show you a path to happiness, the happiness you long for, and need, the
passionate happiness of the heart that is giving where it rejoices to givefor your happiness must always be
in generosityI should have partially paid my debt to you. But that is impossible."
"I've made you sad today by my complaining," she said, with self rebuke; "I'm sorry. You didn't realize?"
"How it was with you? No, not quiteI thought you were more at peace than you are."
"Till today I believe I was half deceived too."
"That singing boy, thatwhat is his name?"
"Ruffo."
"That Ruffo, I should like to run a knife into him under the left shoulderblade. How dare he, a ragamuffin
from some hovel of Naples, make you know that you are unhappy?"
"How strange it is what outside things, or people who have no connection with us or with our lives, can do to
us unconsciously!" she said. "I have heard a hundred boys sing on the Bay, seen a hundred rowing their boats
into the Pooland just this one touches some chord, and all the strings of my soul quiver."
"Some people act upon us somewhat as nature does sometimes. And Vere paid the boy. There is another
irony of unconsciousness. Vere, bone of your bone, flesh of your flesh, rewards your paingiver. How we
hide ourselves from those we love best and live with most intimately! You, her mother, are a stranger to
Vere. Does not today prove it?"
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"Ah, but Vere is not a stranger to me. That is where the mother has the advantage of the child."
Artois did not make any response to this remark. To cover his silence, perhaps, he grasped the oars more
firmly and began to back the boat out of the cave. Both felt that it was no longer necessary to stay in this
confessional of the rock.
As they came out under the grayness of the sky, Hermione, with a change of tone, said:
"And your friend? The Marchesewhat is his name?"
"Isidoro Panacci."
"Tell me about him."
"He is a very perfect type of a complete Neapolitan of his class. He has scarcely travelled at all, except in
Italy. Once he has been in Paris, where I met him, and once to Lucerne for a fortnight. Both his father and
mother are Neapolitans. He is a charming fellow, utterly unintellectual, but quite clever; shrewd, sharp at
reading character, marvellously able to take care of himself, and hold his own with anybody. A cat to fall on
his feet! He is apparently born without any sense of fear, and with a profound belief in destiny. He can drive
fourinhand, swim for any number of hours without tiring, ridewell, as an Italian cavalry officer can ride,
and that is not badly. His accomplishments? He can speak Frenchabominably, and pick out all imaginable
tunes on the piano, putting instinctively quite tolerable basses. I don't think he ever reads anything, except the
Giorno and the Mattino. He doesn't care for politics, and likes cards, but apparently not too much. They're no
craze with him. He knows Naples inside out, and is as frank as a child that has never been punished."
"I should think he must be decidedly attractive?"
"Oh, he is. One great attraction he hashe appears to have no sense at all that difference of age can be a
barrier between two men. He is twentyfour, and I am what I am. He is quite unaware that there is any gulf
between us. In every way he treats me as if I were twentyfour."
"Is that refreshing or embarrassing?"
"I find it generally refreshing. His family accepts the situation with perfect naivete. I am welcomed as Doro's
chum with all the goodwill in the world."
Hermione could not help laughing, and Artois echoed her laugh.
"Merely talking about him has made you look years younger," she declared. "The influence of the day has
lifted from you."
"It would not have fallen upon Isidoro, I think. And yet he is full of sentiment. He is a curious instance of a
very common Neapolitan obsession."
"What is that?"
"He is entirely obsessed by woman. His life centres round woman. You observe I use the singular. I do that
because it is so much more plural than the plural in this case. His life is passed in love affairs, in a sort of
chaos of amours."
"How strange that is!"
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"You think so, my friend?"
"Yes. I never can understand how human beings can pass from love to love, as many of them do. I never
could understand it, even before I even before Sicily."
"You are not made to understand such a thing."
"But you do?"
"I? Well, perhaps. But the loves of men are not as your love."
"Yet his was," she answered. "And he was a true Southerner, despite his father.
"Yes, he was a true Southerner," Artois replied.
For once he was off his guard with her, and uttered his real thought of Maurice, not without a touch of the
irony that was characteristic of him.
Immediately he had spoken he was aware of his indiscretion. But Hermione had not noticed it. He saw by her
eyes that she was far away in Sicily. And when the boat slipped into the Saint's Pool, and Gaspare came to
the water's edge to hold the prow while they got out, she rose from her seat slowly, and almost reluctantly,
like one disturbed in a dream that she would fain continue.
"Have you seen the Signorina, Gaspare?" she asked him. "Has she been out?"
"No, Signora. She is still in the house."
"Still reading!" said Artois. "Vere must be quite a bookworm!"
"Will you stay to dinner, Emile?"
"Alas, I have promised the Marchesino Isidoro to dine with him. Give me a cup of tea a la Russe, and one of
Ruffo's cigarettes, and then I must bid you adieu. I'll take the boat to the Antico Giuseppone, and then get
another there as far as the gardens."
"One of Ruffo's cigarettes!" Hermione echoed, as they went up the steps. "That boy seems to have made
himself one of the family already."
"Yet I wish, as I said in the cave, that I had put a knife into him under the left shoulderbladebefore this
morning."
They spoke lightly. It seemed as if each desired for the moment to get away from their mood in the
confessional of Virgil's Grotto, and from the sadness of the white and silent day.
As to Ruffo, about whom they jested, he was in sight of Naples, and not far from Mergellina, still rowing
with tireless young arms, and singing to "Bella Napoli," with a strong resolve in his heart to return to the
Saint's Pool on the first opportunity and dive for more cigarettes.
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CHAPTER IV
At the Antico Giuseppone, Artois left the boat from the islet and, taking another, was rowed towards the
public gardens of Naples, whose trees were faintly visible far off across the Bay. Usually he talked familiarly
to any Neapolitan with whom he found himself, but today he was taciturn, and sat in the stern of the
broadbottomed craft looking towards the city in silence while the boatman plied his oars. The memory of
his conversation with Hermione in the Grotto of Virgil, of her manner, the look in her eyes, the sound of her
voice there, gave him food for thought that was deep and serious.
Although Artois had an authoritative, and often an ironical manner that frightened timid people, he was a man
capable of much emotion and of great loyalty. He did not easily trust or easily love, but in those whose worth
he had thoroughly proved he had a confidence as complete as that of a child. And where he placed his
complete confidence he placed also his affection. The one went with the other almost as inevitably as the
wave goes with the wind.
In their discussion about the emotion of the heart Artois had spoken the truth to Hermione. As he had grown
older he had felt the influence of women less. The pleasures of sentiment had been gradually superceded in
his natureor so at least he honestly believedby the purely intellectual pleasures. More and more
completely and contentedly had he lived in his work, and in the life of preparation for it. This life could never
be narrow, for Artois was a traveller, and studied many lands.
In the years that had elapsed since the tragedy in Sicily, when the husband of Hermione had met his death
suddenly in the sea, almost in sight of the home of the girl he had betrayed, the fame of Artois had grown
steadily. And he was jealous of his fame almost as a good woman is jealous of her honor. This jealousy had
led him to a certain selfishness of which he was quite awareeven to a certain hardness such as he had
hinted to Hermione. Those who strove, or seemed likely to strive to interrupt him in his work, he pushed out
of his life. Even if they were charming women he got rid of them. And the fact that he did so proved to him,
and not improbably to them, that he was more wrapped up in the gratification of the mind than in the
gratification of the heart, or of the body. It was not that the charm of charming women had ceased to please
him, but it seemed to have ceased really to fascinate him.
Long ago, before Hermione married, he had felt for her a warm and intimate friendship. He had even been
jealous of Maurice. Without being at all in love, he had cared enough for Hermione to be jealous. Before her
marriage he had looked forward in imagination down a vista of long years, and had seen her with a husband,
then with children, always more definitely separated from himself.
And he had seen himself exceptionally alone, even almost miserably alone.
Then fate had spun tragedy into her web. He had nearly died in Africa, and had been nursed back to life by
this friend of whom he had been jealous. And they had gone together to Sicily, to the husband whose memory
Hermione still adored. And then had followed swiftly the murder, the murderer's departure to America, saved
by the silence of Gaspare, and the journey of the bereaved woman to Italy, where Artois had left her and
returned to France.
Once more Artois had his friend, released from the love of another man. But he wished it were not so.
Hermione's generosity met with a full response of generosity from him. All his egotism and selfishness
dropped from him then, shaken down like dead leaves by the tempest of a genuine emotion. His knowledge
of her grief, his understanding of its depth, brought to him a sorrow that was keen, and even exquisitely
painful. For a long while he was preoccupied by an intense desire to assuage it. He strove to do so by acting
almost in defiance of his nature, by fostering deception. From the Abetone Hermione had written him letters,
human documentsthe tale of the suffering of a woman's heart. Many reserves she had from him and from
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every one. The most intimate agony was for her alone, and she kept it in her soul as the priest keeps the
Sacred Host in its tabernacle. But some of her grief she showed in her letters, and some of her desire for
comfort. And without any definite intention, she indicated to her subtle and devoted friend the only way in
which he could console her.
For once, driven by his emotion, he took that way.
He allowed Hermione to believe that he agreed with her in the conception she had formed of her husband's
love for her. It was difficult for him to do this, for he had an almost cruel passion for truth, and generally a
clear insight into human character. Far less than many others would have condemned did he, in his mind,
condemn the man who was dead for the sin against love that he had committed. He had understood Maurice
as Hermione had not understood him, and knowledge is full of pardon. But though he could pardon easily he
could not easily pretend. By pretending he sinned against himself, and helped his friend some steps along the
way to peace. He thought he had helped her to go much farther along that way than she had gone. And he
thought that Vere had helped her, too.
Now the hollow mutterings of the rock in Virgil's Grotto seemed to be in his heart, as he realized how
permanent was the storm in Hermione's nature. Something for her he had done. And somethingmuch
more, no doubtVere had done. But how little it all was!
Their helplessness gave him a new understanding of woman.
Hermione had allowed him great privileges, had allowed him to protect her, had taken his advice. After Vere
was born she had wished to go back again to Sicily. The house of the priest, where she had been so happy,
and so sad, drew her. She longed for it. She desired to make it her home. He had fought against her in this
matter, and had been aided by Gaspare.
There had been a subtle understanding, never expressed, between the boy and him.
Artois had played upon her intellect, had appealed, too, to her mother's heart.
He had not urged her to try to forget, but he had urged her not morbidly to remember, not to cherish and to
foster the memory of the tragedy which had broken her life. To go back to that tiny home, solitary in its
beautiful situation, in the changed circumstances which were hers, would be, he told her, to court and to
summon sorrow. He was even cruel to be kind. When Hermione combated his view, assuring him that to her
Monte Amato was like a sacred place, a place hallowed by memories of happiness, he recalled the despair in
which that happiness had ended. With all the force at his command, and it was great, he drew the picture of
the life that would be in comparison with the life that had been. And he told her finally that what she wished
to do was morbid, was unworthy of her strength of character, was even wicked now that she was a mother.
He brought before her mind those widows who make a cult of their dead. Would she be one of them? Would
she steep a little child in such an atmosphere of memories, casting a young and tender mind backward into a
cruel past instead of leading it forward into a joyous present? Maurice had been the very soul of happiness.
Vere must be linked with the sunbeams. With his utmost subtlety Artois described and traced the effect upon
a tiny and sensitive child of a mother's influence, whether for good or evil, until Hermione, who had a deep
reverence for his knowledge of all phases of human nature, at last, almost in despite of the truth within her, of
the interior voice which said to her, "With you and Vere it would not be so," caught alarm from his apparent
alarm, drew distrust of herself from his apparent distrust of her.
Gaspare, too, played his part. When Hermione spoke to him of returning to the priest's house, almost wildly,
and with the hot energy that bursts so readily up in Sicilians, he begged her not to go back to the maledetta
casa in which his Padrone's dead body had lain. As he spoke a genuine fear of the cottage came upon him. All
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the latent superstition that dwells in the contadino was stirred as dust by a wind. In clouds it flew up about his
mind. Fear looked out of his great eyes. Dread was eloquent in his gestures. And he, too, referred to the child,
to the povera piccola bambina. It would cast illluck on the child to bring her up in a chamber of death. Her
saint would forsake her. She too would die. The boy worked himself up into a fever. His face was white.
Drops of sweat stood on his forehead.
He had set out to be deceptivewhat he would have called un poco birbante, and he had even deceived
himself. He knew that it would be dangerous for his Padrona to live again near Marechiaro. Any day a chance
scrap of gossip might reach her ears. In time she would be certain almost to hear something of the dead
Padrone's close acquaintance with the dwellers in the Casa delle Sirene. She would question him, perhaps.
She would suspect something. She would inquire. She would search. She would find out the hideous truth. It
was this fear which made him argue on the same side as Artois. But in doing so he caught another fear from
his own words. He became really natural, really truthful in his fear. Andshe scarcely knew
whyHermione was even more governed by him than by Artois. He had lived with them in the Casa del
Prete, had been an intimate part of their life there. And he was Sicilian of the soil. The boy had a real power
to move, to dominate her, which he did not then suspect.
Again and again he repeated those words, "La povera bambinala povera piccola bambina." And at last
Hermione was overcome.
"I won't go to Sicily," she said to Artois. "For if I went there I could only go to Monte Amato. I won't go until
Vere is old enough to wish to go, to wish to see the house where her father and I were happy."
And she had never gone back. For Artois had not been satisfied with this early victory.
In returning from a tour in North America the following spring, when Vere was nearly two years old, he had
paid a visit to Marechiaro, and, while there, had seen the contadino from whom Hermione had rented, and
still rented, the house of the priest. The man was middleaged, ignorant but shrewd, and very greedy. Artois
made friends with him, and casually, over a glass of moscato, talked about his affairs and the land question in
Sicily. The peasant became communicative and, of course, loud in his complaining. His land yielded nothing.
The price of almonds had gone down. The lemon crop had been ruined by the storms. As to the vinesthey
were all devoured by the phylloxera, and he had no money to buy and plant vines from America. Artois
hinted that he received a good rent from the English lady for the cottage on Monte Amato. The contadino
acknowledged that he received a fair price for the cottage and the land about it; but the house, he declared,
would go to rack and ruin with no one ever in it, and the land was lying idle, for the English lady would have
everything left exactly as it had been when she lived there with her husband. Artois seized upon this hint of
what was in the peasant's mind, and bemoaned with him his situation. The house ought to be occupied, the
land all about it, up to the very door, and behind upon the sunny mountainside, planted with American
vines. If it belonged to him that was what he would do plant American vines, and when the years of
yielding came, give a good percentage on all the wine made and sold to the man who had tended the
vineyard.
The peasant's love of money awoke. He only let the cottage to Hermione year by year, and had no contract
with her extending beyond a twelve months' lease. Before Artois left Marechiaro the tender treachery was
arranged. When the year's lease was up, the contadino wrote to her declining to renew it. She answered,
protesting, offering more money. But it was all in vain. The man replied that he had already let the cottage
and the land around it to a grower of vines for a long term of years, and that he was getting double the annual
price she offered.
Hermione was indignant and bitterly distressed. When this letter reached her she was at Fiesole with Vere in
a villa which she had taken. She would probably have started at once for Sicily; but Vere was just then ill
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with some infantile complaint, and could not be left. Artois, who was in Rome, and had received from her the
news of this carefully arranged disaster, offered to go to Sicily on her behalfand actually went. He returned
to tell her that the house of the priest was already occupied by contadini, and all the land up to the very door
in process of being dug up and planted with vines. It was useless to make any further offer. The thing was
done.
Hermione said nothing, but Artois saw in her eyes how keenly she was suffering, and turned his own eyes
away. He was only trying to preserve her from greater unhappiness, the agony of ever finding out the truth;
but he felt guilty at that moment, and as if he had been cruel to the woman who roused all his tenderness, all
his protective instinct.
"I shall not go back to Marechiaro now," Hermione said. "I shall not go back even to see the grave. I could
never feel that anything of his spirit lingered there. But I did feel, I should have felt again, as if something of
him still loved that little house on the mountain, still stayed among the oaktrees. It seemed to me that when I
took Vere to the Casa del Prete she would have learned to know something of her father there that she could
never have learned to know in another place. But nowno, I shall not go back. If I did I should even lose my
memories, perhaps, and I could not bear that."
And she had not returned. Gaspare went to Marechiaro sometimes, to see his family and his friends. He
visited the grave and saw that it was properly kept. But Hermione remained in Italy. For some time she lived
near Florence, first at Fiesole, later at Bellosguardo. When the summer heat came she took a villa at the
Abetone. Or she spent some months with Vere beside the sea. As the girl grew older she developed a passion
for the sea, and seemed to care little for the fascination of the pine forests. Hermione, noting this, gave up
going to the Abetone and took a house by the sea for the whole summer. Two years they were at Santa
Margherita, one year at Sorrento.
Then, sailing one evening on the sea towards Bagnoli, they saw the house on the islet beyond the Pool of San
Francesco. Vere was enchanted by it.
"To live in it," she exclaimed, "would be almost like living in the sea!"
Hermione, too, was fascinated by its situation, the loneliness, the wildness, yet the radiant cheerfulness of it.
She made inquiries, found that it was owned by a Neapolitan who scarcely ever went there, and eventually
succeeded in getting it on a long lease. For two years now she and Vere had spent the summer there.
Artois had noticed that since Hermione had been in the Casa del Mare an old desire had begun to revive in
her. She spoke more frequently of Sicily. Often she stood on the rock and looked across the sea, and he knew
that she was thinking of those beloved coastsof the Ionian waters, of the blossoming almondtrees among
the olives and the rocks, of the scarlet geraniums glowing among the thorny cactus, of the giant watercourses
leading up into the mountains. A hunger was awake in her, now that she had a home so near the enchanted
island.
He realized it. But he was no longer much afraid. So many years had passed that even if Hermione revisited
Marechiaro he believed there would be little or no danger now of her ever learning the truth. It had never
been known in the village, and if it had been suspected, all the suspicions must have long ago died down. He
had been successful in his protection. He was thankful for that. It was the one thing he had been able to do for
the friend who had done so much for him.
The tragedy had occurred because of him. Because of him all knowledge of it had been kept from Hermione,
and would now be kept from her foreverbecause of him and Gaspare.
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This he had been able to do. But how powerless he was, and how powerless was Vere!
Now he looked vaguely at the villas of Posilipo, and he realized this thoroughly.
Something for her he had done, and something Vere had done. But how little it all was!
Today a new light had been thrown upon Hermione, and he realized what she was as he had never realized
it before. No, she was right. She could never live fully in a girl childshe was not made to do that. Why had
he ever thought, hoped that perhaps it might be so, that perhaps Vere might some day completely and happily
fill her life? Long ago he had encouraged her to work, to write. Misled by her keen intelligence, her
enthusiasm, her sincerity and vitality, by the passion that was in her, the great heart, the power of feeling, the
power of criticising and inspiring another which she had freely shown to him, Artois had believedas he had
once said to her in London that she might be an artist, but that she preferred to be simply a woman. But he
found it was not so. Hermione had not the peculiar gift of the writer. She could feel, but she could not
arrange. She could discern, but she could not expose. A flood of words came to her, but not the inevitable
word. She could not take that exquisite leap from the known into the unknown which genius can take with the
certainty of alighting on firm ground. In short, she was not formed and endowed to be an artist. About such
matters Artois knew only how to be sincere. He was sincere with his friend, and she thanked him for being
so.
One possible life was taken from Hermione, the life of the artist who lives in the life of the work.
There remained the life in Vere.
Today Artois knew from Hermione's own lips that she could not live completely in her child, and he felt that
he had been blind as men are often blind about women, are blind because they are secretly selfish. The man
lives for himself, but he thinks it natural, even distinctively womanly, that women should live for othersfor
him, for some other man, for their children. What man finds his life in his child? But the womanshe surely
ought to, and without difficulty. Hermione had been sincere today, and Artois knew his blindness, and knew
his secret selfishness.
The gray was lifting a little over Naples, the distant shadowy form of Vesuvius was becoming clearer, more
firm in outline. But the boatman rowed slowly, influenced by the scirocco.
How, then, was Hermione to live? How was she to find happiness or peace? It was a problem which he
debated with an ardor that had in it something of passion. And he began to wonder how it would have been if
he had acted differently, if he had allowed her to find out what he suspected to be the exact truth of the dead
man. Long ago he had saved her from suffering. But by doing so had he not dedicated her, not to a greater,
but to a longer suffering? He might have defiled a beautiful memory. He must have done so had he acted
differently. But if he had defiled it, might not Hermione have been the subject of a great revulsion? Horror
can kill, but it can also cure. It can surely root out love. But from such a heart as Hermione's?
Despite all his understanding of women, Artois felt at a loss today. He could not make up his mind what
would have been the effect upon Hermione if she had learned that her husband had betrayed her.
Presently he left that subject and came to Vere.
When he did this he was conscious at once of a change within him. His tenderness and pity for Hermione
were replaced by another tenderness and pity. And these were wholly for Vere. Hermione was suffering
because of Maurice. But Vere was surely suffering, subconsciously, because of Hermione.
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There were two links in the chain of suffering, that between Maurice and Hermione, and that between
Hermione and Vere.
For a moment he felt as if Vere were bereaved, were motherless. The sensation passed directly he realized the
exaggeration in his mind. But he still felt as if the girl were deprived of something which she ought to
possess, which, till now, he had thought she did possess. It seemed to him that Vere stood quite outside of her
mother's life, instead of in it, in its centre, its core; and he pitied the child, almost as he pitied other children
from time to time, children to whom their parents were indifferent. And yet Hermione loved Vere, and Vere
could not know what he had only known completely todaythat the mother often felt lonely with the child.
Vere did not know that, but surely some day she would find it out.
Artois knew her character well, knew that she was very sensitive, very passionate, quick to feel and quick to
understand. He discovered in her qualities inherited both from her father and her mother, attributes both
English and Sicilian. In appearance she resembled her father. She had "thrown back" to the Sicilian ancestor,
as he had. She had the Southern eyes, the Southern grace, the Southern vivacity and warmth that had made
him so attractive. But Artois divined a certain stubbornness in Vere that had been lacking in the dead man, a
stubbornness that took its rise not in stupidity but in a secret consciousness of force.
Vere, Artois thought, might be violent, but would not be fickle. She had a loyalty in her that was Sicilian in
its fervor, a sense of gratitude such as the contadini have, although by many it is denied to them; a quick and
lively temper, but a disposition that responded to joy, to brightness, to gayety, to sunlight, with a swiftness,
almost a fierceness, that was entirely unEnglish.
Her father had been the dancing Faun. She had not, could never have his gift of thoughtlessness. For she had
intellect, derived from Hermione, and an old truthfulness that was certainly not Sicilian. Often there were
what Artois called "Northern Lights" in her sincerity. The strains in her, united, made, he thought, a
fascinating blend. But as yet she was undevelopedan interesting, a charming child, but only a child. In
many ways she was young for her age. Highly intelligent, she was anything rather than "knowing." Her
innocence was like clear water in a spring. The graciousness of youth was hers to the full.
As Artois thought of it he was conscious, as of a new thing, of the wonderful beauty of such innocent youth.
It was horrible to connect it with suffering. And yet that link in the chain did exist. Vere had not something
that surely she ought to have, and, without consciously missing it, she must sometimes subtly, perhaps
vaguely, be aware that there was a lack in her life. Her mother gave her great love. But she was not to her
mother what a son would have been. And the love that is mingled with regret has surely something shadowy
in it.
Maurice Delarey had been as the embodiment of joy. It was strange that from the fount of joy sorrow was
thrown up. But so it was. From him sorrow had come. From him sorrow might still come, even for Vere.
In the white and silent day Artois again felt the stirring of intuition, as he had felt it long ago. But now he
roused himself, and resolutely, almost angrily, detached his mind from its excursions towards the future.
"Do you often think of tomorrow?" he suddenly said to the boatman, breaking from his silence.
"Signore?"
"Do you often wonder what is going to happen tomorrow, what you will do, whether you will be happy or
sad?"
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The man threw up his head.
"No, Signore. Whatever comes is destiny. If I have food today it is enough for me. Why should I bother
about tomorrow's maccheroni?"
Artois smiled. The boat was close in now to the platform of stone that projected beneath the wall of the
Marina.
As he stepped out he gave the boatman a generous buonamano.
"You are quite right, comrade," he said. "It is the greatest mistake in the world to bother about tomorrow's
maccheroni."
CHAPTER V
Three days after Artois' conversation with Hermione in the Grotto of Virgil the Marchesino Isidoro Panacci
came smiling into his friend's apartments in the Hotel Royal des Etrangers. He was smartly dressed in the
palest possible shade of gray, with a bright pink tie, pink socks, brown shoes of the rather boatlike shape
affected by many young Neopolitans, and a round straw hat, with a small brim, that was set slightly on the
side of his curly head. In his mouth was a cigarette, and in his buttonhole a pink carnation. He took Artois'
hand with his left hand, squeezed it affectionately, murmured "Caro Emilio," and sat down in an easy attitude
on the sofa, putting his hat and stick on a table near by.
It was quite evident that he had come for no special reason. He had just dropped in, as he did whenever he
felt inclined, to gossip with "Caro Emilio," and it never occurred to him that possibly he might be interrupting
an important piece of work. The Marchesino could not realize work. He knew his friend published books. He
even saw him sometimes actually engaged in writing them, pen in hand. But he was sure anybody would far
rather sit and chatter with him, or hear him play a valse on the piano, or a bit of the "Boheme," than bend
over a table all by himself. And Artois always welcomed him. He liked him. But it was not only that which
made him complaisant. Doro was a type, and a singularly perfect one.
Now Artois laid down his pen, and pulled forward an armchair opposite to the sofa.
"Mon Dieu, Doro! How fresh you look, like a fish just pulled out of the sea!"
The Marchesino showed his teeth in a smile which also shone in his round and boyish eyes.
"I have just come out of the sea. Papa and I have been bathing at the Eldorado. We swam round the Castello
until we were opposite your windows, and sang 'Funiculi, funicula!' in the water, to serenade you. Why didn't
you hear us? Papa has a splendid voice, almost like Tamagno's in the gramophone, when he sings the 'Addio'
from 'Otello.' Of course we kept a little out at sea. Papa is so easily recognized by his red mustaches. But still
you might have heard us."
"I did."
"Then why didn't you come unto the balcony, amico mio?"
"Because I thought you were street singers."
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"Davvero? Papa would be angry. And he is in a bad temper today anyhow."
"Why?"
"Well, I believe Gilda Mai is going to bring a causa against Viviano. Of course he won't marry her, and she
never expected he could. Why, she used to be a milliner in the Toledo. I remember it perfectly, and now
Sigismondo But it's really Gilda that has made papa angry. You see, he has paid twice for me, once four
thousand lire, and the other time three thousand five hundred. And then he has lost a lot at Lotto lately. He
has no luck. And then he, too, was in a row yesterday evening."
"The Marchese?"
"Yes, in the Chiaia. He slapped Signora Merani's face twice before every one."
"Diavolo! What! a lady?"
"Well, if you like to call her so," returned Doro, negligently. "Her husband is an impiegato of the Postoffice,
or something of the kind."
"But why should the Marchese slap her face in the Chiaia?"
"Because she provoked him. They took a flat in the house my father owns in the Strada Chiatamone. After a
time they got behind with the rent. He let them stay on for six months without paying, and then he turned
them out. What should he do?" Doro began to gesticulate. He held his right hand up on a level with his face,
with the fingers all drawn together and pressed against the thumb, and moved it violently backwards and
forwards, bringing it close to the bridge of his nose, then throwing it out towards Artois. "What else, I say?
Was he to give his beautiful rooms to them for nothing? And she with a face like have you, I ask you,
Emilio, have you seen her teeth?"
"I have never seen the Signora in my life!"
"You have never seen her teeth? Dio Mio!" He opened his two hands, and, lifting his arms, shook them
loosely above his head, shutting his eyes for an instant as if to ward off some dreadful vision. "They are like
the keys of a piano from Bordicelli's! Basta!" He dropped his hands and opened his eyes. "Yesterday papa
was walking in the Chiaia. He met Signori Merani, and she began to abuse him. She had a red parasol. She
shook it at him! She called him vigliaccopapa, a Panacci, dei Duchi di Vedrano! The parasolit was a
bright red, it infuriated papa. He told the Signora to stop. She knows his temper. Every one in Naples knows
our tempers, every one! I, Viviano, even Sigismondo, we are all the same, we are all exactly like papa. If we
are insulted we cannot control ourselves. You know it, Emilio!"
"I am perfectly certain of it," said Artois. "I am positive you none of you can."
"It does not matter whether it is a man or a woman. We must do something with our hands. We have got to.
Papa told the Signora he should strike her at once unless she put down the red parasol and was silent. What
did she do, the imbecile? She stuck out her face like this,"he thrust his face forward with the right cheek
turned towards Artois"and said, 'Strike me! strike me!' Papa obeyed her. Poom! Poom! He gave her a
smack on each cheek before every one. 'You want education!' he said to her. 'And I shall give it you.' And
now she may bring a processo too. But did you really think we were street singers?" He threw himself back,
took the cigarette from his mouth, and laughed. Then he caught hold of his blond mustache with both hands,
gave it an upward twist, at the same time pouting his big lips, and added:
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"We shall bring a causa against you for that!"
"No, Doro, you and I must never quarrel. By the way, though, I want to see you angry. Every one talks of the
Panacci temper, but when I am with you I always see you smiling or laughing. As to the Marchese, he is as
lively as a boy. Viviano"
"Oh, Viviano is a buffone. Have you ever seen him imitate a monkey from whom another monkey has
snatched a nut?"
"No."
"It is like this"
With extraordinary suddenness he distorted his whole face into the likeness of an angry ape, hunching his
shoulders and uttering fierce simian cries.
"No, I can't do it."
With equal suddenness and selfpossession he became his smiling self again.
"Viviano has studied in the monkeyhouse. And the monk looking the other way when he passes along the
Marina where the women are bathing in the summer! He shall do that for you on Sunday afternoon when you
come to Capodimonte. It makes even mamma die of laughing, and you know how religious she is. But then,
of course, menthat does not matter. Religion is for women, and they understand that quite well."
The Marchesino never made any pretence of piety. One virtue he had in the fullest abundance. He was
perfectly sincere with those whom he considered his friends. That there could be any need for hypocrisy
never occurred to him.
"Mamma would hate it if we were saints," he continued.
"I am sure the Marchesa can be under no apprehension on that score," said Artois.
"No, I don't think so," returned the Marchesino, quite seriously.
He had a sense of humor, but it did not always serve him. Occasionally it was fitful, and when summoned by
irony remained at a distance.
"It is true, Emilio, you have never seen me angry," he continued, reverting to the remark of Artois; "you
ought to. Till you have seen a Panacci angry you do not really know him. With you, of course, I could never
be angrynever, never. You are my friend, my comrade. To you I tell everything."
A sudden remembrance seemed to come to him. Evidently a new thought had started into his active mind, for
his face suddenly changed, and became serious, even sentimental.
"What is it?" asked Artois.
"Today, just now in the sea, I have seen a girlMadonna! Emilio, she had a little nose that was
perfectperfect. How she was simpatica! What a beautiful girl!"
His whole face assumed a melting expression, and he pursed his lips in the form of a kiss.
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"She was in the sea, too?" asked Artois.
"No. If she had been! But I was with papa. It was just after we had been serenading you. She had heard us, I
am sure, for she was laughing. I dived under the boat in which she was. I did all my tricks for her. I did the
mermaid and the seal. She was delighted. She never took her eyes from me. As to papashe never glanced
at him. Poor papa! He was angry. She had her mother with her, I thinka Signora, tall, flat, ugly, but she
was simpatica, too. She had nice eyes, and when I did the seal she could not help laughing, though I think she
was rather sad."
"What sort of boat were they in?" Artois asked, with sudden interest.
"A white boat with a green line."
"And they were coming from the direction of Posilipo?"
"Ma si! Emilio, do you know them? Do you know the perfect little nose?"
The Marchesino laid one hand eagerly on the arm of his friend.
"I believe you do! I am sure of it! The mothershe is flat as a Carabiniere, and quite old, but with nice eyes,
sympathetic, intelligent. And the girl is a little brownfrom the sunwith eyes full of fun and fire, dark
eyes. She may be Italian, and yetthere is something English, too. But she is not blonde, she is not cold.
And when she laughs! Her teeth are not like the keys of a piano from Bordicelli's. And she is full of passion,
of flame, of sentiment, as I am. And she is young, perhaps sixteen. Do you know her? Present me, Emilio! I
have presented you to all my friends."
"Mio caro, you have made me your debtor for life."
"It isn't true!"
"Indeed it is true. But I do not know who these ladies are. They may be Italians. They may be tourists.
Perhaps tomorrow they will have left Naples. Or they may come from Sorrento, Capri. How can I tell who
they are?"
The Marchesino suddenly changed. His ardor vanished. His gesticulating hands fell to his sides. His
expressive face grew melancholy.
"Of course. How can you tell? Directly I was out of the sea and dressed, I went to Santa Lucia. I examined
every boat, but the white boat with the green line was not there, Basta!"
He lit a fresh cigarette and was silent for a moment. Then he said:
"Emilio caro, will you come out with me tonight?"
"With pleasure."
"In the boat. There will be a moon. We will dine at the Antico Giuseppone."
"So far off as that?" Artois said, rather abruptly.
"Why not? Today I hate the town. I want tranquility. At the Antico Giuseppone there will be scarcely any
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one. It is early in the season. And afterwards we will fish for sarde, or saraglie. Take me away from Naples,
Emilio; take me away! For tonight, if I staywell, I feel that I shall not be santo."
Artois burst into his big roaring laugh.
"And why do you want to be santo tonight?" he asked.
"The beautiful girl! I wish to keep her memory, if only for one night."
"Very well, then. We will fish, and you shall be a saint."
"Caro Emilio! Perhaps Viviano will come, too. But I think he will be with Lidia. She is singing tonight at
the Teatro Nuovo. Be ready at halfpast seven. I will call for you. And now I shall leave you."
He got up, went over to a mirror, carefully arranged his tie, and put on his straw hat at exactly the most
impudent angle.
"I shall leave you to write your book while I meet papa at the villa. Do you know why papa is so careful to be
always at the villa at four o'clock just now?"
"No!"
"Nor does mamma! If she did! Povera mamma! But she can always go to Mass. A rivederci, Emilio."
He moved his hat a little more to one side and went out, swinging his walkingstick gently to and fro in a
manner that was pensive and almost sentimental.
CHAPTER VI
The Marchesino Panacci was generally very sincere with his friends, and the boyish expression in his eyes
was not altogether deceptive, for despite his wide knowledge of certain aspects of life, not wholly admirable,
there was really something of the simplicity of a childof a child that could be very naughtyin his
disposition. But if he could be naïve he could also be mischievous and even subtle, and he was very swift in
grasping a situation, very sharp in reading character, very cunning in the pursuit of his pleasure, very adroit in
deception, if he thought that publicity of pursuit would be likely to lead to the frustration of his purpose.
He had seen at once that Artois either knew, or suspected, who were the occupants of the white boat with the
green line, and he had also seen that, influenced perhaps by one of those second thoughts which lead men into
caution, Artois desired to conceal his knowledge, or suspicion. Instantly the Marchesino had, therefore,
dropped the subject, and as instantly he had devised a little plan to clear the matter up.
The Marchesino knew that when Artois had arrived in Naples he had had no friends in the town or
neighborhood. But he also knew that recently an Englishwoman, an old friend of the novelist, had come upon
the scene, that she was living somewhere not far off, and that Artois had been to visit her once or twice by
sea. Artois had spoken of her very casually, and the Marchesino's interest in her had not been awakened. He
was not an inquisitive man by nature, and was always very busy with his own pursuit of pleasure. But he
remembered now that once he had seen his friend being rowed in the direction of Posilipo, and that in the
evening of the same day Artois had mentioned having been to visit his English friend. This fact had
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suggested to the Marchesino that if his suspicion were correct, and the ladies in the white boat with the green
line were this English friend and a daughter, they probably lived in some villa as easily reached by sea as by
land. Such villas are more numerous towards the point of the Capo di Posilipo than nearer Naples, as the high
road, after the Mergellina, mounts the hill and diverges farther and farther from the sea. The Antico
Giuseppone is a small waterside ristorante at the point of the Capo di Posilipo, a little below the Villa
Rosebery.
The Marchesino's suggestion of a dinner there that evening had been prompted by the desire to draw his
friend into the neighborhood of his charmer of the sea. Once there he might either find some pretext for
making her acquaintance through Artoisif Artois did know heror, if that were impossible, he might at
least find out where she lived. By the manner of Artois when the Antico Giuseppone was mentioned, he knew
at once that he was playing his cards well. The occupants of the white boat were known to the novelist. They
did live somewhere near the Antico Giuseppone. And certainly Artois had no desire to bring about histhe
Marchesino'sacquaintance with them.
That this was so, neither surprised nor seriously vexed the Marchesino. He knew a good deal of his friend's
character, knew that Artois, despite his geniality and friendliness, was often reserved even with him.
During their short intimacy he had certainly told Artois a great deal more about his affairs with women than
had been told to him in return. This fact was borne in upon him now. But he did not feel angry. A careless
goodnature was an essential part of his character. He did not feel angry at his friend's secrecy, but he did
feel mischievous. His lively desire to know the girl with "the perfect little nose" was backed up now by
another desireto teach "Caro Emilio" that it was better to meet complete frankness with complete
frankness.
He had strolled out of his friend's room pensively, acting the melancholy youth who had lost all hope of
succeeding in his desire; but directly the door was shut his manner changed. Disregarding the lift, he ran
lightly down the stairs, made his way swiftly by the revolving door into the street, crossed it, and walked
towards the harbor of Santa Lucia, where quantities of pleasureboats lie waiting for hire, and the boatmen
are gathered in knots smoking and gossiping, or are strolling singly up and down near the water's edge,
keeping a sharp lookout for possible customers.
As the Marchesino turned on the bridge that leads towards Castel dell' Ovo one of these boatmen met him
and saluted him.
"Goodday, Giuseppe," said the Marchesino, addressing him familiarly with a broad Neapolitan accent.
"Goodday, Signorino Marchesino," replied the man. "Do you want a boat? I will take you for"
The Marchesino drew out his cigarette case.
"I don't want a boat. But perhaps you can tell me something."
"What is it, Signorino Marchesino?" said the man, looking eagerly at the cigarette case which was now open,
and which displayed two tempting rows of fat Egyptian cigarettes reposing side by side.
"Do you know a boatwhite with a green linewhich sometimes comes into the harbor from the direction
of Posilipo? It was here this afternoon, or it passed here. I don't know whether it went on to the Arsenal."
"White with a green line?" said the man. "That might bewho was there in it, Signorino Marchesino?"
"Two ladies, one old and one very young. The young lady"
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"Those must be the ladies from the island," interrupted the man. "The English ladies who come in the
summer to the Casa del Mare as they call it, on the island close to the Grotto of Virgilio by San Francesco's
Pool. They were here this afternoon, but they're gone back. Their boat is white with a green line, Signorino
Marchesino."
"Grazie, Giuseppe," said the Marchesino, with an immovable countenance. "Do you smoke cigarettes?'
"Signorino Marchesino, I do when I have any soldi to buy them with."
"Take these."
The Marchesino emptied one side of his cigarette case into the boatman's hand, called a hired carriage, and
drove off towards the Villathe horse going at a frantic trot, while the coachman, holding a rein in each
hand, ejaculated, "Aah!" every ten seconds, in a voice that was fiercely hortatory.
Artois, from his window, saw the carriage rattle past, and saw his friend leaning back in it, with alert eyes, to
scan every woman passing by. He stood on the balcony for a moment till the noise of the wheels on the stone
pavement died away. When he returned to his writingtable the mood for work was gone. He sat down in his
chair. He took up his pen. But he found himself thinking of two people, the extraordinary difference between
whom was the cause of his now linking them together in his mind. He found himself thinking of the
Marchesino and of Vere.
Not for a moment did he doubt the identity of the two women in the white boat. They were Hermione and
Vere. The Marchesino had read him rightly, but Artois was not aware of it. His friend had deceived him, as
almost any sharpwitted Neapolitan can deceive even a clever forestiere. Certainly he did not particularly
wish to introduce his friend to Vere. Yet now he was thinking of the two in connection, and not without
amusement. What would they be like together? How would Vere's divine innocence receive the amiable
seductions of the Marchesino? Artois, in fancy, could see his friend Doro for once completely disarmed by a
child. Vere's innocence did not spring from folly, but was backed up by excellent brains. It was that fact
which made it so beautiful. The innocence and the brains together might well read Doro a pretty little lesson.
And Vere after the lessonwould she be changed? Would she lose by giving, even if the gift were a lesson?
Artois had certainly felt that his instinct told him not to do what Doro wanted. He had been moved, he
supposed now, by a protective sentiment. Vere was delicious as she was. And Dorohe was delightful as he
was. The girl was enchanting in her ignorance. The youthto Artois the Marchesino seemed almost a boy,
indeed, often quite a boy was admirable in his precocity. He embodied Naples, its gay furberia, and yet
that was hardly the wordperhaps rather one should say its sunny naughtiness, its reckless devotion to life
purged of thought. And Verewhat did she embody? Not Sicily, though she was in some ways so Sicilian.
Not England; certainly not that!
Suddenly Artois was conscious that he knew Doro much better than he knew Vere. He remembered the
statement of an Austrian psychologist, that men are far more mysterious than women, and shook his head
over it now. He felt strongly the mystery that lay hidden deep down in the innocence of Vere, in the
innocence of every girlchild of Vere's age who had brains, temperament and perfect purity. What a
marvellous combination they made! He imagined the clear flame of them burning in the night of the world of
men. Vere must be happy.
When he said this to himself he knew that, perhaps for the first time, he was despairing of something that he
ardently desired. He was transferring a wish, that was something like a prayer in the heart of one who had
seldom prayed. He was giving up hope for Hermione and fastening hope on Vere. For a moment that seemed
like treachery, like an abandoning of Hermione. Since their interview on the sea Artois had felt that, for
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Hermione, all possibility of real happiness was over. She could not detach her love. It had been fastened
irrevocably on Maurice. It was now fastened irrevocably on Maurice's memory. Long ago, had she, while he
was alive, found out what he had done, her passion for him might have died, and in the course of years she
might have been able to love again. But now it was surely too late. She had lived with her memory too long.
It was her blessingto remember, to recall, how love had blessed her life for a time. And if that memory
were desecrated now she would be as one wrecked in the storm of life. Yet with that memory how she
suffered!
What could he do for her? His chivalry must exercise itself. He must remain in the lists, if only to fight for
Hermione in Vere. And the Marchesino? Artois seemed to divine that he might be an enemy in certain
circumstances.
A warmth of sentiment, not very common in Artois, generated within him by such thoughts as these, thoughts
that detained him from work, still glowed in his heart when evening fell and the Marchesino came gayly in to
take him out upon the sea.
"There's a little wind, Emilio," he said, as they got into the boat in the harbor of Santa Lucia; "we can sail to
the Antico Giuseppone. And after dinner we'll fish for sarde. Isn't it warm? One could sleep out on such a
night."
They had two men with them. When they got beyond the breakwater the sail was set, the Marchesino took the
helm, and the boat slipped through the smooth sea, rounded the rocks on which the old fort stands to stare at
Capri, radiant now as a magic isle in the curiously ethereal light of evening, and headed for the distant point
of land which hid Ischia from their eyes. The freedom of the Bay of Naples was granted themthe freedom
of the sea. As they ran out into the open water, and Artois saw the round gray eyes of the Marchesino dancing
to the merry music of a complete bodily pleasure, he felt like a man escaping. He looked back at the city
almost as at a sad life over, and despite his deep and persistent interest in men he understood the joy of the
hermit who casts them from him and escapes into the wilds. The radiance of the Bay, one of the most radiant
of all the inlets of the sea, bold and glaring in the brilliant daytime, becomes exquisitely delicate towards
night. Vesuvius, its fiery watcher, looks like a kindly guardian, until perhaps the darkness shows the flame
upon its flanks, the flame bursting forth from the mouth it opens to the sky; and the coastline by Sorrento,
the lifted crest of Capri, even the hill of Posilipo, appear romantic and enticing, calling lands holding
wonderful pleasures for men, joys in their rocks and trees, joys in their dim recesses, joys and soft realities
fulfilling every dream upon their coasts washed by the whispering waves.
The eyes of the Marchesino were dancing with physical pleasure. Artois wondered how much he felt the
beauty of the evening, and how. His friend evidently saw the question in his eyes, for he said:
"The man who knows not Naples knows not pleasure."
"Is that a Neapolitan saying?" asked Artois.
"Yes, and it is true. There is no town like Naples for pleasure. Even your Paris, Emilio, with all its theatres,
its cocottes, its restaurantsno, it is not Naples. No wonder the forestiere come here. In Naples they are free.
They can do what they will. They know we shall not mind. We are never shocked."
"And do you think we are easily shocked in Paris?"
"No, but it is not the same. You have not Vesuvius there. You have not the sea, you have not the sun."
Artois began laughingly to protest against the last statement, but the Marchesino would not have it.
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"No, no, it shinesI know that,but it is not the sun we have here."
He spoke to the seamen in the Neapolitan dialect. They were brown, muscular fellows. In their eyes were the
extraordinary boldness and directness of the sea. Neither of them looked gay. Many of the Neapolitans who
are much upon the sea have serious, even grave faces. These were intensely, almost overpoweringly male.
They seemed to partake of the essence of the elements of nature, as if blood of the sea ran in their veins, as if
they were hot with the grim and inner fires of the sun. When they spoke their faces showed a certain
changefulness that denoted intelligence, but never lost the look of force, of an almost tense masculinity ready
to battle, perpetually alive to hold its own.
The Marchesino was also very masculine, but in a different way and more consciously than they were. He
was not cultured, but such civilization as he had endowed him with a power to catch the moods of others not
possessed by these men, in whom persistence was more visible than adroitness, unless indeed any question of
money was to the fore.
"We shall get to the Giuseppone by eight, Emilio," the Marchesino said, dropping his conversation with the
men, which had been about the best hour and place for their fishing. "Are you hungry?"
"I shall be," said Artois. "This wind brings an appetite with it. How well you steer!"
The Marchesino nodded carelessly.
As the boat drew ever nearer to the point, running swiftly before the light breeze, its occupants were silent.
Artois was watching the evening, with the eyes of a lover of nature, but also with the eyes of one who takes
notes. The Marchesino seemed to be intent on his occupation of pilot. As to the two sailors, they sat in the
accustomed calm and staring silence of seafaring men, with wide eyes looking out over the element that
ministered to their wants. They saw it differently, perhaps, from Artois, to whom it gave now an intense
aesthetic pleasure, differently from the Marchesino, to whom it was just a path to possible excitement,
possible gratification of a new and dancing desire. They connected it with strange superstitions, with gifts,
with deprivations, with death. Familiar and mysterious it was purely to them as to all seamen, like a woman
possessed whose soul is far away.
Just as the clocks of Posilipo were striking eight the Marchesino steered the boat into the quay of the Antico
Guiseppone.
Although it was early in the season a few deal tables were set out by the waterside, and a swarthy waiter, with
huge mustaches and a napkin over his arm, came delicately over the stones to ask their wishes.
"Will you let me order dinner, Emilio?" said the Marchesino: "I know what they do best here."
Artois agreed, and while the waiter shuffled to carry out the Marchesino's directions the two friends strolled
near the edge of the sea.
The breeze had been kindly. Having served them well it was now dying down to its repose, leaving the
evening that was near to night profoundly calm. As Artois walked along the quay he felt the approach of calm
like the approach of a potentate, serene in the vast consciousness of power. Peace was invading the sea,
irresistible peace. The night was at hand. Already Naples uncoiled its chain of lamps along the Bay. In the
gardens of Posilipo the lights of the houses gleamed. Opposite, but very far off across the sea, shone the tiny
flames of the houses of Portici, of Torre del Greco, of Torre Annunziata, of Castellamare. Against the
gathering darkness Vesuvius belched slowly soft clouds of rosecolored vapor, which went up like a menace
into the dim vault of the sky. The sea was without waves. The boats by the wharf, where the road ascends
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past the villa Rosebery to the village of Posilipo, scarcely moved. Near them, in a group, lounging against the
wall and talking rapidly, stood the two sailors from Naples with the boatmen of the Guiseppone. Oil lamps
glimmered upon two or three of the deal tables, round one of which was gathered a party consisting of seven
large women, three children, and two very thin middleaged men with bright eyes, all of whom were eating
oysters. Farther on, from a small arbor that gave access to a fisherman's house, which seemed to be
constructed partially in a cave of the rock, and which was gained by a steep and crumbling stairway of stone,
a mother called shrilly to some halfnaked little boys who were fishing with tiny handnets in the sea. By the
table which was destined to the Marchesino and Artois three ambulant musicians were hovering, holding in
their broad and dirty hands two shabby mandolins and a guitar. In the distance a cook with a white cap on his
head and bare arms was visible, as he moved to and fro in the lighted kitchen of the old ristorante, preparing a
"zuppa di pesce" for the gentlemen from Naples.
"Che bella notte!" said the Marchesino, suddenly.
His voice sounded sentimental. He twisted his mustaches and added:
"Emilio, we ought to have brought two beautiful women with us tonight. What are the moon and the sea to
men without beautiful women?"
"And the fishing?" said Artois.
"To the devil with the fishing," replied the young man. "Ecco! Our dinner is ready, with thanks to the
Madonna!"
They sat down, one on each side of the small table, with a smoking lamp between them.
"I have ordered vino bianco," said the Marchesino, who still looked sentimental. "Cameriere, take away the
lamp. Put it on the next table. Va bene. We are going to have 'zuppa di pesce,' gamberi and veal cutlets. The
wine is Capri. Now then," he added, with sudden violence and the coarsest imaginable Neapolitan accent, "if
you fellows play 'Santa Lucia,' 'Napoli Bella,' or 'Sole mio' you'll have my knife in you. I am not an Inglese. I
am a Neapolitan. Remember that!"
He proved it with a string of gutter words and oaths, at which the musicians smiled with pleasure. Then,
turning again to Artois, he continued:
"If one doesn't tell them they think one is an imbecile. Emilio caro, do you not love to see the moon with a
beautiful girl?"
His curious assumption that Artois and he were contemporaries because they were friends, and his apparently
absolute blindness to the fact that a man of sixty and a man of twentyfour are hardly likely to regard the
other sex with an exactly similar enthusiasm, always secretly entertained the novelist, who made it his
business with this friend to be accommodating, and who seldom, if ever, showed himself authoritative, or
revealed any part of his real inner self.
"Ma si!" he replied; "the night and the moon are made for love."
"Everything is made for love," returned the Marchesino. "Take plenty of soaked bread, Emilio. They know
how to make this zuppa here. Everything is made for love.Look! There is a boat coming with women in
it!"
At a short distance from the shore a rowing boat was visible; and from it now came shrill sounds of very
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common voices, followed by shouts of male laughter.
"Perhaps they are beautiful," said the Marchesino, at once on the alert.
The boat drew in to the quay, and from it there sprang, with much noise and many gesticulations, two
overdressed womenprobably, indeed almost certainly, canzonettisteand the two large young men,
whose brown fingers and whose chests gleamed with false diamonds. As they passed the table where the two
friends were sitting, the Marchesino raked the women with his bold gray eyes. One of them was large and
artificially blonde, with a spreading bust, immense hips, a small waist, and a quantity of pale dyed hair, on
which was perched a bright blue hat. The other was fiercely dark, with masses of coarse black hair, big,
blatant eyes that looked quite black in the dim lamplight, and a figure that suggested a selfconscious snake.
Both were young. They returned the Marchesino's stare with vigorous impudence as they swung by.
"What sympathetic creatures!" he murmured. "They are two angels. I believe I have seen one of them at the
Margherita. What was her name Maria Leoni, I fancy."
He looked enviously at the young men. The arrival of the lobster distracted his attention for the moment; but
it was obvious that the appearance of these women had increased the feeling of sentimentality already
generated in him by the softness and stillness of the night.
The three musicians, rendered greedy rather than inspired by the presence of more clients, now began to
pluck a lively street tune from their instruments; and the waiter, whose mustaches seemed if possible bigger
now that night was truly come, poured the white wine into the glasses with the air of one making a libation.
As the Marchesino ate, he frequently looked towards the party at the neighboring table. He was evidently
filled with envy of the two men whose jewels glittered as they gesticulated with their big brown hands. But
presently their pleasure and success recalled to him something which he had momentarily forgotten, the
reason why he had planned this expedition. He was in pursuit. The recollection cheered him up, restored to
him the strength of his manhood, put him right with himself. The envy and the almost sickly sentimentality
vanished from him, and he broke into the usual gay conversation which seldom failed him, either by day or
night.
It was past nine before they had finished their coffee. The two boatmen had been regaled and had drunk a
bottle of wine, and the moon was rising and making the oil lamps of the Guiseppone look pitiful. From the
table where the canzonettiste were established came peals of laughter, which obviously upset the seven large
and respectable women who had been eating oysters, and who now sat staring heavily at the gay revellers,
while the two thin middleaged men with bright eyes began to look furtively cheerful, and even rather
younger than they were. The musicians passed round a small leaden tray for soldi, and the waiter brought the
Marchesino the bill, and looked inquiringly at Artois, aware that he at least was not a Neapolitan. Artois gave
him something and satisfied the musicians, while the Marchesino disputed the bill, not because he minded
paying, but merely to prove that he was a Neapolitan and not an imbecile. The matter was settled at last, and
they went towards the boat; the Marchesino casting many backward glances towards the two angels, who,
with their lovers, were becoming riotous in their gayety as the moon came up.
"Are we going out into the Bay?" said Artois, as they stepped into the boat, and were pushed off.
"Where is the best fishingground?" asked the Marchesino of the elder of the two men.
"Towards the islet, Signorino Marchesino," he replied at once, looking his interlocutor full in the face with
steady eyes, but remaining perfectly grave.
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Artois glanced at the man sharply. For the first time it occurred to him that possibly his friend had arranged
this expedition with a purpose other than that which he had put forward. It was not the fisherman's voice
which had made Artois wonder, but the voice of the Marchesino.
"There are generally plenty of sarde round the islet," continued the fisherman, "but if the Signori would not
be too tired it would be best to stay out the night. We shall get many more fish towards morning, and we can
run the boat into the Pool of San Francesco, and have some sleep there, if the Signori like. We others
generally take a nap there, and go to work further on in the night. But of course it is as the Signori prefer."
"They want to keep us out all night to get more pay," said the Marchesino to Artois, in bad French.
He had divined the suspicion that had suddenly risen up in his friend, and was resolved to lay it to rest,
without, however, abandoning his purpose, which had become much more ardent with the coming of the
night. The voices of the laughing women were ringing in his ears. He felt adventurous. The youth in him was
rioting, and he was longing to be gay, as the men with those women were being gay.
"What do you think, Emilio caro?" he asked.
Then before Artois could reply, he said:
"After all, what do a few soldi matter? Who could sleep in a room on such a night? It might be August, when
one bathes at midnight, and sings canzoni till dawn. Let us do as he says. Let us rest in the what is the
pool?" he asked of the fishermen, pretending not to know the name.
"The pool of San Francesco, Signorino Marchesino."
"Pool of San Francesco. I remember now. That is the place where all the fishermen along the coast towards
Nisida go to sleep. I have slept there many times when I was a boy, and so has Viviano. Tonight shall we do
as the fishermen, Emilio?"
There was no pressure in his careless voice. His eyes for the moment looked so simple, though as eager as a
child's.
"Anything you like, mon ami," said Artois.
He did not want to go to San Francesco's Pool with the Marchesino, but he did not wish to seem reluctant to
go. And he said to himself now that his interior hesitation was absurd. Night had fallen. By the time they
reached the Pool the inmates of the Case del Mare would probably be asleep. Even if they were not, what did
it matter? The boat would lie among the vessels of the fishermen. The Marchesino and he would share the
fishermen's repose. And even if Hermione and Vere should chance to be out of doors they would not see him,
or, if they did, would not recognize him in the night.
His slight uneasiness, prompted by a vague idea that the Marchesino was secretly mischievous, had possibly
some plan in his mind connected with the islet, was surely without foundation.
He told himself so as the fisherman laid hold of their oars and set the boat's prow towards the point of land
which conceals the small harbor of the Villa Rosebery.
The shrill voices of the two singers died away from their ears, but lingered in the memory of the Marchesino,
as the silence of the sea took the boat to itself, the sea silence and the magic of the moon.
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He turned his face towards the silver, beyond which, hidden as yet, was the islet where dwelt the child he
meant to know.
CHAPTER VII
Although Hermione had told Artois that she could not find complete rest and happiness in her child, that she
could not live again in Vere fully and intensely as she had lived once, as she still had it in her surely to live,
she and Vere were in a singularly close relationship. They had never yet been separated for more than a few
days. Vere had not been to school, and much of her education had been undertaken by her mother. In
Florence she had been to classes and lectures. She had had lessons in languages, French, German, and Italian,
in music and drawing. But Hermione had been her only permanent teacher, and until her sixteenth birthday
she had never been enthusiastic about anything without carrying her enthusiasm to her mother, for sympathy,
explanation, or encouragement.
Sorrow had not quenched the elan of Hermione's nature. What she had told Artois had been trueshe was
not a finished woman, nor would she ever be, so long as she was alive and conscious. Her hunger for love,
her passionate remembrance of the past, her incapacity to sink herself in any one since her husband's death,
her persistent, though concealed, worship of his memory, all these things proved her vitality. Artois was right
when he said that she was a force. There was something in her that was redhot, although she was now a
middle aged woman. She needed much more than most people, because she had much more than most
people have to give.
Her failure to express herself in an art had been a tragedy. From this tragedy she turned, not with bitterness,
but perhaps with an almost fiercer energy, to Vere. Her intellect, released from fruitless toil, was running
loose demanding some employment. She sought that employment in developing the powers of her child. Vere
was not specially studious. Such an outofdoor temperament as hers could never belong to a bookworm or a
recluse. But she was naturally clever, as her father had not been, and she was enthusiastic not only in pleasure
but in work. Long ago Hermione, trying with loving anxiety to educate her boyish husband, to make him
understand certain subtleties of her own, had found herself frustrated. When she made such attempts with
Vere she was met half way. The girl understood with swiftness even those things with which she was not
specially in sympathy. Her father's mind had slipped away, ever so gracefully, from all which it did not love.
Vere's could grasp even an unloved subject. There was mental grit in herArtois knew it. In all her work
until her sixteenth year Vere had consulted her mother. Nothing of her child till then was ever hidden from
Hermione, except those things which the human being cannot reveal, and sometimes scarcely knows of. The
child drew very much from her mother, responded to her enthusiasm, yet preserved instinctively, and quite
without selfconsciousness, her own individuality.
Artois had noticed this, and this had led him to say that Vere also was a force.
But when she was sixteen Vere woke up to something. Until now no one but herself knew to what.
Sometimes she shut herself up alone in her room for long periods. When she came out she looked lazy, her
mother thought, and she liked to go then to some nook of the rocks and sit alone, or to push a boat out into
the centre of the Saint's Pool, and lie in it with her hands clasped behind her head looking up at the passing
clouds or at the radiance of the blue.
Hermione knew how fond Vere was of reading, and supposed that this love was increasing as the child grew
older. She sometimes felt a little lonely, but she was unselfish. Vere's freedom was quite innocent. She, the
mother, would not seek to interfere with it. Soon after dinner on the evening of the Marchesino's expedition
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with Artois, Vere had got up from the sofa, on which she had been sitting with a book of Rossetti's poems in
her hand, had gone over to one of the windows, and had stood for two or three minutes looking out over the
sea. Then she had turned round, come up to her mother and kissed her tenderlymore tenderly, Hermione
thought, even than usual.
"Goodnight, Madre mia," she had said.
And then, without another word, she had gone swiftly out of the room.
After Vere had gone the room seemed very silent. In the evening, if they stayed in the house, they usually sat
in Hermione's room up stairs. They had been sitting there tonight. The shutters were not closed. The
window that faced the sea towards Capri was open. A little moonlight began to mingle subtly with the light
from the two lamps, to make it whiter, cleaner, suggestive of outdoor things and large spaces. Hermione had
been reading when Vere was reading. She did not read now Vere was gone. Laying down her book she sat
listening to the silence, realizing the world without. Almost at her feet was the sea, before her a
widestretching expanse, behind her, confronted by the desolate rocks, the hollow and mysterious caverns. In
the night, the Saint, unwearied, watched his Pool. Not very far off, yet delightfully remote, lay Naples with its
furious activities, its gayeties, its intensities of sin, of misery, of pleasure. In the Galleria, tourists from the
hotels and from the ships were wandering rather vaguely, watched and followed by newspaper sellers, by
touts, by greedy, pale faced boys, and old, wornout men, all hungry for money and indifferent how it was
gained. Along the Marina, with its huge serpent of lights, the street singers and players were making their
nightly pilgrimage, pausing, wherever they saw a lighted window or a dark figure on a balcony, to play and
sing the tunes of which they were weary long ago. On the wall, high above the sea, were dotted the dilettante
fishermen with their long rods and lines. And below, before each stone staircase that descended to the water,
was a waiting boat, and in the moonlight rose up the loud cry of "Barca! Barca!" to attract the attention of any
casual passerby.
And here, on this more truly sealike sea, distant from the great crowd and from the thronging houses, the
real fishermen who live by the sea were alert and at work, or were plunged in the quiet sleep that is a
preparation for long hours of nocturnal wakefulness.
Hermione thought of it all, was aware of it, felt it, as she sat there opposite to the open window. Then she
looked over to her writing table, on which stood a large photograph of her dead husband, then to the sofa
where Vere had been. She saw the volume of Rossetti lying beside the cushion that still showed a shallow
dent where the child's head had been resting.
And then she shut her eyes, and asked her imagination to take her away for a moment, over the sea to
Messina, and along the curving shore, and up by winding paths to a mountain, and into a little room in a tiny,
whitewashed house, not the house of the sea, but of the priest. It still stood there, and the terrace was still
before it. And the olivetrees rustled, perhaps, just now in the wind beneath the stars.
Yes, she was there. Lucrezia and Gaspare were in bed. But she and Maurice were sitting in the straw chairs
on each side of the table, facing the open French window and the flight of shallow steps that led down to the
terrace.
Faintly she heard the whisper of the sea about the islet, but she would not let it hinder her imagination: she
translated it by means of her imagination into the whisper of the wind low down there, in the ravine among
the trees. And that act made her think of the ravine, seemed presently to set her in the ravine. She was there in
the night with Gaspare. They were hurrying down towards the sea. He was behind her, and she could hear his
footstepslonging to go faster. But she was breathless, her heart was beating, there was terror in her soul.
What was that? A rattle of stones in the darkness, and then an old voice muttering "Benedicite!"
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She opened her eyes and moved suddenly, like one intolerably stirred. What a foe the imagination can
bewhat a foe! She got up and went to the window. She must drive away that memory of the ravine, of all
that followed after. Often she lingered with it, but tonight, somehow, she could not, she dared not. She was
less brave than usual tonight.
She leaned out of the window.
"Am I a fool?"
That was what she was saying to herself. And she was comparing herself now with other people, other
women. Did she know one who could not uproot an old memory, who could suffer, and desire, and internally
weep, after more than sixteen years?
"I suppose it is preposterous."
She deliberately chose that ugly word to describe her own condition of soul. But instantly it seemed to her as
if far down in that soul something rose up and answered:
"No, it is not. It is beautiful. It is divine. It is moreit is due. He gave you the greatest gift. He gave you
what the whole world is always seeking; even in blindness, even in ignorance, even in terrible vice. He gave
you love. How should you forget him?"
Far away on the sea that was faintly silvered by the moon there was a black speck. It was, or seemed from the
distance to be, motionless. Hermione's eyes were attracted to it, and again her imagination carried her to
Sicily. She stood on the shore by the inlet, she saw the boat coming in from the open sea. Then it stopped
midwaylike that boat.
She heard Gaspare furiously weeping.
But the boat moved, and the sound that was in her imagination died away, and she said to herself, "All that
was long ago."
The boat out there was no doubt occupied by Neapolitan fishermen, and she was here on the islet in the Sea
of Naples, and Sicily was far away across the moonlit waters. As to Gaspareshe was sure he was not
weeping, faithful though he was to the memory of the dead Padrone.
And Vere? Hermione wondered what Vere was doing. She felt sure, though she did not know why, that Vere
had not gone to bed. She realized tonight that her child was growing up rapidly, was passing from the stage
of childhood to the stage of girlhood, was on the threshold of all the mysterious experiences that life holds for
those who have ardent temperaments and eager interests, and passionate desires and fearless hearts.
Tonight Hermione felt very strongly the difference between the father and the daughter. There was a gravity
in Vere, a firmness that Maurice had lacked. Full of life and warmth as she was, she was not the pure spirit of
joy that he had been in those first days in Sicily. She was not irresponsible. She was more keenly aware of
others, of just how they were feeling, of just how they were thinking, than Maurice had been.
Vere was very individual.
With that thought there came to Hermione a deeper sense of loneliness. She was conscious now in this
moment, as she had never been conscious before, of the independence of her child's character. The
knowledge of this independence seemed to come upon her suddenlyshe could not tell why; and she saw
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Vere apart from her, detached, like a column in a lonely place.
Vere must not escape from her. She must accompany her child step by step. She must not be left alone. She
had told Emile that she could not live again in Vere. And that was true. Vere was not enough. But Vere was
very much. Without Vere, what would her life be?
A wave of melancholy flowed over her tonight, a tide come from she knew not where. Making an effort to
stem it, she recalled her happiness with Maurice after that day of the Tarantella. How groundless had really
been her melancholy then! She had imagined him escaping from her, but he had remained with her, and loved
her. He had been good to her until the end, tender and faithful. If she had ever had a rival, that rival had been
Sicily. Always her imagination was her torturer.
Her failure in art had been a tragedy because of this. If she could have set her imagination free in an art she
would have been far safer than she was. Emile Artois was really lonelier than she, for he had not a child. But
his art surely saved him securely from her sense of desolation. And then he was a man, and men must need
far less than women do. Hermione felt that it was so. She thought of Emile in his most helpless moment, in
that period when he was ill in Kairouan before she came. Even then she believed that he could not have felt
quite so much alone as she did now; for men never long to be taken care of as women do. And yet she was
well, in this tranquil house which was her ownwith Vere, her child, and Gaspare, her devoted servant.
As mentally she recounted her benefits, the strength there was in her arose, protesting. She called herself
harsh names: egoist, craven, faineant. But it was no use to attack herself. In the deeps of her poor, eager,
passionate, hungry woman's nature something wept, and needed, and could not be comforted, and could not
be schooled. It complained as one feeble, but really it must be strong; for it was pitilessly persistent in its
grieving. It had a strange endurance. Life, the passing of the years, could not change it, could not still it.
Those eternal hungers of which Hermione had spoken to Artoisthey must have their meaning. Somewhere,
surely, there are the happy huntinggrounds, dreamed of by the red manthere are the Elysian Fields where
the souls that have longed and suffered will find the ultimate peace.
There came a tap at the door.
Hermione started up from the cushion against which she had pressed her head, and opened her eyes,
instinctively laying her hand on Vere's volume of Rossetti, and pretending to read it.
"Avanti!" she said.
The door opened and Gaspare appeared. Hermione felt an immediate sensation of comfort.
"Gaspare," she said, "what is it? I thought you were in bed."
"Ha bisogna Lei?" he said.
It was a most familiar phrase to Hermione. It had been often on Gaspare's lips when he was a boy in Sicily,
and she had always loved it, feeling as if it sprang from a nature pleasantly ready to do anything in her
service. But tonight it had an almost startling appropriateness, breaking in as if in direct response to her
gnawing hunger of the heart. As she looked at Gaspare, standing by the door in his darkblue clothes, with an
earnest expression on his strong, handsome face, she felt as if he must have come just then because he was
conscious that she had so much need of help and consolation. And she could not answer "no" to his simple
question.
"Come in, Gaspare," she said, "and shut the door. I'm all alone. I should like to have a little talk with you."
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He obeyed her, shut the door gently, and came up to her with the comfortable confidence of one safe in his
welcome, desired not merely as a servant but as a friend by his Padrona.
"Did you want to say anything particular, Gaspare?" Hermione asked him. "Heretake a cigarette."
She gave him one. He took it gently, twitching his nose as he did so. This was a little trick he had when he
was pleased.
"You can smoke it here, if you like."
"Grazie, Signora."
He lit it gravely and took a whiff. Then he said:
"The Signorina is outside."
"Is she?"
Hermione looked towards the window.
"It is a lovely night."
"Si, Signora."
He took another whiff, and turned his great eyes here and there, looking about the room. Hermione began to
wonder what he had to say to her. She was certain that he had come to her for some reason other than just to
ask if she had need of him.
"It does the Signorina good to get a breath of air before she goes to bed," Hermione added, after a moment of
silence. "It makes her sleep."
"Si, Signora."
He still stood calmly beside her, but now he looked at her with the odd directness which had been
characteristic of him as a boy, and which he had not lost as a man.
"The Signorina is getting quite big, Signora," he said. "Have you noticed? Per Dio! In Sicily, if the Signorina
was a Sicilian, the giovinotti would be asking to marry her."
"Ah, but, Gaspare, the Signorina is not a Sicilian," she said. "She is English, you know, and English girls do
not generally think of such things till they are much older than Sicilians."
"But, Signora," said Gaspare, with the bluntness which in him was never rudeness, but merely the sincerity
which he considered due to his Padronadue also to himself, "my Padrone was like a real Sicilian, and the
Signorina is his daughter. She must be like a Sicilian too, by force."
"Your Padrone, yes, he was a real Sicilian," Hermione said softly. "But, well, the Signorina has much more
English blood in her veins than Sicilian. She has only a little Sicilian blood."
"But the Signorina thinks she is almost a Sicilian. She wishes to be a Sicilian."
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"How do you know that, Gaspare?" she asked, smiling a little at his firmness and persistence.
"The Signorina said so the other day to the giovinotto who had the cigarettes, Signora. I talked to him, and he
told me. He said the Signorina had said to him that she was partly a Sicilian, and that he had said 'no,' that she
was English. And when he said thathe said to methe Signorina was quite angry. He could see that she
was angry by her face."
"I suppose that is the Sicilian blood, Gaspare. There is some in the Signorina's veins, of course. And then,
you know, both her father and I loved your country. I think the Signorina must often long to see Sicily."
"Does she say so?" asked Gaspare, looking rather less calm.
"She has not lately. I think she is very happy here. Don't you?"
"Si, Signora. But the Signorina is growing up now, and she is a little Sicilian anyhow, Signora."
He paused, looking steadily at his Padrona.
"What is it, Gaspare? What do you want to say to me?"
"Signora, perhaps you will say it is not my business, but in my country we do not let girls go about by
themselves after they are sixteen. We know it is better not. Ecco!"
Hermione had some difficulty in not smiling. But she knew that if she smiled he might be offended. So she
kept her countenance and said:
"What do you mean, Gaspare? The Signorina is nearly always with me."
"No, Signora. The Signorina can go wherever she likes. She can speak to any one she pleases. She is free as a
boy is free."
"Certainly she is free. I wish her to be free."
"Va bene, Signora, va bene."
A cloud came over his face, and he moved as if to go. But Hermione stopped him.
"Wait a minute, Gaspare. I want you to understand. I like your care for the Signorina. You know I trust you
and depend on you more than on almost any one. But you must remember that I am English, and in England,
you know, things in some ways are very different from what they are in Sicily. Any English girl would be
allowed the freedom of the Signorina."
"Why?"
"Why not? What harm does it do? The Signorina does not go to Naples alone."
"Per Dio!" he interrupted, in a tone almost of horror.
"Of course I should never allow that. But here on the islandwhy, what could happen to her here? Come,
Gaspare, tell me what it is you are thinking of. You haven't told me yet. I knew directly you came in that you
had something you wanted to say. What is it?"
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"I know it is not my business," he said. "And I should never speak to the Signorina, but"
"Well, Gaspare?"
"Signora, all sorts of people come here to the islandmen from Naples. We do not know them. We cannot
tell who they are. And they can all see the Signorina. And they can even talk to her."
"The fishermen, you mean?"
"Any one who comes in a boat."
"Well, but scarcely any one ever comes but the fishermen. You know that."
"Oh, it was all very well when the Signorina was a little girl, a child, Signora," he said, almost hotly. "But
now it is different. It is quite different."
Suddenly Hermione understood. She remembered what Vere had said about Gaspare being jealous. He must
certainly be thinking of the boydiver, of Ruffo.
"You think the Signorina oughtn't to talk to the fishermen?" she said.
"What do we know of the fishermen of Naples, Signora? We are not Neapolitans. We are strangers here. We
do not know their habits. We do not know what they think. They are different from us. If we were in Sicily! I
am a Sicilian. I can tell. But when men come from Naples saying they are Sicilians, how can I tell whether
they are ruffiani or not?"
Gaspare's inner thought stood revealed.
"I see, Gaspare," Hermione said, quietly. "You think I should not have let the Signorina talk to that boy the
other day. But I saw him myself, and I gave the Signorina leave to take him some cigarettes. And he dived for
her. She told me all about it. She always tells me everything."
"I do not doubt the Signorina," said Gaspare. "But I thought it was my duty to tell you what I thought,
Signora. Why should people come here saying they are of my country, saying they are Sicilians, and talking
as the Neapolitans talk?"
"Well, but at the time, you didn't doubt that boy was what he said he was, did you?"
"Signora, I did not know. I could not know. But since then I have been thinking."
"Well, Gaspare, you are quite right to tell me. I prefer that. I have much faith in you, and always shall have.
But we must not say anything like this to the Signorina. She would not understand what we meant."
"No, Signora. The Signorina is too good."
"She would not understand, and I think she would be hurt"Hermione used the word "offesa,""as you
would be if you fancied I thought something strange about you."
"Si, Signora."
"Goodnight, Gaspare."
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"Goodnight, Signora. Buon riposo."
He moved towards the door. When he reached it he stopped and added:
"I am going to bed, Signora."
"Go. Sleep well."
"Grazie, Signora. The Signorina is still outside, I am sure."
"She goes out for a minute nearly every evening, Gaspare. She likes the air and to look at the sea."
"Si, Signora; in a minute I shall go to bed. Buon riposo."
And he went out.
When he had gone Hermione remained at first where she was. But Gaspare had effectually changed her
mood, had driven away what she chose to call her egoism, had concentrated all her thoughts on Vere. He had
never before spoken like this about the child. It was a sudden waking up on his part to the fact that Vere was
growing up to womanhood.
When he chose, Gaspare could always, or nearly always, make his Padrona catch his mood, there was
something so definite about him that he made an impression. And, though he was easily inclined to be
suspicious of those whom he did not know well, Hermione knew him to be both intelligent and shrewd,
especially about those for whom he had affection. She wondered now whether it were possible that Gaspare
saw, understood, or even divined intuitively, more clearly than she did she, a mother!
It was surely very unlikely.
She remembered that Gaspare had a jealous nature, like most of his countrymen.
Nevertheless he had suddenly made the islet seem different to her. She had thought of it as remote, as
pleasantly far away from Naples, isolated in the quiet sea. But it was very easy to reach from Naples, and, as
Gaspare had said, what did they know, or understand, of the Neapolitans, they who were strangers in the
land?
She wondered whether Vere was still outside. Tonight she certainly envisaged Vere newly. Never till
tonight had she thought of her as anything but a child; as characteristic, as ardent, as determined sometimes,
perhaps as forceful even, but always with a child's mind behind it all.
But to the people of the South Vere was already a womaneven to Gaspare, who had held her in his arms
when she was in long clothes. At least Hermione supposed so now, after what Gaspare had said about the
giovinotti, who, in Sicily, would have been wishing to marry Vere, had she been Sicilian. And perhaps even
the mind of Vere was more grownup than her mother had been ready to suppose.
The mother was conscious of a slight but distinct uneasiness. It was vague. Had she been asked to explain it
she could not, perhaps, have done so.
Presently, after a minute or two of hesitation, she went to the window that faced north, opened it, and stood
by, listening. It was from the sea on this side that the fishermen who lived in the Mergellina, and in the town
of Naples, came to the islet. It was from this direction that Ruffo had come three days ago.
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Evidently Gaspare had been turning over the boy's acquaintance with Vere in his mind all that time,
disapproving of it, secretly condemning Hermione for having allowed it. No, not that; Hermione felt that he
was quite incapable of condemning her. But he was a watchdog who did not bark, but who was ready to bite
all those who ventured to approach his two mistresses unless he was sure of their credentials. And of this
boy's, Ruffo's, he was not sure.
Hermione recalled the boy; his brown healthiness, his laughing eyes and lips, his strong young body, his
careless happy voice. And she found herself instinctively listening by the window to hear that voice again.
Now, as she looked out, the loveliness of the night appealed to her strongly, and she felt sure that Vere must
be still outside, somewhere under the moon.
Just beneath the window was the narrow terrace, on to which she had stepped out, obedient to Vere's call,
three days ago. Perhaps Vere was there, or in the garden beyond. She extinguished the lamp. She went to her
bedroom to get a lace shawl, which she put over her head and drew round her shoulders like a mantilla. Then
she looked into Vere's room, and found it empty.
A moment later she was on the terrace bathed in the radiance of the moon.
CHAPTER VIII
Vere was outside under the stars. When she had said goodnight and had slipped away, it was with the desire
to be alone, to see no one, to speak with no one till next morning. But the desires of the young change
quickly, and Vere's presently changed.
She came out of the house, and passing over the bridge that connected together the two cliffs of which the
islet was composed, reached the limit of the islet. At the edge of the precipice was a seat, and there she sat
down. For some time she rested motionless, absorbing the beauty and the silence of the night. She was
looking towards Ischia. She wished to look that way, to forget all about Naples, the great city which lay
behind her.
Here were the ancient caves darkening with their mystery the silver wonder of the sea. Here the venerable
shore stretched towards lands she did not know. They called to the leaping desires of her heart as the city did
not call. They carried her away.
Often, from this seat, on dark and moonless nights, she had watched the fishermen's torches flaring below her
in the blackness, and had thrilled at the mystery of their occupation, and had imagined them lifting from the
sea strange and wonderful treasures, that must change the current of their lives: pearls such as had never
before been given to the breasts of women, caskets that had lain for years beneath the waters, bottles in which
were stoppered up magicians who, released, came forth in smoke, as in the Eastern story.
Once she had spoken of this last imagination to Gaspare, and had seen his face suddenly change and look
excited, vivid, and then sad. She had asked him why he looked like that, and, after a moment of hesitation, he
had told her how, long ago, before she was born, his Padrone had read to him such a tale as they lay together
upon a mountain side in Sicily. Vere had eagerly questioned him, and he, speaking with vehemence in the
heat of his recollection, had brought before her a picture of that scene in his simple life; had shown her how
he lay, and how the Padrone lay, he listening, the Padrone, book in hand, reading about the "mago africano."
He had even told Vere of their conversation afterwards, and how he had said that he would always be free,
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that he would never be "stoppered up," like the "mago africano." And when she had wondered at his memory
growing still more excited he had told her many other things of which his Padrone and he had talked together,
and had made her feel the life of the past on Monte Amato as no cultured person, she believed, could ever
have made her feel it. But when she had sought to question him about her father's death he had become silent,
and she had seen that it would be impossible to make him obey her and tell her all the details that she longed
to know.
Tonight Vere could see no fishermen at work. The silver of the sea below her was unbroken by the black
forms of gliding boats, the silence was unbroken by calling voices. And tonight she was glad that it was so;
for she was in the mood to be quite alone. As she sat there very still she seemed to herself to be drawing
nearer to the sea, and drawing the sea to her. Indeed, she was making some such imaginative attempt as her
mother was making in the houseto become, in fancy at least, one with something outside of her, to be
fused with the sea, as her mother desired to be fused with her. But Vere's endeavor was not tragic, like her
mother's, but was almost tenderly happy. She thought she felt the sea responding to her as she responded to
the sea. And she was very glad in that thought.
Presently she began to wonder about the fishermen.
How did they feel about the sea? To her the sea was romantic and personal. Was it romantic and personal to
them? They were romantic to her because of their connection with the sea, which had imprinted upon them
something of itself, showed forth in them, by means of them, something surely of its own character; but
probably, almost certainly, she supposed, they were unconscious of this. They lived by the sea. Perhaps they
thought of it as of a vast moneybag, into which they dipped their hands to get enough to live by. Or perhaps
they thought of it as an enemy, against which they lived in perpetual war, from which they wrung, as it were
at the sword's point, a poor and precarious booty.
As she sat thinking about this Vere began to change in her desire, to wish there were some fishermen out
tonight about the islet, and that she could have speech of them. She would like to find out from one of them
how they regarded the sea.
She smiled as she imagined a conversation between herself and some strong, brown, wild Neapolitan, she
questioning and he replying. How he would misunderstand her! He would probably think her mad. And yet
sometimes the men of the sea in their roughness are imaginative. They are superstitious. But a manno, she
could not question a man. Her mind went to the boy diver, Ruffo. She had often thought about Ruffo during
the last three days. She had expected to see him again. He had said nothing about returning to the islet, but
she had felt sure he would return, if only in the hope of being given some more cigarettes. Boys in his
position, she knew well, do not get a present of Khali Targa cigarettes every day of the week. How happy he
had looked when he was smoking them! She remembered exactly the expression of his brown face now, as
she sat watching the empty, moonlit sea. It was not greedy. It was voluptuous. She remembered seeing
somewhere a picture of some Sultan of the East reclining on a divan and smoking a chibouk. She thought
Ruffo had looked rather like the Sultan, serenely secure of all earthly enjoyment. At that moment the Pool of
San Francesco had stood to the boy for the Paradise of Mahomet.
But Ruffo had not come again.
Each morning Vere had listened for his voice, had looked down upon the sea for his boat, but all in vain. On
the third day she had felt almost angry with him unreasonably. But then she remembered that he was not his
own master, not the owner of the boat. Of course, he could not do what he liked. If he couldwell, then he
would have come back. She was positive of that.
If he ever did come back, she said to herself now, she would question him about the sea. She would get at his
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thoughts about the sea, at his feelings. She wondered if they could possibly be at all like hers. It was unlikely,
she supposed. They two were so very different. And yet!
She smiled to herself again, imagining question and answer with Ruffo. He would not think her mad, even if
she puzzled him. They understood each other. Even her mother had said that they seemed to be in sympathy.
And that was true. Difference of rank need not, indeed cannot, destroy the magic chain if it exists, cannot
prevent its links from being forged. She knew that her mother was in sympathy with Gaspare, and Gaspare
with her mother. So there was no reason why she should not be in sympathy with Ruffo.
If he were here tonight she would begin at once to talk to him about the sea. But of course he would never
come at night to the islet.
Vere knew that the Neapolitan fishermen usually keep each to his own special branch of the common
profession. By this time of night, no doubt, Ruffo was in his home at the Mergellina, sitting in the midst of
his family, or was strolling with lively companions of his own age, or, perhaps, was fast asleep in bed.
Vere felt that it would be horrible to go to bed on such a night, to shut herself in from the moon and the sea.
The fishermen who slept in the shelter of the Saint's Pool were enviable. They had the stars above them, the
waters about them, the gentle winds to caress them as they lay in the very midst of romance.
She wondered whether there were any boats in the Saint's Pool tonight. She had not been to see. A few steps
and she could look over. She got up and went back to the bridge, treading softly because she was thinking of
repose. There she stopped and looked down. She saw two boats on the far side of the Pool almost at the feet
of the Saint. The men in them must be lying down, for Vere could see only the boats, looking black, and
filled with a confused blacknessof sails probably, and sleeping men. The rest of the pool was empty, part
of it bright with the radiance of the moon, part of it shading away to the mysterious dimness of still water at
night under the lee of cliffs.
For some time the girl stood, watching. Just at that moment her active brain almost ceased to work, stilled by
the reverie that is born of certain night visions. Without these motionless boats the 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 soundfar offchecked 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 bigbladed 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.
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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 therea 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 herto let her know that he knew she was
there.
Perhaps he did not dare toor, 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 shadowso it seemed in the shadow of the cliffflitted out of the boat and disappeared.
He was comingto have that talk about the sea.
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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. Tonight 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."
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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 mamma!"
"I am sorry. Is she like you?"
"I don't know, Signorina; I have never thought about it. What does it matter?"
"It may not matter, but such things are interesting sometimes."
"Are they, Signorina?"
Then, evidently with a polite desire to please her and carry on the conversation in the direction indicated by
her, he added:
"And are you like your Signora Madre, Signorina?"
Vere felt inclined to smile, but she answered, quite seriously.
"I don't believe I am. My mother is very tall, much taller than I am, and not so dark. My eyes are much darker
than hers and quite different."
"I think you have the eyes of a Sicilian, Signorina."
Again Vere was conscious of a simple effort on the part of the boy to be gallant. And he had a good memory
too. He had not forgotten her threedays'old claim to Sicilian blood. The night mitigated the blunders of his
temperament, it seemed. Vere could not help being pleased. There was something in her that ever turned
towards the Sicily she had never seen. And this boy had not seen Sicily either.
"Isn't it odd that you and I have never seen Sicily?" she said, "and that both our mothers have? And mine is
all English, you know."
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"My mamma would be very glad to kiss the hand of your Signora Mother," replied Ruffo. "I told her about
the kind ladies who gave me cigarettes, and that the Signorina had never seen her father. When she heard that
the Signorina was born after her father was dead, and that her father had died in Sicily, she saidmy poor
mamma!'If ever I see the Signorina's mother, I shall kiss her hand. She was a widow before she was a
mother; may the Madonna comfort her.' My mamma spoke just like that, Signorina. And then she cried for a
long time. But when Patrigno came in she stopped crying at once."
"Did she? Why was that?"
"I don't know, Signorina."
Vere was silent for a moment. Then she said:
"Is your Patrigno kind to you, Ruffo?"
The boy looked at her, then swiftly looked away.
"Kind enough, Signorina," he answered.
Then they both kept silence. They were standing side by side thus, looking down rather vaguely at the Saint's
pool, when another boat floated gently into it, going over to the far side, where already lay the two boats at
the feet of San Francesco. Vere saw it with indifference. She was accustomed to the advent of the fishermen
at this hour. Ruffo stared at it for a moment with a critical inquiring gaze. The boat drew up near the land and
stopped. There was a faint murmur of voices, then silence again.
The Marchesino had told the two sailors that they could have an hour or two of sleep before beginning to fish.
The men lay down, shut their eyes, and seemed to sleep at once. But Artois and the Marchesino, lounging on
a pile of rugs deftly arranged in the bottom of the stern of the boat, smoked their cigars in a silence laid upon
them by the night silence of the Pool. Neither of them had as yet caught sight of the figures of Vere and
Ruffo, which were becoming more clearly relieved as the moon rose and brought a larger world within its
radiance, of its light. Artois was satisfied that the members of the Casa del Mare were in bed. As they
approached the house he had seen no light from its windows. The silence about the islet was profound, and
gave him the impression of being in the very heart of the night. And this impression lasted, and so tricked his
mind that he forgot that the hour was not really late. He lay back, lazily smoking his cigar, and drinking in the
stark beauty round about him, a beauty delicately and mysteriously fashioned by the night, which, as by a
miracle, had laid hold of bareness and barren ugliness, and turned them to its exquisite purposes, shrinking
from no material in its certainty of its own power to transform.
The Marchesino, too, lay back, with his great, gray eyes staring about him. While the feelings of his friend
had moved towards satisfaction, his had undergone a less pleasant change. His plan seemed to be going awry,
and he began to think of himself as of a fool. What had he anticipated? What had he expected of this
expedition? He had been, as usual, politely waiting on destiny. He had come to the islet in the hope that
Destiny would meet him there and treat him with every kindness and hospitality, forestalling his desires. But
lo! He was abandoned in a boat among a lot of taciturn men, while the object of all his thoughts and pains, his
plots and hopes, was, doubtless, hermetically sealed in the home on the cliff above him.
Several Neapolitan words, familiar in street circles, ran through his mind, but did not issue from his lips, and
his face remained perfectly calmalmost seraphic in expression.
Out of the corners of his eyes he stole a glance at "caro Emilio." He wished his friend would follow the
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example of the men and go to sleep. He wanted to feel himself alone in wakefulness and unobserved. For he
was not resigned to an empty fate. The voices of the laughing women at the Antico Giuseppone still rang
through his memory. He was adventurous by nature. What he would do if Emilio would only slumber he did
not know. But it was certain he would do something. The islet, dark and distinct in outline beneath the moon,
summoned him. Was he a Neapolitan and not beneath her window? It was absurd. And he was not at all
accustomed to control himself or to fight his own impulses. For the moment "caro Emilio" became
"maledetto Emilio" in his mind. Sleepless as Providence, Emilio reclined there. A slightly distracted look
came into the Marchesino's eyes as he glanced away from his friend and stared once more at the islet, which
he longed so ardently to invade.
This time he saw the figures of Vere and Ruffo above him in the moonlight, which now sharply relieved
them. He gazed. And as he gazed they moved away from the bridge, going towards the seat where Vere had
been before she had seen Ruffo.
Vere had on a white dress.
The heart of the Marchesino leaped. He was sure it was the girl of the white boat. Then the inhabitants of the
house on the islet were not asleep, were not even in bed. Theyshe at least, and that was all he cared
forwere out enjoying the moon and the sea. How favorable was the night! But who was with her?
The Marchesino had very keen eyes. And now he used them with almost fierce intensity. But Ruffo was on
the far side of Vere. It was not possible to discern more than that he was male, and taller than the girl in the
white dress.
Jealousy leaped up in the Marchesino, that quick and almost frivolous jealousy which, in the Southerner, can
so easily deepen into the deadliness that leads to crime. Not for a moment did he doubt that the man with
Vere was a lover. This was a blow which, somehow, he had not expected. The girl in the white boat had
looked enchantingly young. When he had played the seal for her she had laughed like a child. He even he,
who believed in no one's simplicity, made sceptical by his own naughtiness so early developed towards a fine
maturity!had not expected anything like this. And these English, who pride themselves upon their
propriety, their stiffness, their cold respectability! These English misses!
"Ouf!"
It was out of the Marchesino's mouth before he was aware of it, an exclamation of cynical disgust.
"What's the matter, amico mio?" said Artois, in a low voice.
"Niente!" said the Marchesino, recollecting himself. "Are not you going to sleep?"
"Yes," said Artois, throwing away his cigar end. "I am. And you?"
"I too!"
The Marchesino was surprised by his friend's reply. He did not understand the desire of Artois not to have his
sense of the romance of their situation broken in upon by conversation just then. The romance of women was
not with Artois, but the romance of Nature was. He wanted to keep it. And now he settled himself a little
lower in the boat, under the shadow of its side, and seemed to be giving himself to sleep.
The Marchesino thanked the Madonna, and made his little pretence of slumber too, but he kept his head
above the gunwale, leaning it on his arm with a supporting cushion beneath; and though he really did shut
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both his eyes for a short time, to deceive caro Emilio, he very soon opened them again, and gazed towards the
islet. He could not see the two figures now. Rage seized him. First the two men at the Antico Giuseppone,
and now this man on the islet! Every one was companioned. Every one was enjoying the night as it was
meant to be enjoyed. Hehe alone was the sport of "il maledetto destino." He longed to commit some act of
violence. Then he glanced cautiously round without moving.
The two sailors were sleeping. He could hear their regular and rather loud breathing. Artois lay quite still.
The Marchesino turned his body very carefully so that he might see the face of his friend. As he did so Artois,
who had been looking straight up at the stars, shut his eyes, and simulated sleep. His suspicion of Doro, that
this expedition had been undertaken with some hidden motive, was suddenly renewed by this sly and furtive
movement, which certainly suggested purpose and the desire to conceal it.
So caro Emilio slept very peacefully, and breathed with the calm regularity of a sucking child. But in this
sleep of a child he was presently aware that the boat was movingin fact was being very adroitly moved.
Though his eyes were shut he felt the moonlight leave his face presently, and knew they were taken by the
shadow of the islet. Then the boat stopped.
A moment later Artois was aware that the boat contained three people instead of four.
The Marchesino had left it to take a little stroll on shore.
Artois lay still. He knew how light is the slumber of seamen in a boat with the wide airs about them, and felt
sure that the sailors must have been waked by the tour of the boat across the Pool. Yet they had not moved,
and they continued apparently to sleep. He guessed that a glance from their "Padrone" had advised them not
to wake. And this was the truth.
At the first movement of the boat both the men had looked up and had received their message from the
Marchesino's expressive eyes. They realized at once that he had some design which he wished to keep from
the knowledge of his friend, the forestiere. Of course it must be connected with a woman. They were not
particularly curious. They had always lived in Naples, and knew their aristocracy. So they merely returned
the Marchesino's glance with one of comprehension and composed themselves once more to repose.
The Marchesino did not come back, and presently Artois lifted himself up a little, and looked out.
The boat was right under the lee of the islet, almost touching the shore, but the sea was so perfectly still that it
scarcely moved, and was not in any danger of striking against the rock. The sailors had seen that, too, before
they slept again.
Artois sat quite up. He wondered a good deal what his friend was doing. One thing was certainhe was
trespassing. The islet belonged to Hermione, and no one had any right to be upon it without her invitation.
Artois had that right, and was now considering whether or not he should use it, follow the Marchesino and
tell himwhat he had not told himthat the owner of the islet was the English friend of whom he had
spoken.
For Artois the romance of the night in which he had been revelling was now thoroughly disturbed. He looked
again towards the two sailors, suspecting their sleep. Then he got up quietly, and stepped out of the boat onto
the shore. His doing so gave a slight impetus to the boat, which floated out a little way into the Pool. But the
men in it seemed to sleep on.
Artois stood still for a moment at the edge of the sea. His great limbs were cramped, and he stretched them.
Then he went slowly towards the steps. He reached the plateau before the Casa del Mare. The Marchesino
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was not there. He looked up at the house. As he did so the front door opened and Hermione came out,
wrapped in a white lace shawl.
"Emile?" she said, stopping with her hand on the door. "Whyhow extraordinary!"
She came to him.
"Have you come to pay us a nocturnal visit, orthere's nothing the matter?"
"No," he said.
For perhaps the first time in his life he felt embarrassed with Hermione. He took her hand.
"I don't believe you meant me to know you were here," she said, guided by the extraordinary intuition of
woman.
"To tell the truth," he answered, "I did not expect to see you. I thought you were all in bed."
"Oh no. I have been on the terrace and in the garden. Vere is out somewhere. I was just going to look for
her."
There was a distinct question in her prominent eyes as she fixed them on him.
"No, I haven't seen Vere," he said, answering it.
"Are you alone?" she asked, abruptly.
"No. You remember my mentioning my friend, the Marchesino Panacci? Well, he is with me. We were going
to fish. The fishermen suggested our sleeping in the Saint's Pool for an hour or two first. I found Doro gone
and came to look for him."
There was still a faint embarrassment in his manner.
"I believe you have seen him," he added. "He was bathing the other day when you were passing in the
boat,I think it was you. Did you see a young man who did some tricks in the water?"
"Oh yes, an impudent young creature. He pretended to be a porpoise and a seal. He made us laugh. Vere was
delighted with him. Is that your friend? Where can he be?"
"Where is Vere?" said Artois.
Their eyes met, and suddenly his embarrassment passed away.
"You don't mean that?"
"My friend, you know what these Neapolitans are. Doro came back from his bathe raving about Vere. I did
not tell him I knew her. I thinkI am sure he has guessed it, and much more. Let us go and find him. It
seems you are to know him. E il destino."
"You don't want me to know him?" she said, as they turned away from the house.
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"I don't know that there is any real reason why you should not. But my instinct was against the acquaintance.
Where can Vere be? Does she often come out alone at night?"
"Very often. Ah! There she is, beyond the bridge, andis that the Marchesino Panacci with her? Whyno,
it's"
"It is Ruffo," Artois said.
Vere and the boy were standing near the edge of the cliff and talking earnestly together, but as Hermione and
Artois came towards them they turned round as if moved by a mutual impulse. Ruffo took off his cap and
Vere cried out:
"Monsieur Emile!"
She came up to him quickly. He noticed that her face looked extraordinarily alive, that her dark eyes were
fiery with expression.
"Goodevening, Vere," he said.
He took her small hand.
"Buona sera, Ruffo," he added.
He looked from one to the other, and saw the perfect simplicity of both.
"Tell me, Vere," he said. "Have you seen any one on the islet tonight?"
"Yes, just now. Why? What made you think so?"
"Well?"
"A mana gentleman came. I told him he was trespassing."
Artois smiled. Ruffo stood by, his cap in his hand, looking attentively at Vere, who had spoken in French.
She glanced at him, and suddenly broke into Italian.
"He was that absurd boy we saw in the sea, Madre, the other day, who pretended to be a seal, and made me
laugh. He reminded me of it, and asked me if I didn't recognize him."
"What did you say?"
"I said 'No' and 'Goodnight.' "
"And did he go?" asked Artois.
"No, he would not go. I don't know what he wanted. He looked quite odd, as if he were feeling angry inside,
and didn't wish to show it. And he began trying to talk. But as I didn't really know himafter all, laughing at
a man because he pretends to be a seal is scarcely knowing him, is it, Monsieur Emile?"
"No," he said, smiling at her smile.
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"I said 'goodnight' again in such a way that he had to go."
"And so he went!" said Artois.
"Yes. Do you know him, Monsieur Emile?"
"Yes. He came with me tonight."
A little look of penitence came into the girl's face.
"Oh, I am sorry."
"Why should you be?"
"Well, he began saying something about knowing friends of mine, orI didn't really listen very much,
because Ruffo was telling me all about the seaand I thought it was all nonsense. He was absurdly
complimentary first, you see! and so, when he began about friends, I only said 'goodnight' again. Andand
I'm really afraid I turned my back upon him. And now he's a friend of yours. Monsieur Emile! I am sorry!"
Already the Marchesino had had that lesson of which Artois had thought in Naples. Artois laughed aloud.
"It doesn't matter, Vere. My friend is not too sensitive."
"Buona sera, Signorina! Buona sera, Signora! Buon riposo!"
It was Ruffo preparing to go, feeling that he scarcely belonged to this company, although he looked in no way
shy, and had been smiling broadly at Vere's narrative of the discomfiture of the Marchesino.
"Ruffo," said Hermione, "you must wait a moment."
"Si, Signora?"
"I am going to give you a few more cigarettes."
Vere sent a silent but brilliant "Thank you" to her mother. They all walked towards the house.
Vere and her mother were in front, Artois and Ruffo behind. Artois looked very closely and even curiously at
the boy.
"Have I ever seen you before?" he asked, as they came to the bridge.
"Signore?"
"Not the other morning. But have we ever met in Naples?"
"I have seen you pass by sometimes at the Mergellina, Signore."
"That must be it then!" Artois thought, "I have seen you there without consciously noticing you."
"You live there?" he said.
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"Si, Signore; I live with my mamma and my Patrigno."
"Your Patrigno," Artois said, merely to continue the conversation. "Then your father is dead?"
"Si, Signore, my Babbo is dead."
They were on the plateau now, before the house.
"If you will wait a moment, Ruffo, I will fetch the cigarettes," said Hermione.
"Let me go, Madre," said Vere, eagerly.
"Very well, dear."
The girl ran into the house. As she disappeared they heard a quick step, and the Marchesino came hurrying up
from the sea. He took off his hat when he saw Hermione, and stopped.
"I was looking for you, Emilio."
He kept his hat in his hand. Evidently he had recovered completely from his lesson. He looked gay and
handsome. Artois realized how very completely the young rascal's desires were being fulfilled. But of course
the introduction must be made. He made it quietly.
"Marchese Isidoro PanacciMrs. Delarey."
The Marchesino bent and kissed Hermione's hand. As he did so Vere came out of the house, her hands full of
Khali Targa cigarettes, her face eager at the thought of giving pleasure to Ruffo.
"This is my daughter, Vere," Hermione said. "Vere, this is the Marchese Isidoro Panacci, a friend of
Monsieur Emile's."
The Marchesino went to kiss Vere's hand, but she said:
"I'm very sorrylook!"
She showed him that they were full of cigarettes, and so escaped from the little ceremony. For those watching
it was impossible to know whether she wished to avoid the formal salutation of the young man's lips or not.
"Here, Ruffo!" she said. She went up to the boy. "Put your hands together."
Ruffo gladly obeyed. He curved his brown hands into a cup, and Vere filled this cup with the big cigarettes,
while Hermione, Artois, and the Marchesino looked on; each one of them with a fixed attention
whichsurelythe action scarcely merited. But there was something about those two, Vere and the boy,
which held the eyes and the mind.
"Goodnight, Ruffo. You must carry them to the boat. They'll be crushed if you put them into your
trouserspocket."
"Si, Signorina!"
He waited a moment. He wanted to salute them, but did not know how to. That was evident. His expressive
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eyes, his whole face told it to them.
Artois suddenly set his lips together in his beard. For an instant it seemed to him that the years had rolled
back, that he was in London, in Caminiti's restaurant, that he saw Maurice Delarey, with the reverential
expression on his face that had been so pleasing. Yes, the boy Ruffo looked like him in that moment, as he
stood there, wishing to do his devoir, to be polite, but not knowing how to.
"Never mind, Ruffo," It was Vere's voice. "We understand! Orshall I?" A laughing look came into her
face. She went up to the boy and, with a delicious, childish charm and delicacy, that quite removed the action
from impertinence, she took his cap off. "There!" She put it gently back on his dark hair. "Now you've been
polite to us. Buona notte!"
"Buona notte, Signorina."
The boy ran off, half laughing, and carrying carefully the cigarettes in his hands still held together like a cup.
Hermione and Artois were smiling. Artois felt something for Vere just then that he could hardly have
explained, master though he was of explanation of the feelings of man. It seemed to him that all the purity,
and the beauty, and the whimsical unselfconsciousness, and the touchingness of youth that is divine, appeared
in that little, almost comic action of the girl. He loved her for the action, because she was able to perform it
just like that. And something in him, suddenly adored youth in a way that seemed new to his heart.
"Well," said Hermione, when Ruffo had disappeared. "Will you come in? I'm afraid all the servants are in
bed, but"
"No, indeed it is too late," Artois said.
Without being aware of it he spoke with an authority that was almost stern.
"We must be off to our fishing," he added. "Goodnight. Goodnight, Vere."
"Goodnight, Signora."
The Marchesino bowed, with his hat in his hand. He kissed Hermione's hand again, but he did not try to take
Vere's.
"Goodnight," Hermione said.
A glance at Artois had told her much that he was thinking.
"Goodnight, Monsieur Emile," said Vere. "Goodnight, Marchese. Buona pesca!"
She turned and followed her mother into the house.
"Che simpatica!"
It was the Marchesino's voice, breathing the words through a sigh: "Che simpatica Signorina!" Then an idea
seemed to occur to him, and he looked at his friend reproachfully. "And you knew the girl with the perfect
little nose, Emilioall the time you knew her!"
"And all the time you knew I knew her!" retorted Artois.
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They looked at each other in the eyes and burst out laughing.
"Emilio, you are the devil! I will never forgive you. You do not trust me."
"Caro amico, I do trust youalways to fall in love with every girl you meet. But"and his voice
changed"the Signorina is a child. Remember that, Doro."
They were going down the steps to the sea. Almost as Artois spoke they reached the bottom, and saw their
boat floating in the moonlight nearly in the centre of the Pool. The Marchesino stood still.
"My dear Emilio," he said, staring at Artois with his great round eyes, "you make me wonder whether you
know women."
Artois felt amused.
"Really?" he said.
"Really! And yet you write books."
"Writing books does not always prove that one knows much. But explain to me."
They began to stroll on the narrow space at the sea edge. Close by lay the boat to which Ruffo belonged. The
boy was already in it, and they saw him strike a match and light one of the cigarettes. Then he lay back at his
ease, smoking, and staring up at the moon.
"A girl of sixteen is not a child, and I am sure the Signorina is sixteen. But that is not all. Emilio, you do not
know the Signorina."
Artois repressed a smile. The Marchesino was perfectly in earnest.
"And youdo you know the Signorina?" Artois asked.
"Certainly I know her," returned the Marchesino with gravity.
They reached Ruffo's boat. As they did so, the Marchesino glanced at it with a certain knowing impudence
that was peculiarly Neapolitan.
"When I came to the top of the islet the Signorina was with that boy," the Marchesino continued.
"Well?" said Artois.
"Oh, you need not be angry, Emilio caro."
"I am not angry," said Artois.
Nor was he. It is useless to be angry with racial characteristics, racial points of view. He knew that well. The
Marchesino stared at him.
"No, I see you are not."
"The Signorina was with that boy. She has talked to him before. He has dived for her. He has sung for her!
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She has given him cigarettes, taken from her mother's box, with her mother's consent. Everything the
Signorina does her mother knows and approves of. You saw the Signora send the Signorina for more
cigarettes to give the boy tonight. Ebbene?"
"Ebbene. They are English!"
And he laughed.
"Madre mia!"
He laughed again, seized his mustaches, twisted them, and went on.
"They are English, but for all that the Signorina is a woman. And as to that boy"
"Perhaps he is a man."
"Certainly he is. Dio mio, the boy at least is a Neapolitan."
"No, he isn't."
"He is not?"
"He's a Sicilian."
"How do you know?"
"I was here the other day when he was diving for frutti di mare."
"I have seen him at the Mergellina ever since he was a child."
"He says he is a Sicilian."
"Boys like that say anything if they can get something by it. Perhaps he thought you liked the Sicilians better
than the Neapolitans. But anyhowSicilian or Neapolitan, it is all one! He is a Southerner, and at fifteen a
Southerner is already a man. I was."
"I know it. But you were proving to me that the Signorina is a woman. The fact that she, an English girl, is
good friends with the fisher boy does not prove it."
"Ah, well!"
The Marchesino hesitated.
"I had seen the Signorina before I came to meet you at the house."
"Had you?"
"Didn't you know it?"
"Yes, I did."
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"I knew she told you."
"What?"
"She told you! she told you! She is birbante. She is a woman, for she pretended as only a woman can
pretend."
"What did she pretend?"
"That she was not pleased at my coming, at my finding out where she lived, and seeking her. Why, Emilio,
even when I was in the sea, when I was doing the seal, I could read the Signorina's character. She showed me
from the boat that she wanted me to come, that she wished to know me. Ah, che simpatica! Che simpatica
ragazza!"
The Marchesino looked once more at Ruffo.
"Come here a minute!" he said, in a low voice, not wishing to wake the still sleeping fishermen.
The boy jumped lightly out and came to them. When he stood still the Marchesino said, in his broadest
Neapolitan:
"Now then, tell me the truth! I'm a Neapolitan, not a forestiere. You've seen me for years at the Mergellina."
"Si, Signore."
"You're a Napolitano."
"No, Signore. I am a Sicilian."
There was a sound of pride in the boy's voice.
"I am quite sure he speaks the truth," Artois said, in French.
"Why do you come here?" asked the Marchesino.
"Signore, I come to fish."
"For cigarettes?"
"No, Signore, for sarde. Buona notte, Signore."
He turned away from them with decision, and went back to his boat.
"He is a Sicilian," said Artois. "I would swear to it."
"Why? Hark at his accent."
"He is a Sicilian!"
"But why are you so sure?"
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Artois only said:
"Are you going to fish?"
"Emilio, I cannot fish tonight. My soul is above such work as fishing. It is indeed. Let us go back to
Naples."
"Va bene."
Artois was secretly glad. He, too, had no mindor was it no heart? for fishing that night, after the episode
of the islet. They hailed the sailors, who were really asleep this time, and were soon far out on the path of the
moonlight setting their course towards Naples.
CHAPTER X
On the following morning Hermione and Vere went for an excursion to Capri. They were absent from the
island for three nights. When they returned they found a card lying upon the table in the little hall
"Marchese Isidoro Panacci di Torno"and Gaspare told them that it had been left by a Signore, who had
called on the day of their departure, and had seemed very disappointed to hear that they were gone.
"I do not know this Signore," Gaspare added, rather grimly.
Vere laughed, and suddenly made her eyes look very round, and staring, and impudent.
"He's like that, Gaspare," she said.
"Vere!" said her mother.
Then she added to Gaspare:
"The Marchese is a friend of Don Emilio's. Ah! and here is a letter from Don Emilio."
It was lying beside the Marchese's card with some other letters. Hermione opened it first, and read that Artois
had been unexpectedly called away to Paris on business, but intended to return to Naples as soon as possible,
and to spend the whole summer on the Bay.
"I feel specially that this summer I should like to be near you," he wrote. "I hope you wish it."
At the end of the letter there was an allusion to the Marchesino, "that gay and admirably characteristic
Neapolitan product, the Toledo incarnate."
There was not a word of Vere.
Hermione read the letter aloud to Vere, who was standing beside her, evidently hoping to hear it. When she
had finished, Vere said:
"I am glad Monsieur Emile will be here all the summer."
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"Yes."
"But why specially this summer, Madre?"
"I am not sure what he means by that," Hermione answered.
But she remembered the conversation in the Grotto of Virgil, and wondered if her friend thought she needed
the comfort of his presence.
"Well, Madre?"
Vere's bright eyes were fixed upon her mother.
"Well, Vere? What is it?"
"Is there no message for me from Monsieur Emile?"
"No, Vere."
"How forgetful of him! But never mind!" She went upstairs, looking disappointed.
Hermione reread the letter. She wondered, perhaps more than Vere, why there was no message for the child.
The childshe was still calling Vere that in her mind, even after the night conversation with Gaspare. Two
or three times she reread that sentence, "I feel specially that this summer I should like to be near you," and
considered it; but she finally put the letter away with a strong feeling that most of its meaning lay between the
lines, and that she had not, perhaps, the power to interpret it.
Vere had said that Emile was forgetful. He might be many things, but forgetful he was not. One of his most
characteristic qualities was his exceptionally sharp consciousness of himself and of others. Hermione knew
that he was incapable of writing to her and forgetting Vere while he was doing so.
She did not exactly know why, but the result upon her of this letter was a certain sense of depression, a slight
and vague foreboding. And yet she was glad, she was even thankful, to know that her friend, was going to
spend the summer on the Bay. She blamed herself for her melancholy, telling herself that there was nothing
in the words of Artois to make her feel sad. Yet she continued to feel sad, to feel as if some grievous change
were at hand, as if she had returned to the island to confront some untoward fate. It was very absurd of her.
She told herself that.
The excursion to Capri had been a cheerful one. She had enjoyed it. But all the time she had been watching
Vere, studying her, as she had not watched and studied her before. Something had suddenly made her feel
unaccustomed to Vere. It might be the words of Gaspare, the expression in the round eyes of the Marchesino,
or something new, or newly apparent, in Vere. She did not know. But she did know that now the omission of
Artois to mention Vere in his letter seemed to add to the novelty of the child for her.
That seemed strange, yet it was a fact. How absolutely mysterious are many of the currents of our being,
Hermione thought. They flow far off in subterranean channels, unseen by us, and scarcely ever realized, but
governing, carrying our lives along upon their deeps towards the appointed end.
Gaspare saw that his Padrona was not quite as usual, and looked at her with largeeyed inquiry, but did not at
first say anything. After tea, however, when Hermione was sitting alone in the little garden with a book, he
said to her bluntly:
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"Che ha Lei?"
Hermione put the book down in her lap.
"That is just what I don't know, Gaspare."
"Perhaps you are not well."
"But I believe I am, perfectly well. You know I am always well. I never even have fever. And you have that
sometimes."
He continued to look at her searchingly.
"You have something."
He said it firmly, almost as if he were supplying her with information which she needed and had lacked.
Hermione made a sound that was like a little laugh, behind which there was no mirth.
"I don't know what it is."
Then, after a pause, she added that phrase which is so often upon Sicilian lips:
"Ma forse e il destino."
Gaspare moved his head once as if in acquiescence.
"When we are young, Signora," he said, "we do what we want, but we have to want it. And we think we are
very free. And when we are old we don't feel to want anything, but we have to do things just the same.
Signora, we are not free. It is all destiny."
And again he moved his head solemnly, making his liquid brown eyes look more enormous than usual.
"It is all destiny," Hermione repeated, almost dreamily.
Just then she felt that it was sothat each human being, and she most of all, was in the grasp of an inflexible,
of an almost fierce guide, who chose the paths, and turned the feet of each traveller, reluctant or not, into the
path the will of the guide had selected. And now, still dreamily, she wondered whether she would ever try to
rebel if the path selected for her were one that she hated or feared, one that led into any horror of darkness, or
any horror of too great light. For light, too, can be terrible, a sudden great light that shines pitilessly upon
one's own soul. She was of those who possess force and impulse, and she knew it. She knew, too, that these
are often rebellious. But today it seemed to her that she might believe so much in destiny, be so entirely
certain of the inflexible purpose and power of the guide, that her intellect might forbid her to rebel, because
of rebellion's foreordained inutility. Nevertheless, she supposed that if it was her instinct to rebel, she would
do so at the psychological moment, even against the dictates of her intellect.
Gaspare remained beside her quietly. He often stood near her after they had been talking together, and calmly
shared the silence with her. She liked that. It gave her an impression of his perfect confidence in her, his
perfect ease in her company.
"Don't you ever think that you can put a knife into destiny, Gaspare," she asked him presently, using an
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image he would be likely to understand, "as you might put a knife into a man who tried to force you to do
something you didn't wish to do?"
"Signora, what would be the use? The knife is no good against Destiny, nor the revolver either. And I have
the permesso to carry one," he added, with a smile, as if he realized that he was being whimsical.
"Well, then, we must just hope that Destiny will be very kind to us, be a friend to us, a true comrade. I shall
hope that and so must you."
"Si, Signora."
He realized that the conversation was finished, and went quietly away.
Hermione kept the letter of Artois. When he came back to the Bay she wanted to show it to him, to ask him to
read for her the meaning between its lines. She put it away in her writingtable drawer, and then resolved to
forget the peculiar and disagreeable effect it had made upon her.
A fortnight passed away before Artois' return. June came in upon the Bay, bringing with it a more vivid life
in the environs of Naples. As the heat of the sun increased the vitality of the human motes that danced in its
beams seemed to increase also, to become more blatant, more persistent. The wild oleander was in flower.
The thorny cactus put forth upon the rim of its grotesque leaves pale yellow blossoms to rival the red
geraniums that throng about it insolently in Italy. In the streets of the city ragged boys ran by crying,
"Fragole!" and holding aloft the shallow baskets in which the rosy fruit made splashes of happy color. The
carters wore bright carnations above their dusty ears. The children exposed their bare limbs to the sun, and
were proud when they were given morsels of ice wrapped up in vine leaves to suck in the intervals of their
endless dances and their play. On the hill of Posilipo the Venetian blinds of the houses, in the gardens
clouded by the rounded dusk of the great stone pines, were thrust back, the windows were thrown open, the
glad sunrays fell upon the cool paved floors, over which few feet had trodden since the last summer died.
Loud was the call of "Aqua!" along the roads where there were buildings, and all the lemons of Italy seemed
to be set forth in bowers to please the eyes with their sharp, yet soothing color, and tempt the lips with their
poignant juice. Already in the Galleria, an "avviso" was prominently displayed, stating that Ferdinando
Bucci, the famous maker of Sicilian icecreams, had arrived from Palermo for the season. In the Piazza del
Plebiscito, hundreds of chairs were ranged before the bandstand, and before the kiosk where the women sing
on the nights of summer near the Caffe Turco. The "Margherita" was shutting up. The "Eldorado" was
opening. And all along the sea, from the vegetable gardens protected by brushwood hedges on the outskirts of
the city towards Portici, to the balconies of the "Mascotte," under the hill of Posilipo, the wooden bathing
establishments were creeping out into the shallow waters, and displaying proudly to the passersby above
their names: "Stabilimento Elena," "Stabilimento Donn' Anna," "Stabilimento delle Sirene," "Il piccolo
Paradiso."
And all along the sea by night there was music.
From the Piazza before the Palace the band of the Caffe Gambrinus sent forth its lusty valses. The posturing
women of the wooden kiosk caught up the chain of sound, and flung it on with their shrill voices down the
hill towards Santa Lucia, where, by the waterside and the crowding white yachts, the itinerant musicians took
it into the keeping of their guitars, their mandolins, their squeaky fiddles, and their hot and tremulous voices.
The "Valse Bleu," "Santa Lucia," "Addio, mia bella Napoli," "La Frangese," "Sole Mio," "Marechiaro,"
"Carolina," "La Ciociara"; with the chain of lights the chain of songs was woven round the bay; from the
Eldorado, past the Hotel de Vesuve, the Hotel Royal, the Victoria, to the treeshaded alleys of the Villa
Nazionale, to the Mergellina, where the naked urchins of the fisherfolk took their evening bath among the
resting boats, to the "Scoglio di Frisio," and upwards to the Ristorante della Stella, and downwards again to
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the Ristorante del Mare, and so away to the point, to the Antico Giuseppone.
Long and brilliant was the chain of lamps, and long and ardent was the chain of melodies melting one into the
other, and stretching to the wide darkness of the night and to the great stillness of the sea. The night was alive
with music, with the voices that beat like hearts overcharged with sentimental longings.
But at the point where stood the Antico Giuseppone the lights and the songs died out. And beyond there was
the mystery, the stillness of the sea.
And there, beyond the chain of lights, the chain of melodies, the islet lay in its delicate isolation;
nevertheless, it, too, was surely not unaware of the coming of summer. For even here, Nature ran up her flag
to honor her new festival. High up above the rock on the mainland opposite there was a golden glory of
ginestra, the broom plant, an expanse of gold so brilliant, so daring in these bare surroundings, that Vere said,
when she saw it:
"There is something cruel even in beauty, Madre. Do you like successful audacity?"
"I think I used to when I was your age," said Hermione. "Anything audacious was attractive to me then. But
now I sometimes see through it too easily, and want something quieter and a little more mysterious."
"The difference between the Marchesino and Monsieur Emile?" said the girl, with a little laugh.
Hermione laughed, too.
"Do you think Monsieur Emile mysterious?" she asked.
"Yescertainly. Don't you?"
"I have known him so intimately for so many years."
"Well, but that does not change him. Does it?"
"No. But it may make him appear very differently to me from the way in which he shows himself to others."
"I think if I knew Monsieur Emile for centuries I should always wonder about him."
"What is it in Emile that makes you wonder?" asked her mother, with a real curiosity.
"The same thing that makes me wonder when I look at a sleepy lion."
"You call Emile sleepy!" said Hermione.
"Oh, not his intellect, Madre! Of course that is horribly, horribly wide awake."
And Vere ran off to her room, or the garden, or the Saint's Poolwho knew where?leaving her mother to
say to herself, as she had already said to herself in these last days of the growing summer, "When I said that
to Emile, what a fool I was!" She was thinking of her statement that there was nothing in her child that was
hidden from her. As if in answer to that statement, Vere was unconsciously showing to her day by day the
folly of it. Emile had said nothing. Hermione remembered that, and realized that his silence had been caused
by his disagreement. But why had he not told her she was mistaken? Perhaps because she had just been
laying bare to him the pain that was in her heart. Her call had been for sympathy, not merely for truth. She
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wondered whether she was a coward. Since they had returned from Capri the season and Vere had surely
changed. Then, and always afterwards, Hermione thought of those three days in Capri as a definite barrier, a
dividing line between two periods. Already, while in Capri, she had begun to watch her child in a new way.
But that was, perhaps, because of an uneasiness, partly nervous, within herself. In Capri she might have been
imagining. Now she was not imagining, she was realizing.
Over the sea came to the islet the intensity of summer. Their world was changing. And in this changing world
Vere was beginning to show forth more clearly than before her movement onwardwhither?
As yet the girl herself was unconscious of her mother's new watchfulness. She was happy in the coming of
summer, and in her happiness was quite at ease, like a kitten that stretches itself luxuriously in the sun. To
Vere the world never seemed quite awake till the summer came. Only in the hot sunshine did there glow the
truthfulness and the fulness of life. She shared it with the ginestra. She saw and felt a certain cruelty in the
gold, but she did not fear or condemn it, or wish it away. For she was very young, and though she spoke of
cruelty she did not really understand it. In it there was force, and force already appealed to the girl as few
things did. As, long ago, her father had gloried in the coming of summer to the South, she gloried in it now.
She looked across the Pool of the Saint to the flood of yellow that was like sunlight given a body upon the
cliff opposite, and her soul revelled within her, and her heart rose up and danced, alone, and yet as if in a glad
company of dancers, all of whom were friends. Her brain, too, sprang to the alert. The sun increased the
feeling of intelligence within her.
And then she thought of her room, of the hours she passed shut in there, and she was torn by opposing
impulses.
But she told no one of them. Vere could keep her secrets although she was a girl.
How the sea welcomed the summer! To many this home on the island would have seemed an arid,
inhospitable place, desolate and lost amid a cruel world of cliffs and waters. It was not so to Vere. For she
entered into the life of the sea. She knew all its phases, as one may know all the moods of a person loved. She
knew when she would find it intensely calm, at early morning and when the evening approached. At a certain
hour, with a curious regularity, the breeze came, generally from Ischia, and turned it to vivacity. A temper
that was almost frivolous then possessed it, and it broke into gayeties like a child's. The waves were small,
but they were impertinently lively. They made a turmoil such as urchins make at play. Heedless of reverence,
but not consciously impious, they flung themselves at the feet of San Francesco, casting up a tiny tribute of
spray into the sun.
Then Vere thought that the Saint looked down with pleasure at them, as a good old man looks at a crowd of
laughing children who have run against him in the street, remembering his own youth. For even the Saints
were young! And, after that, surely the waves were a little less boisterous. She thought she noted a greater
calm. But perhaps it was only that the breeze was dying down as the afternoon wore on.
She often sat and wondered which she loved bestthe calm that lay upon the sea at dawn, or the calm that
was the prelude to the night. Silvery were these dawns of the summer days. Here and there the waters
gleamed like the scales of some lovely fish. Mysterious lights, like those in the breast of the opal, shone in
the breast of the sea, stirred, surely travelled as if endowed with life, then sank away to the faroff kingdoms
that man may never look on. Those dawns drew away the girl's soul as if she were led by angels, or, like
Peter, walked upon the deep at some divine command. She felt that though her body was on the islet the vital
part of her, the real "I," was free to roam across the great expanse that lay flat and still and delicately
mysterious to the limits of eternity.
She had strange encounters there, the soul of her, as she went towards the East.
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The evening calm was different. There was, Vere thought, less of heaven about it, but perhaps more of the
wonder of this world. And this made her feel as if she had been nearer to heaven at her birth than she would
be at her death. She knew nothing of the defilements of life. Her purity of mind was very perfect; but, taking
a parable from Nature, she applied it imaginatively to Man, and she saw him covered with dust because of his
journey through the world. Poor man!
And then she pitied herself too. But that passed. For if the sea at evening held most of the wonder of this
world, it was worth the holding. Barely would she substitute the heavenly mysteries for it. The fishermen's
boats were dreams upon a dream. Each sail was akin to a miracle. A voice that called across the water from a
distance brought tears to Vere's eyes when the magic was at its fullest. For it seemed to mean all things that
were tender, all things that were wistful, all things that trembled with hopethat trembled with love.
With summer Vere could give herself up to the sea, and not only imaginatively but by a bodily act.
Every day, and sometimes twice a day, she put on her bathingdress in the Casa del Mare, threw a thin cloak
over her, and ran down to the edge of the sea, where Gaspare was waiting with the boat. Hermione did not
bathe. It did not suit her now. And Gaspare was Vere's invariable companion. He had superintended her
bathing when she was little. He had taught her to swim. And with no one else would he ever trust his
Padroncina when she gave herself to the sea. Sometimes he would row her out to a reef of rocks in the open
water not too many yards from the island, and she would dive from them. Sometimes, if it was very hot, he
would take her to the Grotto of Virgil. Sometimes they went far out to sea, and then, like her father in the
Ionian Sea before the Casa delle Sirene, Vere would swim away and imagine that this was her mode of travel,
that she was journeying alone to some distant land, or that she had been taken by the sea forever.
But very soon she would be sure to hear the soft splash of oars following her, and, looking back, would see
the large, attentive eyes of the faithful Gaspare cautiously watching her dark head. Then she would lift up one
hand, and call to him to go, and say she did not want him, that she wished to be alone, smiling and yet
imperious. He only followed quietly and inflexibly. She would dive. She would swim under water. She would
swim her fastest, as if really anxious to escape him. It was a game between them now. But always he was
there, intent upon her safety.
Vere did not know the memories within Gaspare that made him such a guardian to the child of the Padrone he
had loved; but she loved him secretly for his watchfulness, even though now and then she longed to be quite
alone with the sea. And this she never was when bathing, for Hermione had exacted a promise from her not to
go to bathe without Gaspare. In former days Vere had once or twice begun to protest against this prohibition,
but something in her mother's eyes had stopped her. And she had remembered:
"Father was drowned in the sea."
Then, understanding something of what was in her mother's heart, she threw eager arms about her, and
anxiously promised to be good.
One afternoon of the summer, towards the middle of June, she prolonged her bathe in the Grotto of Virgil
until Gaspare used his authority, and insisted on her coming out of the water.
"One minute more, Gaspare! Only another minute!"
"Ma Signorina!"
She dived. She came up.
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"Ma veramente Signorina!"
She dived again.
Gaspare waited. He was standing up in the boat with the oars in his hands, ready to make a dash at his
Padroncina directly she reappeared, but she was wily, and came up behind the boat with a shrill cry that
startled him. He looked round reproachfully over his shoulder.
"Signorina," he said, turning the boat round, "you are like a wicked baby today."
"What is it, Gaspare?" she asked, this time letting him come towards her.
"I say that you are like a wicked baby. And only the other day I was saying to the Signora"
"What were you saying?"
She swam to the boat and got in.
"What?" she repeated, sitting down on the gunwale, while he began to row towards the islet.
"I was saying that you are nearly a woman now."
Vere seemed extraordinarily thin and young as she sat there in her dripping bathingdress, with her small,
bare feet distilling drops into the bottom of the boat, and her two hands, looking drowned, holding lightly to
the wood on each side of her. Even Gaspare, as he spoke, was struck by this, and by the intensely youthful
expression in the eyes that now regarded him curiously.
"Really, Gaspare?"
Vere asked the question quite seriously.
"Si, Signorina."
"A woman!"
She looked down, as if considering herself. Her wet face had become thoughtful, and for a moment she said
nothing.
"And what did mother say?" she asked, looking up again. "But I know. I am sure she laughed at you."
Gaspare looked rather offended. His expressive face, which always showed what he was feeling, became
almost stern, and he began to row faster than before.
"Why should the Signora laugh? Am I an imbecile, Signorina?"
"You?"
She hastened to correct the impression she had made.
"Why, Gaspare, you are our Providence!"
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"Va bene, but"
"I only meant that I am sure Madre wouldn't agree with you. She thinks me quite a child. I know that."
She spoke with conviction, nodding her head.
"Perhaps the Signora does not see."
Vere smiled.
"Gaspare, I believe you are horribly sharp," she said. "I often think you notice everything. You are birbante, I
am half afraid of you."
Gaspare smiled, too. He had quite recovered his good humor. It pleased him mightily to fancy he had seen
what the Padrona had not seen.
"I am a man, Signorina," he observed, quietly. "And I do not speak till I know. Why should I? And I was at
your baptism. When we came back to the house I put five lire on the bed to bring you luck, although you
were not a Catholic. But it is just the same. Your Saint will take care of you."
"Well, but if I am almost a womanwhat then, Gaspare?"
"Signorina?"
"Mustn't I play about any more? Mustn't I do just what I feel inclined to, as I did in the grotto just now?"
"Three is no harm in that, Signorina. I was only joking then. But"
He hesitated, looking at her firmly with his unfaltering gaze.
"But what? I believe you want to scold me about something. I am sure you do."
"No, Signorina, never! But women cannot talk to everybody, as children can. Nobody thinks anything of
what children say. People only laugh and say 'Ecco, it's a baby talking.' But when we are older it is all
different. People pay attention to us. We are of more importance then."
He did not mention Ruffo. He was too delicate to do that, for instinctively he understood how childish his
Padroncina still was. And, at that moment, Vere did not think of Ruffo. She wondered a little what Gaspare
was thinking. That there was some special thought behind his words, prompting them, she knew. But she did
not ask him what it was, for already they were at the islet, and she must run in, and put on her clothes.
Gaspare put her cloak carefully over her shoulders, and she hurried lightly up the steps and into her room.
Her mother was not in the house. She had gone to Naples that day to see some poor people in whom she was
interested. So Vere was alone. She took off her bathingdress, and began to put on her things rather slowly.
Her whole body was deliciously lulled by its long contact with the sea. She felt gloriously calm and
gloriously healthy just then, but her mind was working vigorously though quietly.
A woman! The word sounded a little solemn and heavy, and, somehow, dreadfully respectable. And she
thought of her recent behavior in the Grotto, and laughed aloud. She was so very slim, too. The word woman
suggested to her some one more bulky than she was. But all that was absurd, of course. She was thinking very
frivolously today.
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She put on her dress and fastened it. At the age of sixteen she had put up her hair, but now it was still wet,
and she had left it streaming over her shoulders. In a moment she was going out onto the cliff to let the sun
dry it thoroughly. The sun was so much better than any towel. With her hair down she really looked like a
child, whatever Gaspare thought. She said that to herself, standing for a moment before the glass. Vere was
almost as divinely free from self consciousness as her father had been. But the conversation in the boat had
made her think of herself very seriously, and now she considered herself, not without keen interest.
"I am certainly not a wicked baby," she said to herself. "But I don't think I look at all like a woman."
Her dark eyes met the eyes in the glass and smiled.
"And yet I shall be seventeen quite soon. What can have made Gaspare talk like that to Madre? I wonder
what he said exactly. And then that about 'women cannot talk to everybody as children can.' Now what?"
Ruffo came into her mind.
"Ah!" she said, aloud.
The figure in the glass made a little gesture. It threw up its hand.
"That's it! That's it! Gaspare thinks"
"Signorina! Signorina!"
Gaspare's voice was speaking outside the door. And now there came a firm knock. Vere turned round, rather
startled. She had been very much absorbed by her colloquy.
"What is it, Gaspare?"
"Signorina, there's a boat coming in from Naples with Don Emilio in it."
"Don Emilio! He's come back! Oh!" There was a pause. Then she cried out, "Capital! Capital!"
She ran to the door and opened it.
"Just think of Don Emilio's being back already, Gaspare. But Madre! She will be sorry."
"Signorina?"
"Why? What's the matter?"
"Are you coming out like that?"
"What?Oh, you mean my hair?"
"Si, Signorina."
"Gaspare, you ought to have been a lady's maid! Go and bring in Don Emilio to Madre's room.
Andwaityou're not to tell him Madre is away. Now mind!"
"Va bene, Signorina."
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He went away.
"Shall I put up my hair?"
Vere went again to the glass, and stood considering herself.
"For Monsieur Emile! No, it's too absurd! Gaspare really is . . . I sha'n't!"
And she ran out just as she was to meet Artois.
CHAPTER XI
When she reached her mother's sittingroom Artois was already there speaking to Gaspare by a window. He
turned rather quickly as Vere came in, and exclaimed:
"Vere! Why"
"Oh!" she cried, "Gaspare hasn't gone!"
A look almost of dread, half pretence but with some reality in it, too, came into her face.
"Gaspare, forgive me! I was in such a hurry. And it is only Don Emilio!"
Her voice was coaxing. Gaspare looked at his Padroncina with an attempt at reprobation; but his nose
twitched, and though he tried to compress his lips they began to stretch themselves in a smile.
"Signorina! Signorina!" he exclaimed. "Madonna!"
On that exclamation he went out, trying to make his back look condemnatory.
"Only Don Emilio!" Artois repeated.
Vere went to him, and took and held his hand for a moment.
"Yesonly! That's my little compliment. Madre would say of you. 'He's such an old shoe!' Such
compliments come from the heart, you know."
She still held his hand.
"I should have to put my hair up for anybody else. And Gaspare wanted me to for you."
Artois was looking rather grave and tired. She noticed that now, and dropped his hand and moved towards a
bell.
"Tea!" she said, "all alone with mefor a treat!"
"Isn't your mother in?"
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"No. She's gone to Naples. I'm very, very sorry. Make the best of it, Monsieur Emile, for the sake of my
amour propre. I said I was sorry but that was only for you, and Madre."
Artois smiled.
"Is an old shoe a worthy object of gross flattery?" he said.
"No."
"Then"
"Don't be cantankerous, and don't be subtle, because I've been bathing."
"I notice that."
"And I feel so calm and delicious. Tea, please, Giulia."
The plump, dark woman who had opened the door smiled and retreated.
"So calm and so delicious, Monsieur Emile, and as if I were made of friendliness from top to toe."
"The alltheworld feeling. I know."
He sat down, rather heavily.
"You are tired. When did you come?"
"I arrived this morning. It was hot travelling, and I shared my compartment in the wagonlit with a German
gentleman very far advanced in several unaesthetic ailments. Basta! Thank Heaven for this. Calm and
delicious!"
His large, piercing eyes were fixed upon Vere.
"And about twelve," he added, "or twelveandahalf."
"I?"
"Yes, you. I am not speaking of myself, though I believe I am calm also."
"I am a womanpractically."
"Practically?"
"Yes; isn't that the word people always put in when they mean 'that's a lie'?"
"You mean you aren't a woman! This afternoon I must agree with you."
"It's the sea! But just now, when you were coming, I was looking at myself in the glass and saying, 'You're a
woman'solemnly, you know, as if it was a dreadful truth."
Artois had sat down on a sofa. He leaned back now with his hands behind his head. He still looked at Vere,
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and, as he did so, he heard the faint whisper of the sea.
"Child of nature," he said"call yourself that. It covers any age, and it's blessedly true."
Giulia came in at this moment with tea. She smiled again broadly on Artois, and received and returned his
greeting with the comfortable and unembarrassed friendliness of the Italian race. As she went out she was
still smiling.
"Addio to the German gentleman with the unaesthetic ailments!" said Artois.
An almost boyish sensation of sheer happiness invaded him. It made him feel splendidly, untalkative. And he
felt for a moment, too, as if his intellect lay down to sleep.
"Cara Giulia!" he added, after a rapturous silence.
"What?"
"Carissima Giulia!"
"Yes, Giulia is"
"They all are, and the island, and the house upon it, and this clear yellow tea, and this brown toast, and this
butter from Lombardy. They all are."
"I believe you are feeling good all over, Monsieur Emile."
"San Gennaro knows I am."
He drank some tea, and ate some toast, spreading the butter upon it with voluptuous deliberation.
"Then I'm sure he's pleased."
"Paris, hateful Paris!"
"Oh, but that's abusive. A person who feels good all over should not say that."
"You are right, Vere. But when are you not right? You ought always to wear your hair down, mon enfant, and
always to have just been bathing."
"And you ought always to have just been travelling."
"It is true that a dreadful past can be a blessing as well as a curse. It is profoundly true. Why have I never
realized that before?"
"If I am twelve and a half, I think you are aboutabout"
"For the love of the sea make it under twenty, Vere."
"Nineteen, then."
"Were you going to make it under twenty?"
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"Yes, I was."
"I don't believe you. Yes, I do, I do! You are an artist. You realize that truth is a question of feeling, not a
question of fact. You penetrate beneath the gray hairs as the prosaic never do. This butter is delicious! And to
think that there have been moments when I have feared butter, when I have kept an eye upon a corpulent
future. Give me some more, plenty more."
Vere stretched out her hand to the teatable, but it shook. She drew it back, and burst into a peal of laughter.
"What are you laughing at?" said Artois, with burlesque majesty.
"At you. What's the matter with you, Monsieur Emile? How can you be so foolish?"
She lay back in her chair, with her hair streaming about her, and her thin body quivered, as if the sense of fun
within her were striving to break through its prison walls.
"This," said Artois, "this is sheer impertinence. I venture to inquire for butter, and"
"To inquire! One, two, three, fourfive pats of butter right in front of you! And you inquire!"
Artois suddenly sent out a loud roar to join her childish treble.
The tea had swept away his previous sensation of fatigue, even the happy stolidity that had succeeded it for
an instant. He felt full of life and gayety, and a challenging mental activity. A similar challenging activity, he
thought, shone in the eyes of the girl opposite to him.
"Thank God I can still be foolish!" he exclaimed. "And thank God that there are people in the world devoid of
humor. My German friend was without humor. Only that fact enabled me to endure his prodigious collection
of ailments. But for the heat I might even have revelled in them. He was asthmatic, without humor; dyspeptic,
without humor. He had a bad cold in the head, without humor, and got up into the top berth with two
rheumatic legs and a crick in the back, without humor. Had he seen the fun of himself, the fun would have
meant much less to me."
"You cruel person!"
"There is often cruelty in humorperhaps not in yours, though, yet."
"Why do you sayyet, like that?"
"The hair is such a kindly veil that I doubt the existence of cruelty behind it."
He spoke with a sort of almost tender and paternal gentleness.
"I don't believe you could ever be really cruel, Monsieur Emile."
"Why not?"
"I think you are too intelligent."
"Why should that prevent me?"
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"Isn't cruelty stupid, unimaginative?"
"Often. But it can be brilliant, artful, intellectual, full of imagination. It can be religious. It can be passionate.
It can be splendid. It can be almost everything."
"Splendid!"
"Like Napoleon's cruelty to France. But why should I educate you in abominable knowledge?"
"Oh," said the girl, thrusting forward her firm little chin, "I have no faith in mere ignorance."
"Yet it does a great deal for those who are not ignorant."
"How?"
"It shows them how pretty, how beautiful even, sometimes, was the place from which they started for their
journey through the world."
Vere was silent for a moment. The sparkle of fun had died out of her eyes, which had become dark with the
steadier fires of imagination. The strands of her thick hair, falling down on each side of her oval face, gave to
it a whimsically mediaeval look, suggestive of legend. Her longfingered, delicate, but strong little hands
were clasped in her lap, and did not move. It was evident that she was thinking deeply.
"I believe I know," she said, at last. "Yes, that was my thought, or almost."
"When?"
She hesitated, looking at him, not altogether doubtfully, but with a shadow of reserve, which might easily, he
fancied, grow deeper, or fade entirely away. He saw the resolve to speak come quietly into her mind.
"You know, Monsieur Emile, I love watching the sea," she said, rather slowly and carefully. "Especially at
dawn, and in the evening before it is dark. And it always seems to me as if at dawn it is more heavenly than it
is after the day has happened, though it is so very lovely then. And sometimes that has made me feel that our
dawn is our most beautiful timeas if we were nearest the truth then. And, of course, that is when we are
most ignorant, isn't it? So I suppose I have been thinking a little bit like you. Haven't I?"
She asked it earnestly. Artois had never heard her speak quite like this before, with a curious deliberation that
was nevertheless without selfconsciousness. Before he could answer she added, abruptly, as if correcting, or
even almost condemning herself:
"I can put it much better than that. I have."
Artois leaned forward. Something, he did not quite know what, made him feel suddenly a deep interest in
what Vere saida strong curiosity even.
"You have put it much better?" he said.
Vere suddenly looked conscious. A faint wave of red went over her face and down to her small neck. Her
hands moved and parted. She seemed half ashamed of something for a minute.
"Madre doesn't know," she murmured, as if she were giving him a reason for something. "It isn't interesting,"
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she added. "Except, of course, to me."
Artois was watching her.
"I think you really want to tell me," he said now.
"Oh yes, in a way I do. I have been half wanting to for a long time but only half."
"And now?"
She looked at him, but almost instantly looked down again, with a sort of shyness he had never seen in her
before. And her eyes had been full of a strange and beautiful sensitiveness.
"Never mind, Vere," he said quickly, obedient to those eyes, and responding to their delicate subtlety. "We all
have our righteous secrets, and should all respect the righteous secrets of others."
"Yes, I think we should. And I know you would be the very last, at least Madre and you, toI think I'm
being rather absurd, really." The last words were said with a sudden change of tone to determination, as if
Vere were taking herself to task. "I'm making a lot of almost nothing. You see, if I am a woman, as Gaspare
is making out, I'm at any rate a very young one, am I not?"
"The youngest that exists."
As he said that Artois thought, "Mon Dieu! If the Marchesino could only see her now!"
"If humor is cruel, Monsieur Emile," Vere continued, "you will laugh at me. For I am sure, if I tell youand
I know now I'm going toyou will think this fuss is as ridiculous as the German's cold in the head, and poor
legs, and all. I wrote that about the sea."
She said the last sentence with a sort of childish defiance.
"Wait," said Artois. "Now I begin to understand."
"What?"
"All those hours spent in your room. Your mother thought you were reading."
"No," she said, still rather defiantly; "I've been writing that, and other thingsabout the sea."
"How? In prose?"
"No. That's the worst of it, I suppose."
And again the faint wave of color went over her face to her neck.
"Do you really feel so criminal? Then what ought I to feel?"
"You? Now that is really cruel!" she cried, getting up quickly, almost as if she meant to hurry away.
But she only stood there in front of him, near the window.
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"Never mind!" she said. "Only you remember that Madre tried. She had never said much about it to me. But
now and then from just a word I know that she feels bad, that she wishes very much she could do something.
Only the other day she said to me, 'We have the instinct, men the vocabulary.' She was meaning that you had.
She even told me to ask you something that I had asked her, and she said, 'I feel all the things that he can
explain.' And there was something in her voice that hurt mefor her. And Madre is so clever. Isn't she
clever?"
"Yes."
"And if Madre can't do things, you can imagine that I feel rather absurd now that I'm telling you."
"Yes, being just as you are, Vere, I can quite imagine that you do. But we can have sweet feelings of
absurdity that only arise from something moral within us, a moral delicacy. However, would you like me to
look at what you have been writing about the sea?"
"Yes, if you can do it quite seriously."
"I could not do it in any other way."
"Thenthank you."
She went out of the room, not without a sort of simple dignity that was utterly removed from conceit or
pretentiousness.
What a strange end, this, to their laughter!
Vere was away several minutes, during which at first Artois sat quite still, leaning back, with his great frame
stretched out, and his hands once more behind his head. His intellect was certainly very much awake now,
and he was setting a guard upon it, to watch it carefully, lest it should be ruthless, even with Vere. And was
he not setting also another guard to watch the softness of his nature, lest it should betray him into foolish
kindness?
Yet, after a minute, he said to himself that he was wasting his time in both these proceedings. For Vere's eyes
were surely a touchstone to discover honesty. There is something merciless in the purity of untarnished
youth. What can it not divine at moments?
Artois poured out another cup of tea and drank it, considering the little funny situation. Vere and he with a
secret from Hermione shared between them! Vere submitting verses to his judgment! He remembered
Hermione's halfconcealed tragedy, which, of course, had been patent to him in its uttermost nakedness.
Even Vere had guessed something of it. Do we ever really hide anything from every one? And yet each one
breathes mystery too. The assertive man is the last of fools. Of that at least Artois just then felt certain.
If Vere should really have talent! He did not expect it, although he had said that there was intellectual force in
the girl. There was intellectual force in Hermione, but she could not create. And Vere! He smiled as he
thought of her rush into the room with her hair streaming down, of her shrieks of laughter over his absurdity.
But she was full of changes.
The door opened, and Vere came in holding some manuscript in her hand. She had done up her hair while she
had been away. When Artois saw that he heaved himself up from the sofa.
"I must smoke," he said.
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"Oh yes. I'll get the Khali Targas."
"No. I must have a pipe. And you prefer that, I know."
"Generally, butyou do look dreadfully as if you meant business when you are smoking a pipe."
"I do mean business now."
He took his pipe from his pocket, filled it and lit it.
"Now then, Vere!" he said.
She came to sit down on the sofa.
He sat down beside her.
CHAPTER XII
More than an hour had passed. To Vere it had seemed like five minutes. Her cheeks were hotly flushed. Her
eyes shone. With hands that were slightly trembling she gathered together her manuscripts, and carefully
arranged them in a neat packet and put a piece of ribbon round them, tying it in a little bow. Meanwhile
Artois, standing up, was knocking the shreds of tobacco out of his pipe against the chimneypiece into his
hand. He carried them over to the window, dropped them out, then stood for a minute looking at the sea.
"The evening calm is coming, Vere," he said, "bringing with it the wonder of this world."
"Yes."
He heard a soft sigh behind him, and turned round.
"Why was that? Has dejection set in, then?"
"No, no."
"You know the Latin saying: 'Festina lente'? If you want to understand how slowly you must hasten, look at
me."
He had been going to add, "Look at these gray hairs," but he did not. Just then he felt suddenly an invincible
reluctance to call Vere's attention to the signs of age apparent in him.
"I spoke to you about the admirable incentive of ambition," he continued, after a moment. "But you must
understand that I meant the ambition for perfection, not at all the ambition for celebrity. The satisfaction of
the former may be a deep and exquisite joythe partial satisfaction, for I suppose it can never be anything
more than that. But the satisfaction of the other will certainly be Deadsea fruitfruit of the sea unlike that
brought up by Ruffo, without lasting savor, without any real value. One should never live for that."
The last words he spoke as if to himself, almost like a warning addressed to himself.
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"I don't believe I ever should," Vere said quickly. "I never thought of such a thing."
"The thought will come, though, inevitably."
"How dreadful it must be to know so much about human nature as you do!"
"And yet how little I really know!"
There came up a distant cry from the sea. Vere started.
"There is Madre! Of course, Monsieur Emile, I don't wantbut you understand!"
She hurried out of the room, carrying the packet with her.
Artois felt that the girl was strongly excited. She was revealing more of herself to him, this little Vere whom
he had known, and not known, ever since she had been a baby. The gradual revelation interested him
intenselyso intensely that in him, too, there was excitement now. So many truths go to make up the whole
round truth of every human soul. Hermione saw some of these truths of Vere, Gaspare others, perhaps; he
again others. And even Ruffo and the Marchesinohe put the Marchesino most definitely lasteven they
saw still other truths of Vere, he supposed.
To whom did she reveal the most? The mother ought to know most, and during the years of childhood had
doubtless known most. But those years were nearly over. Certainly Vere was approaching, or was on, the
threshold of the second period of her life.
And she and he had a secret from Hermione. This secret was a very innocent one. Still, of course, it had the
two attributes that belong to every secret: of drawing together those who share it, of setting apart from them
those who know it not. And there was another secret, too, connected with it, and known only to Artois: the
fact that the child, Vere, possessed the very small but quite definite beginnings, the seed, as it were, of
something that had been denied to the mother, Hermione.
"Emile, you have come back! I am glad!"
Hermione came into the room with her eager manner and rather slow gait, holding out both her hands, her hot
face and prominent eyes showing forth with ardor the sincerity of her surprise and pleasure.
"Gaspare told me. I nearly gave him a hug. You know his sly look when he has something delightful up his
sleeve for one! Bless you!"
She shook both his hands.
"And I had come back in such bad spirits! But now"
She took off her hat and put it on a table.
"Why were you in bad spirits, my friend?"
"I had been with Madame Alliani, seeing something of the intense misery and wickedness of Naples. I have
seen a girlsuch a tragedy! What devils men can be in these Southern places! What hideous things they will
do under the pretence of being driven by love! Butno, don't let us spoil your arrival. Where is Vere? I
thought she was entertaining you."
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"We have been having tea together. She has this moment gone out of the room."
"Oh!"
She seemed to expect some further explanation. As he gave none she sat down.
"Wasn't she very surprised to see you?"
"I think she was. She had just been bathing, and came running in with her hair all about her, looking like an
Undine with a dash of Sicilian blood in her. Here she is!"
"Are you pleased, Madre? You poor, hot Madre!"
Vere sat down by her mother and put one arm round her. Subtly she was trying to make up to her mother for
the little secret she was keeping from her for a time.
"Are you very, very pleased?"
"Yes, I think I am."
"Think! You mischievous Madre!"
Hermione laughed.
"But I feel almost jealous of you two sitting here in the cool, and having a quiet tea and a lovely talk while
Never mind. Here is my tea. And there's another thing. Oh, Emile, I do wish I had known you would arrive
today!"
"Why specially?"
"I've committed an unusual crime. I've madeactuallyan engagement for this evening."
Artois and Vere held up their hands in exaggerated surprise.
"Are you mad, my dear Hermione?" asked Artois.
"I believe I am. It's dangerous to go to Naples. I met a young man."
"The Marchesino!" cried Vere. "The Marchesino! I see him in your eye, Madre."
"C'est cela!" said Artois, "and you mean to say!"
"That I accepted an invitation to dine with him tonight, at nine, at the Scoglio di Frisio. There! Why did I? I
have no idea. I was hot from a horrible vicolo. He was cool from the sea. What chance had I against him?
And then he is through and through Neapolitan, and gives no quarter to a woman, even when she is 'una
vecchia.' "
As she finished Hermione broke into a laugh, evidently at some recollection.
"Doro made his eyes very round. I can see that," said Artois.
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"Like this!" cried Vere.
And suddenly there appeared in her face a reminiscence of the face of the Marchesino.
"Vere, you must not! Some day you will do it by accident when he is here."
"Is he coming here?"
"In a launch to fetch meus."
"Am I invited?" said Vere. "What fun!"
"I could not get out of it," Hermione said to Artois. "But now I insist on your staying here till the Marchesino
comes. Then he will ask you, and we shall be a quartet."
"I will stay," said Artois, with a sudden return of his authoritative manner.
"It seems that I am woefully ignorant of the Bay," continued Hermione. "I have never dined at Frisio's.
Everybody goes there at least once. Everybody has been there. Emperors, kings, queens, writers, singers,
politicians, generalsthey all eat fish at Frisio's."
"It's true."
"You have done it?"
"Yes. The Padrone is worth knowing. Hebut tonight you will know him. Yes, Frisio's is characteristic.
Vere will be amused."
With a light tone he hid a faint chagrin.
"What fun!" repeated Vere. "If I had diamonds I should put them on."
She too was hiding something, one sentiment with another very different. But her youth came to her aid, and
very soon the second excitement really took the place of the first, and she was joyously alive to the prospect
of a novel gayety.
"I must not eat anything more," said Hermione. "I believe the Marchesino is ordering something marvellous
for us, all the treasures of the sea. We must be up to the mark. He really is a good fellow."
"Yes," said Artois. "He is. I have a genuine liking for him."
He said it with obvious sincerity.
"I am going," said Vere. "I must think about clothes. And I must undo my hair again and get Maria to dry it
thoroughly, or I shall look frightening."
She went out quickly, her eyes sparkling.
"Vere is delighted," said Hermione.
"Yes, indeed she is."
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"And you are not. Would you rather avoid the Marchesino tonight, Emile, and not come with us? Perhaps I
am selfish. I would so very much rather have you with us."
"If Doro asks me I shall certainly come. It's true that I wish you were not engaged tonightI should have
enjoyed a quiet evening here. But we shall have many quiet, happy evenings together this summer, I hope."
"I wonder if we shall?" said Hermione, slowly.
"Youwhy?"
"I don't know. Oh, I am absurd, probably. One has such strange ideas, houses based on sand, or on air, or
perhaps on nothing at all."
She got up, went to her writingtable, opened a drawer, and took out of it a letter.
"Emile," she said, coming back to him with it in her hand, "would you like to explain this to me?"
"What is it?"
"The letter I found from you when I came back from Capri."
"But does it need explanation?"
"It seemed to me as if it did. Read it and see."
He took it from her, opened it and read it.
"Well?" he said.
"Isn't the real meaning between the lines?"
"If it is, cannot you decipher it?"
"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.
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"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 today 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 youhaven'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 décor. 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
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franklywere 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 themof which both had been sensitive and fully consciouspassed 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 thenthe 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. "OrI 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 thunderstorm. 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 today already. How many more will greet me
tonight?"
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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.
"This is a new frock, and my very smartest," she said; "and you dared to abuse Paris!"
"Being a man. I must retract now. You are right, we cannot do without it. Buthave you an umbrella?"
"An umbrella?"
She moved and laughed again, much more gayly.
"I am serious. Come here and look at Ischia."
She went with him quickly to the window.
"That blackness does look wicked. But it's a long way off."
"I think it is coming this way."
"Oh, but"and she went to the opposite window"the sky is perfectly clear towards Naples. And look how
still the sea is."
"Too still. It is like steel."
"Hush! Listen!"
She held up her hand. They both heard a faroff sound of busy panting on the sea.
"That must be the launch!" she said.
Her eyes were gay and expectant. It was evident that she was in high spirits, that she was looking forward to
this unusual gayety.
"Yes."
"Doesn't it sound in a hurry, as if the Marchesino was terribly afraid of being late?"
"Get your umbrella, Vere, and a waterproof. You will want them both."
At that moment Hermione came in.
"Madre, the launch is coming in a frightful hurry, and Monsieur Emile says we must take umbrellas."
"Surely it isn't going to rain?"
"There is a thunderstorm coming up from Ischia, I believe," said Artois.
"Then we will take our cloaks in case. It is fearfully hot. I thought so when I was dressing. No doubt the
launch will have a cabin."
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A siren hooted.
"That is the Marchesino saluting us!" cried Vere. "Come along, Madre! Maria! Maria!"
She ran out, calling for the cloaks.
"Do you like Vere's frock, Emile?" said Hermione, as they followed.
"Yes. She looks deliciousbut quite like a little woman of the world."
"Ah, you like her best as the Island child. So do I. Oh, Emile!"
"What is it?"
"I can't help it. I hate Vere's growing up."
"Few things can remain unchanged for long. This sea will be unrecognizable before we return."
Gaspare met them on the landing with solemn eyes.
"There is going to be a great storm, Signora," he said. "It is coming from Ischia."
"So Don Emilio thinks. But we will take wraps, and we are going in a launch. It will be all right, Gaspare."
"Shall I come with you, Signora?"
"Well, Gaspare, you see it is the Marchese's launch"
"If you would like me to come, I will ask the Signore Marchese."
"We'll see how much room there is."
"Si, Signora."
He went down to receive the launch.
"Emile," Hermione said, as he disappeared, "can you understand what a comfort to me Gaspare is? Ah, if
people knew how women love those who are ready to protect them! It's quite absurd, but just because
Gaspare said that, I'd fifty times rather have him with us than go without him."
"I understand. I love your watchdog, too."
She touched his arm.
"No one could ever understand the merits of a watchdog better than you. That's right, Maria; we shall be
safer with these."
The Marchesino stood at the foot of the cliff, bareheaded, to receive them. He was in evening dress, what he
called "smoking," with a flower in his buttonhole, and a straw hat, and held a pair of white kid gloves in his
hand. He looked in rapturous spirits, but ceremonial. When he caught sight of Artois on the steps behind
Hermione and Vere, however, he could not repress an exclamation of "Emilio!"
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He took Hermione's and Vere's hands, bowed over them and kissed them. Then he turned to his friend.
"Caro Emilio! You are back! You must come with us! You must dine at Frisio's."
"May I?" said Artois.
"You must. This is delightful. See, Madame," he added to Hermione, suddenly breaking into awful French,
"we have the English flag! Your Jack! Voila, the great, the only Jack! I salute him! Let me help you!"
As Hermione stepped into the launch she said:
"I see there is plenty of room. I wonder if you would mind my taking my servant, Gaspare, to look after the
cloaks and umbrellas. It seems absurd, but he says a storm is coming, and"
"A storm!" cried the Marchesino. "Of course your Gaspare must come. Which is he?"
"There."
The Marchesino spoke to Gaspare in Italian, telling him to join the two sailors in the stern of the launch. A
minute afterwards he went to him and gave him some cigarettes. Then he brought from the cabin two
bouquets of flowers, and offered them to Hermione and Vere, who, with Artois, were settling themselves in
the bows. The siren sounded. They were off, cutting swiftly through the oily sea.
"A storm, Signora. Cloaks and umbrellas!" said the Marchesino, shooting a glance of triumph at "Cara
Emilio," whose presence to witness his success completed his enjoyment of it. "But it is a perfect night. Look
at the sea. Signorina, let me put the cushion a little higher behind you. It is not right. You are not perfectly
comfortable. And everything must be perfect for you tonighteverything." He arranged the cushion
tenderly. "The weather, too! Why, where is the storm?"
"Over Ischia," said Artois.
"It will stay there. Ischia! It is a volcano. Anything terrible may happen there."
"And Vesuvius?" said Hermione, laughing.
The Marchesino threw up his chin.
"We are not going to Vesuvius. I know Naples, Signora, and I promise you fine weather. We shall take our
coffee after dinner outside upon the terrace at the one and only Frisio's."
He chattered on gayly. His eyes were always on Vere, but he talked chiefly to Hermione, with the obvious
intention of fascinating the mother in order that she might be favorably disposed towards him, and later on
smile indulgently upon his flirtation with the daughter. His proceedings were carried on with a frankness that
should have been disarming, and that evidently did disarm Hermione and Vere, who seemed to regard the
Marchesino as a very lively boy. But Artois was almost immediately conscious of a secret irritation that
threatened to spoil his evening.
The Marchesino was triumphant. Emilio had wished to prevent him from knowing these ladies. Why?
Evidently because Emilio considered him dangerous. Now he knew the ladies. He was actually their host.
And he meant to prove to Emilio how dangerous he could be. His eyes shot a lively defiance at his friend,
then melted as they turned to Hermione, melted still more as they gazed with unwinking sentimentality into
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the eyes of Vere. He had no inward shyness to contend against, and was perfectly at his ease; and Artois
perceived that his gayety and sheer animal spirits were communicating themselves to his companions. Vere
said little, but she frequently laughed, and her face lit up with eager animation. And she, too, was quite at her
ease. The direct, and desirous, glances of the Marchesino did not upset her innocent self possession at all,
although they began to upset the selfpossession of Artois. As he sat, generally in silence, listening to the
frivolous and cheerful chatter that never stopped, while the launch cut its way through the solemn, steellike
sea towards the lights of Posilipo. He felt that he was apart because he was clever, as if his cleverness caused
loneliness.
They travelled fast. Soon the prow of the launch was directed to a darkness that lay below, and to the right of
a line of brilliant lights that shone close to the sea; and a boy dressed in white, holding a swinging lantern,
and standing, like a statue, in a small niche of rock almost flush with the water, hailed them, caught the
gunwale of the launch with one hand, and brought it close in to the wall that towered above them.
"Do we get out here? But where do we go?" said Hermione.
"There is a staircase. Let me"
The Marchesino was out in a moment and helped them all to land. He called to the sailors that he would send
down food and wine to them and Gaspare. Then, piloted by the boy with the lantern, they walked up carefully
through dark passages and over crumbling stairs, turned to the left, and came out upon a small terrace above
the sea and facing the curving lamps of Naples. Just beyond was a long restaurant, lined with great windows
on one side and with mirrors on the other, and blazing with light.
"Ecco!" cried the Marchesino. "Ecco lo Scoglio di Frisio! And here is the Padrone!" he added, as a small,
brighteyed man, with a military figure and fierce mustaches, came briskly forward to receive them.
CHAPTER XIII
The dinner, which was served at a table strewn with red carnations close to an open window, was a gay one,
despite Artois. It could hardly have been otherwise with a host so complacent, so attentive, so selfpossessed,
so hilarious as the Marchesino. And the Padrone of the restaurant warmly seconded the efforts of the giver of
the feast. He hovered perpetually, but always discreetly, near, watchfully directing the middleaged waiters
in their duties, smiling to show his teeth, stained with tobacco juice, or drawing delicately close to relate
anecdotes connected with the menu.
The soup, a "zuppa di pesce alla marinara" remarkable for its beautiful red color, had been originally invented
by the chef of Frisio's for the exQueen Natalie of Servia, who had deigned to come, heavily veiled, to lunch
at the Scoglio, and had finally thrown off her veil and her incognito, and written her name in the visitors'
book for all to see. The Macaroni a l'Imperatrice had been the favorite plat of the dead Empress Elizabeth of
Austria, who used to visit Frisio's day after day, and who always demanded two thingsan eruption of
Vesuvius and "Funiculi, funicula!" William Ewart Gladstone had deigned to praise the "oeufs a la
Gladstone," called henceforth by his name, when he walked over from the Villa Rendel to breakfast; and the
delicious punch served before the dolce, and immediately after the "Pollo panato alla Frisio," had been lauded
by the late Czar of all the Russias, who was drinking a glass of itaccording to the solemn asseveration of
the Padronewhen the telegram announcing the assassination of his father was put into his hand.
Names of very varied popular and great ones of the earth floated about the table. Here, it appeared, Mario
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Costa and Paolo Tosti had composed their most celebrated songs between one course and another. Here Zola
and Tolstoy had written. Here Sarah Bernhardt had ordered a dozen bottles of famous old wine to be sent to
the Avenue Pereire from the cellars of Frisio, and had fallen in love with a cat from Greece. Here Matilde
Serao had penned a lasting testimony to the marital fidelity of her husband.
Everythingeverything had happened here, just here, at Frisio's.
Seeing the amused interest of his guests, the Marchesino encouraged the Padrone to talk, called for his most
noted wines, and demanded at dessert a jug of Asti Spumante, with snow in it, and strawberries floating on
the top.
"You approve of Frisio's, Signorina?" he said, bending towards Vere. "You do not find your evening dull?"
The girl shook her head. A certain excitement was noticeable in her gayetyhad been noticed by her mother
all through the evening. It was really due to the afternoon's incident with Artois, succeeded by this
unexpected festival, in which the lively homage of the Marchesino was mingled with the long procession of
celebrated names introduced by the Padrone. Vere was secretly strung up, had been strung up even before she
stepped into the launch. She felt very happy, but in her happiness there was something feverish, which was
not customary to any mood of hers. She never drank wine, and had taken none tonight, yet as the evening
wore on she was conscious of an effervescence, as if her brain were full of winking bubbles such as rise to
the surface of champagne.
Her imagination was almost furiously alive, and as the Padrone talked, waving his hands and striking
postures like those of a military dictator, she saw the dead Empress, with her fan before her face, nodding her
head to the jig of "Funiculi, funicula," while she watched the red cloud from Vesuvius rising into the starry
sky; she saw Sarah Bernhardt taking the Greek cat upon her knee; the newly made Czar reading the telegram
with his glass of punch beside him; Tosti tracing lines of music; Gladstone watching the sea; and finally the
gaunt figure and the long beard of Tolstoy bending over the book in which he wrote clearly so many years
ago, "Vedi Napoli e poi mori."
"Monsieur Emile, you must write in the wonderful book of Frisio's," she exclaimed.
"We will all write, Signorina!" cried the Marchesino. "Bring the book, Signor Masella!"
The Padrone hastened away to fetch it, but Vere shook her head.
"No, no, we must not write! We are nobodies. Monsieur Emile is a great man. Only he is worthy of such a
book. Isn't it so, Madre?"
Artois felt the color rising to his face at this unexpected remark of the girl. He had been distrait during the
dinner, certainly neither brilliant nor amusing, despite his efforts to seem talkative and cheerful. A depression
had weighed upon him, as it had weighed upon him in the launch during the voyage from the island. He had
felt as if he were apart, even almost as if he were de trop. Had Vere noticed it? Was that the reason of this
sudden and charming demonstration in his favor?
He looked across at her, longing to know. But she was arguing gayly with the Marchesino, who continued to
insist that they must all write their names as a souvenir of the occasion.
"We are nobodies," she repeated.
"You dare to say that you are a nobody!" exclaimed the young man, looking at her with ardent eyes. "Ah,
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Signorina, you do wrong to drink no wine. In wine there is truth, they say. But youyou drink water, and
then you say these dreadful things that are notare not true. Emilio"he suddenly appealed to
Artois"would not the Signorina honor any book by writing her name in it? I ask you if"
"Marchese, don't be ridiculous!" said Vere, with sudden petulance. "Don't ask Monsieur Emile absurd
questions!"
"But he thinks as I do. Emilio, is it not so? Is it not an honor for any book to have the Signorina's name?"
He spoke emphatically and looked really in earnest. Artois felt as if he were listening to a silly boy who
understood nothing.
"Let us all write our names," he said. "Here comes the book."
The Padrone bore it proudly down between the mirrors and the windows.
But Vere suddenly got up.
"I won't write my name," she said, sticking out her chin with the little determined air that was sometimes
characteristic of her. "I am going to see what Gaspare and the sailors are doing."
And she walked quickly away towards the terrace.
The Marchesino sprang up in despair.
"Shall we all go, Madame?" he said. "I have ordered coffee. It will be brought in a moment to the terrace."
Hermione glanced at Artois.
"I will stay here for a little. I want to look at the book," she said. "We will come in a moment. I don't take
coffee."
"Thenwe will be upon the terrace. A rivederci per un momentopour un moment, Madame."
He bowed over Hermione's hand, and hurried away after Vere.
The Padrone put his book very carefully down between Hermione and Artois, and left them with a murmured
apology that he had to look after another party of guests which had just come into the restaurant.
"I thought you would be glad to get rid of those young things for a minute," said Hermione, in explanation of
what she had done.
Artois did not reply, but turned over the leaves of the book mechanically.
"Oh, here is Tolstoy's signature," he said, stopping.
Hermione drew her chair nearer.
"What a clear handwriting!" she said.
"Yes, isn't it? 'Vedi Napoli e poi mori.' "
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"Where are you going to write?"
He was looking towards the outer room of the restaurant which led onto the terrace.
He turned the leaves.
"I?ohhere is a space."
He took up a pen the Padrone had brought, dipped it into the ink.
"What's the good?" he said, making a movement as if to push the book away.
"No; do write."
"Why should I?"
"I agree with Vere. Your name will add something worth having to the book."
"Oh, well"
A rather bitter expression had come into his face.
"Deadsea fruit!" he muttered.
But he bent, wrote something quickly, signed his name, blotted and shut the book. Hermione had not been
able to see the sentence he had written. She did not ask what it was.
There was a noise of rather shuffling footsteps on the paved floor of the room. Three musicians had come in.
They were shabbily dressed. One was very short, stout, and quite blind, with a gaping mouth that had an odd
resemblance to an elephant's mouth when it lifts its trunk and shows its rolling tongue. He smiled perpetually.
The other two were thin and dreary, middleaged, and hopelesslooking. They stood not far from the table
and began to play on guitars, putting wrong harmonies to a wellknown Neapolitan tune, whose name Artois
could not recall.
"What a pity it is they never put the right bass!" said Hermione.
"Yes. One would suppose they would hit it sometimes by mistake. But they seldom do."
Except for the thin and uncertain music the restaurant was almost silent. The people who had just come in
were sitting down far away at the end of the long room. Hermione and Artois were the only other visitors,
now that Vere and the Marchesino were outside on the terrace.
"Famous though it is, Frisio's does not draw the crowd," said Hermione.
Tonight she found it oddly difficult to talk to her friend, although she had refused the Marchesino's
invitation on purpose to do so.
"Perhaps people were afraid of the storm."
"Well, but it doesn't come."
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"It is close," he said. "Don't you feel it? I do."
His voice was heavy with melancholy, and made her feel sad, even apprehensive.
"Where are the stars?" he added.
She followed his example and leaned out of the great window. Not a star was visible in all the sky.
"You are right. It is coming. I feel it now. The sea is like lead, and the sky, too. There is no sense of freedom
tonight, no outofdoors feeling. And the water is horribly calm."
As they both leaned out they heard, away to the left at some distance, the voices of Vere and the Marchesino.
"I stayed because I thoughtI fancied all the chatter was getting a little on your nerves, Emile," Hermione
said now. "They are so absurdly young, both of them. Wasn't it so?"
"Am I so old that youth should get upon my nerves?" he returned, with a creeping irritation, which, however,
he tried to keep out of his voice.
"No. But of course we can hardly enjoy nonsense that might amuse them immensely. Vere is such a baby,
and your friend is a regular boy, in spite of his selfassurance."
"Women often fancy men to be young in ways in which they are not young," said Artois. "Panacci is very
much of a man, I can assure you."
"Panacci! I never heard you call him that before."
Her eager brown eyes went to his face curiously for a moment. Artois saw that, and said, rather hastily:
"It's true that nearly every one calls him Doro."
Once more they heard the chattering voices, and then a sound of laughter in the darkness. It made Hermione
smile, but Artois moved uneasily. Just then there came to them from the sea, like a blow, a sudden puff of
wind. It hit their faces.
"Do you want to avoid the storm?" Artois said.
"Yes. Do you think"
"I am sure you can only avoid it by going at once. Look!"
He pointed towards the sea. The blackness before them was cut at some distance off by a long, level line of
white.
"What's that?" asked Hermione, peering out.
"Foam."
"Foam! But surely it can't be!"
The wind struck them again. It was like a hot, almost like a sweating hand, coarse and violent, and repugnant.
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Hermione drew in.
"There is something disgusting in nature tonight," she said "something that seems almost unnatural."
The blind man began to sing behind them. His voice was soft and throaty. The phrasing was sickly. Some
notes trembled. As he sang he threw back his head, stared with his sightless eyes at the ceiling, and showed
his tongue. The whole of his fat body swayed. His face became scarlet. The two hopeless, middleaged men
on either side of him stared into vacancy as, with dirty hands on which the veins stood out, they played wrong
basses to the melody on their guitars.
Suddenly Hermione was seized with a sensation of fear.
"Let us go. We had better go. Ah!"
She cried out. The wind, returning, had caught the white tablecloth. It flew up towards her, then sank down.
"What a fool I am!" she said. "I thoughtI didn't know"
She felt that really it was something in Artois which had upset her nerves, but she did not say so. In that
moment, when she was startled, she had instinctively put out her hand towards him. But, as instinctively, she
drew it back without touching him.
"Oh, here is Gaspare!" she said.
An immense, a really ridiculous sense of relief came to her as she saw Gaspare's sturdy legs marching
decisively towards them, his great eyes examining the row of mirrors, the tables, the musicians, then settling
comfortably upon his Padrona. Over his arms he carried the cloaks, and his hands grasped the two umbrellas.
At that moment, if she had translated her impulse into an action, Hermione would have given Gaspare a good
hugjust for being himself; for being always the same: honest, watchful, perfectly fearless, perfectly natural,
and perfectly determined to take care of his Padrona and his Padroncina.
Afterwards she remembered that she had found in his presence relief from something that had distressed her
in her friend.
"Signora, the storm is coming. Look at the sea!" said Gaspare. He pointed to the white line which was
advancing in the blackness.
"I told the Signorina, and that Signore"
A fierce flash of lightning zigzagged across the windowspace, and suddenly the sound of the wind was loud
upon the sea, and mingled with the growing murmur of waves.
"Ecco!" said Gaspare. "Signora, you ought to start at once. But the Signor Marchese"
The thunder followed. Hermione had been waiting for it, and felt almost relieved when it came crashing
above the Scoglio di Frisio.
"The Signor Marchese, Gaspare?" she asked, putting on the cloak he was holding for her.
"He only laughs, Signora," said Gaspare, rather contemptuously. "The Signor Marchese thinks only of his
pleasure."
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"Well, he must think of yours now," said Artois, decisively, to Hermione. "You will have a rough voyage to
the island, even as it is."
They were walking towards the entrance. Hermione had noticed the pronoun, and said quietly:
"You will take a carriage to the hotel, or a tram?"
"The tram, I think. It passes the door here."
He glanced at her and added:
"I noticed that the cabin of the launch is very small, and as Gaspare is with you"
"Oh, of course!" she said quickly. "It would be ridiculous for you to come all the way back with us. Besides,
there is not room in the cabin."
She did not know why, but she felt guilty for a moment. Yet she had done nothing.
"There is the rain," said Artois.
They were just entering the outer room from which the terrace opened.
"Vere!" called Hermione.
As she called the lightning flashed again, and showed her Vere and the Marchesino running in from the
darkness. Vere was laughing, and looked more joyous than before.
"Such a storm, Madre! The sea is a mass of foam. It's glorious! Hark at the fishermen!"
From the blackness below rose hoarse shouts and prolonged callssome near, some far. Faintly with them
mingled the quavering and throaty voice of the blind man, now raised in "Santa Lucia."
"What are we going to do, Monsieur Emile?"
"We must get home at once before it gets worse," said Hermione. "Marchese, I am so sorry, but I am afraid
we must ask for the launch."
"But, madame, it is only a squall. By midnight it will be all over. I promise you. I am a Neapolitan."
"Ah, but you promised that there would be no storm at all."
"Saantaa Luuciia! Santa Lucia!"
The blind man sounded like one in agony. The thunder crashed again just above him, as if it desired to beat
down his sickly voice.
Artois felt a sharp stab of neuralgia over his eyes.
Behind, in the restaurant, the waiters were running over the pavement to shut the great windows. The rush of
the rain made a noise like quantities of silk rustling.
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The Marchesino laughed, quite unabashed. His cheeks were slightly flushed and his eyes shone.
"Could I tell the truth, Signora? You might have refused to come. But now I speak the solemn truth. By
midnight"
"I'm afraid we really can't stay so late as that."
"But there is a piano. I will play valses. I will sing." He looked ardently at Vere, who was eagerly watching
the sea from the window.
"And we will dance, the Signorina and I."
Artois made a brusque movement towards the terrace, muttering something about the launch. A glare of
lightning lit up the shore immediately below the terrace, showing him the launch buffeted by the waves that
were now breaking over the sandy beach. There came a summoning call from the sailors.
"If you do stay," Artois said to the Marchesino, turning back to them, "you must send the launch round to
Mergellina. I don't believe it can stop here."
"Well, but there are rocks, Caro Emilio. It is protected!"
"Not enough."
"Signora," said Gaspare, "we had better go. It will only get worse. The sea is not too bad yet."
"Come along!" Hermione cried, with decision. "Come, Vere! I'm very sorry, Marchese, but we must really
get back at once. Goodnight, Emile! Gaspare give me your arm."
And she set off at once, clinging to Gaspare, who held an open umbrella over her.
"Goodnight, Vere!" said Artois.
The girl was looking at him with surprised eyes.
"You are going"
"I shall take the tram."
"Ohof course. That is your quickest way."
"Signorinathe umbrella!"
The Marchesino was offering his arm to conduct Vere to the launch. He cast a challenging look of triumph at
Artois.
"I would come in the launch," Artois said hastily. "But Goodnight!"
He turned away.
"A rivederci, Emilio!" called the Marchesino.
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"derci!"
The last syllables only came back to them through the wind and the rain.
"Take my arm, Signorina."
"Grazie, it is all right like this."
"Ma"
"I am quite covered, really, thank you."
She hurried on, smiling, but not taking his arm. She knew how to be obstinate.
"Ma Signorinamais Mademoiselle"
"Gaspare! Is Madre all safe in the launch?"
Vere glided from under the Marchesino's umbrella and sought the shade of Gaspare's. Behind, the
Marchesino was murmuring to himself Neapolitan street expressions.
"Si, Signorina."
Gaspare's face had suddenly lighted up. His Padroncina's little hand was holding tightly to his strong arm.
"Take care, Signorina. That is water!"
"Oh, I was nearly in. I thought"
He almost lifted her into the launch, which was rising and falling on the waves.
"Madre! What a night!"
Vere sank down on the narrow seat of the little cabin. The Marchesino jumped aboard. The machine in the
stern throbbed. They rushed forward into the blackness of the impenetrable night, the white of the leaping
foam, the hissing of the rain, the roaring of the wind. In a blurred and hasty vision the lights of Frisio's ran
before them, fell back into the storm like things defeated. Hermione fancied she discerned for a second the
blind man's scarlet face and open mouth, the Padrone at a window waving a frantic adieu, having only just
become aware of their departure. But if it were so they were gone before she knew gone into mystery, with
Emile and the world.
The Marchesino inserted himself reproachfully into the cabin. He had turned up the collar of his "smoking,"
and drawn the silk lapels forward over his soft shirtfront. His white gloves were saturated. He came to sit
down by Vere.
"Madame!" he said reproachfully, "we should have waited. The sea is too rough. Really, it is dangerous. And
the Signorina and Iwe could have danced together."
Hermione could not help laughing, though she did not feel gay.
"I should not have danced," said Vere. "I could not. I should have had to watch the storm."
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She was peering out of the cabin window at the wild foam that leaped up round the little craft and
disappeared in the darkness. There was no sensation of fear in her heart, only a passion of interest and an odd
feeling of triumph.
To dance with the Marchesino at the Scoglio di Frisio would have been banal in comparison with this
glorious progress through the night in the teeth of opposing elements. She envied Gaspare, who was outside
with the sailors, and whose form she could dimly see, a blur against the blackness. She longed to take off her
smart little hat and her French frock, and be outside too, in the wind and the rain.
"It is ridiculous to be dressed like this!" she said, quickly, taking off the glove she had put on her left hand.
"You poor Marchese!"
She looked at his damp "smoking," his soaking gloves and deplorable expression, and could not repress a
little rush of laughter.
"Do forgive me! Madre, I know I'm behaving shamefully, but we are all so hopelessly inappropriate. Your
diamond broach, Madre! And your hat is all on one side. Gaspare must have knocked it with the umbrella. I
am sure we all look like hens in a shower!"
She leaned back against the swaying side of the cabin and laughed till the tears were in her eyes. The sudden
coming of the storm had increased the excitement that had been already within her, created by the incidents
of the day.
"Vere!" said her mother, but smiling through the protest.
The Marchesino showed his big white teeth. Everything that Vere did seemed to develop his admiration for
her. He was delighted with this mood, and forgot his disappointment. But there was a glint of wonder in his
eyes, and now he said:
"But the Signorina is not afraid! She does not cry out! She does not call upon the Madonna and the Saints!
My mother, my sisters, if they were here"
The prow of the launch struck a wave which burst over the bows, scattering spray to the roof of the cabin.
"But I like it, I love it!" said Vere. "Don't you?don't you, Madre?"
Before Hermione could reply the Marchesino exclaimed:
"Signorina, in the breast of an angel you have the heart of a lion! The sea will never harm you. How could it?
It will treat you as it treats the Saint of your pool, San Francesco. You know what the sailors and the
fishermen say? In the wildest storms, when the sea crashes upon the rocks, never, never does it touch San
Francesco. Never does it put out the lamp that burns at San Francesco's feet."
"Yes, I have heard them say that," Vere said.
Suddenly her face had become serious. The romance in the belief of the seamen had got hold of her, had
touched her. The compliment to herself she ignored. Indeed, she had already forgotten it.
"Only the other night" she began.
But she stopped suddenly.
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"You know," she said, changing to something else, "that when the fishermen pass under San Francesco's
pedestal they bend down, and lift a little water from the sea, and sprinkle it into the boat, and make the sign of
the cross. They call it 'acqua benedetta.' I love to see them do that."
Another big wave struck the launch and made it shiver. The Marchesino crossed himself, but quite
mechanically. He was intent on Vere.
"I wonder," the girl said, "whether tonight San Francesco will not be beaten by the waves, whether his light
will be burning when we reach the island."
She paused, then she added, in a lower voice:
"I do hope it willdon't you, Madre?"
"Yes, Vere," said her mother.
Something in her mother's voice made the girl look up at her swiftly, then put a hand into hers, a hand that
was all sympathy. She felt that just then her mother's imagination was almost, or quite, one with hers. The
lights of Naples were gone, swallowed by the blackness of the storm. And the tiny light at the feet of the
Saint, of San Francesco, who protected the men of the sea, and the boysRuffo, too! would it greet them,
star of the sea to their pool, star of the sea to their island, their Casa del Mare, when they had battled through
the storm to San Francesco's feet?
"I do hope it will."
Why did Hermione's heart echo Vere's words with such a strenuous and sudden passion, such a deep desire?
She scarcely knew then. But she knew that she wanted a light to be shining for her when she neared
homelonged for it, needed it specially that night. If San Francesco's lamp were burning quietly amid the
fury of the sea in such a blackness as this about themwell, it would seem like an omen. She would take it
as an omen of happiness.
And if it were not burning?
She, too, longed to be outside with Gaspare and the sailors, staring into the darkness with eyes keen as those
of a seaman, looking for the light. Since Vere's last words and her reply they had sat in silence. Even the
Marchesino's vivacity was suddenly abated, either by the increasing violence of the storm or by the change in
Vere. It would have been difficult to say by which. The lightning flashed. The thunder at moments seemed to
split the sky asunder as a charge of gunpowder splits asunder a rock. The head wind rushed by, yet had never
passed them, but was forever coming furiously to meet them. On the roof of the little cabin the rain made a
noise that was no longer like the rustle of silk, but was like the crackle of musketry.
There was something oppressive, something even almost terrible, in being closely confined, shut in by low
roof and narrow walls from such sweeping turbulence, such a clamor of wind and water and the sky.
Hermione looked at her diamond brooch, then at her cloak.
Slowly she lifted her hand and began to button it.
Vere moved and began to button up hers. Hermione glanced at her, and saw a watchful, shining,
halfhumorous, halfpassionate look in her eyes that could not be mistaken.
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She dropped her hands.
"No, Vere!"
"Yes, Madre! Yes, yes, yes!"
The Marchesino stared.
"No, I did not"
"You did! You did, Madre! It's no use! I understood directly."
She began quickly to take off her hat.
"Marchese, we are going out."
"Vere, this is absurd."
"We are going outside, Marchese. Madre wants air."
The Marchesino, accustomed only to the habits and customs of Neapolitan women, looked frankly as if he
thought Hermione mad.
"Poor Madre must have a breath of air."
"I will open the window, Signora!"
"And the rain all over her, and the thunder close above her, and the sea in her face, the seathe sea!"
She clapped her hands.
"Gaspare! Gaspare!"
She put her face to the glass. Gaspare, who was standing up in the stern, with his hands holding fast to the rail
that edged the cabin roof, bent down till his brown face was on a level with hers, and his big eyes were
staring inquiringly into her eyes.
"We are coming out."
On the other side of the glass Gaspare made violently negative gestures. One word only came to those inside
the cabin through the uproar of the elements.
"Impossible!"
"Signorina," said the Marchesino, "you cannot mean it. But you will be washed off. And the wateryou will
be drowned. It cannot be."
"Marchese, look at Madre! If she stays inside another minute she will be ill. She is stifling! Quickly!
Quickly!"
The Marchesino, whose sense of humor was not of a kind to comprehend this freak of Vere's, was for once
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really taken aback. There were two sliding doors to the cabin, one opening into the bows of the launch, the
other into the stern. He got up, looking very grave and rather confused, and opened the former. The wind
rushed in, carrying with it spray from the sea. At the same moment there was a loud tapping on the glass
behind them. Vere looked round. Gaspare was crouching down with his face against the pane. She put her ear
to the glass by his mouth.
"Signorina, you must not go into the bows," he called. "If you will come out, come here, and I will take care
of you."
He knew Vere's love of the sea and understood her desire.
"Go, Vere," said Hermione.
The Marchesino shut the door and stood by it, bending and looking doubtful.
"I will stay here with the Marchese. I am really too old to face such a tempest, and the Marchese has no coat.
He simply can't go."
"But, Signora, it does not matter! I am ready."
"Impossible. Your clothes would be ruined. Go along, Vere! Turn up your collar."
She spoke almost as if to a boy, and like a gay boy Vere obeyed her and slipped out to Gaspare.
"You really won't come, Madre?"
"No. Buttell me if you see the light."
The girl nodded, and the door moved into its place, shutting out the wind.
Then the Marchesino sat down and looked at his damp patentleather boots.
He really could not comprehend these English ladies. That Vere was greatly attracted by him he thoroughly
believed. How could it be otherwise? Her liveliness he considered direct encouragement. And then she had
gone out to the terrace after dinner, leaving her mother. That was to make him follow her, of course. She
wanted to be alone with him. In a Neapolitan girl such conduct would have been a declaration. A Neapolitan
mother would not have allowed them to sit together on the terrace without a chaperon. But the English
mother had deliberately remained within and had kept Caro Emilio with her. What could such conduct mean,
if not that the Signorina was in love with him, the Marchesino, and that the Signorina's mamma was perfectly
willing for him to make love to her child?
And yetand yet?
There was something in Vere that puzzled him, that had kept him strangely discreet upon the terrace, that
made him silent and thoughtful now. Had she been a typical English girl he might have discerned something
of the truth of her. But Vere was lively, daring, passionate, and not without some traces of halfhumorous
and wholly innocent coquetry. She was not at all what the Neapolitan calls "a lump of snow to cool the
wine." In her innocence there was fire. That was what confused the Marchesino.
He stared at the cabin door by which Vere had gone out, and his round eyes became almost pathetic for a
moment. Then it occurred to him that perhaps this exit was a second ruse, like Vere's departure to the terrace,
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and he made a movement as if to go out and brave the storm. But Hermione stopped him decisively.
"No, Marchese," she said, "really I cannot let you expose yourself to the rain and the sea in that airy costume.
I might be your mother."
"Signora, but you"
"No, compliments apart, I really might be, and you must let me use a mother's authority. Till we reach the
island stay here and make the best of me."
Hermione had touched the right note. Metaphorically, the Marchesino cast himself at her feet. With a gallant
assumption of undivided adoration he burst into conversation, and, though his eyes often wandered to the
blurred glass, against which pressed and swayed a blackness that told of those outside, his sense of his duty as
a host gradually prevailed, and he and Hermione were soon talking quite cheerfully together.
Vere had forgotten him as utterly as she had forgotten Naples, swallowed up by the night. Just then only the
sea, the night, Gaspare, and the two sailors who were managing the launch were real to her besides herself.
For a moment even her mother had ceased to exist in her consciousness. As the sea swept the deck of the
little craft it swept her mind clear to make more room for itself.
She stood by Gaspare, touching him, and clinging on, as he did, to the rail. Impenetrably black was the night.
Only here and there, at distances she could not begin to judge of, shone vaguely lights that seemed to dance
and fade and reappear like marsh lights in a world of mist. Were they on sea or land? She could not tell and
did not ask. The sailors doubtless knew, but she respected them and their duty too much to speak to them,
though she had given them a smile as she came out to join them, and had received two admiring salutes in
reply. Gaspare, too, had smiled at her with a pleasure which swiftly conquered the faint reproach in his
eloquent eyes. He liked his Padroncina's courage, liked the sailors of the Signor Marchese to see it. He was
soaked to the skin, but he, too, was enjoying the adventure, a rare one on this summer sea, which had slept
through so many shining days and starry nights like a "bambino in dolce letargo."
Tonight it was awake, and woke up others, Vere's nature and his.
"Where is the island, Gaspare?" cried Vere through the wind to him.
"Chi lo sa, Signorina.
He waved one hand to the blackness before them.
"It must be there."
She strained her eyes, then looked away towards where the land must be. At a long distance across the
leaping foam she saw one light. As the boat rose and sank on the crests and into the hollows of the waves the
light shone and faded, shone and faded. She guessed it to be a light at the Antico Giuseppone. Despite the
head wind and the waves that met them the launch travelled bravely, and soon the light was gone. She told
herself that it must have been at the Giuseppone, and that now they had got beyond the point, and were
opposite to the harbor of the Villa Rosebery. But no lights greeted them from the White Palazzo in the wood,
or from the smaller white house low down beside the sea. And again she looked straight forward.
Now she was intent on San Francesco. She was thinking of him, of the Pool, of the island. And she thrilled
with joy at the thought of the wonderful wildness of her home. As they drew on towards it the waves were
bigger, the wind was stronger. Even on calm nights there was always a breeze when one had passed the
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Giuseppone going towards Ischia, and beyond the island there was sometimes quite a lively sea. What would
it be tonight? Her heart cried out for a crescendo. Within her, at that moment, was a desire like the
motorist's for speed. More! more! More wind! More sea! More uproar from the elements!
And San Francesco all alone in this terrific blackness! Had he not been dashed from his pedestal by the
waves? Was the light at his feet still burning?
"Il Santo!" she said to Gaspare.
He bent his head till it was close to her lips.
"Il Santo! What has become of him, Gaspare?"
"He will be there, Signorina."
So Gaspare, too, held to the belief of the seamen of the Bay. He had confidence in the obedience of the sea,
this sea that roared around them like a tyrant. Suddenly she had no doubt. It would be so. The saint would be
untouched. The light would still be burning. She looked for it. And now she remembered her mother. She
must tell her mother directly she saw it. But all was blackness still.
And the launch seemed weary, like a live thing whose strength is ebbing, who strains and pants and struggles
gallantly, not losing heart but losing physical force. Surely it was going slower. She laid one hand upon the
cabin roof as if in encouragement. Her heart was with the launch, as the seaman's is with his boat when it
resists, surely for his sake consciously, the assault of the great sea.
"Coraggio!"
She was murmuring the word. Gaspare looked at her. And the word was in his eyes as it should be in all eyes
that look at youth. And the launch strove on.
"Coraggio! Coraggio!"
The spray was in her face. Her hair was wet with the rain. Her French frockthat was probably ruined! But
she knew that she had never felt more happy. And nowit was like a miracle! Suddenly out of the darkness
a second darkness shaped itself, a darkness that she knew the island. And almost simultaneously there
shone out a little steady light.
"Ecco il Santo!"
"Ecco! Ecco!"
Vere called out: "Madre! Madre!"
She bent down.
"Madre! The light is burning."
The sailors, too, bent down, right down to the water. They caught at it with their hands, Gaspare, too. Vere
understood, and, kneeling on the gunwale, firmly in Gaspare's grasp, she joined in their action.
She sprinkled the boat with the acqua benedetta and made the sign of the cross.
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CHAPTER XIV
When, the next day, Artois sat down at his table to work he found it impossible to concentrate his mind. The
irritation of the previous evening had passed away. He attributed it to the physical effect made upon him by
the disturbed atmosphere. Now the sun shone, the sky was clear, the sea calm. He had just come out of an
icecold bath, had taken his coffee, and smoked one cigarette. A quiet morning lay before him. Quiet?
He got up and went to the window.
On the wooden roof of the bath establishment opposite rows of towels, hung out to dry, were moving
listlessly to and fro in the soft breeze. Capri was almost hidden by haze in the distance. In the sea, just below
him, several heads of swimmers moved. One boy was "making death." He floated on his back with his eyes
closed and his arms extended. His body, giving itself without resistance to every movement of the water,
looked corpselike and ghostly.
A companion shouted to him. He threw up his arms suddenly and shouted a reply in the broadest Neapolitan,
then began to swim vigorously towards the slimy rocks at the base of Castel dell' Ovo. Upon the wooden
terrace of the baths among green plants in pots stood three women, probably friends of the proprietor. For
though it was already hot, the regular bathing season of Naples had not yet begun and the baths were not
completed. Only in July, after the festa of the Madonna del Carmine, do the Neapolitans give themselves
heart and soul to the sea. Artois knew this, and wondered idly what the women were doing on the terrace.
One had a dog. It sat in the sun and began to cough. A long wagon on two wheels went by, drawn by two
mules and a thin horse harnessed abreast. It was full of white stone. The driver had bought some green stuff
and flung it down upon the white. He wore a handkerchief on his head. His chest was bare. As he passed
beneath the window he sang a loud song that sounded Eastern, such a song as the Spanish wagoners sing in
Algeria, as they set out by night on their long journeys towards the desert. Upon a tiny platform of wood,
fastened to slanting stakes which met together beneath it in a tripod, a stout man in shirt and trousers, with
black whiskers, was sitting on a chair fishing with a rod and line. A boy sat beside him dangling his legs over
the water. At a little distance a large fishingsmack, with sails set to catch the breeze farther out in the Bay,
was being laboriously rowed towards the open sea by halfnaked men, who shouted as they toiled at the
immense oars.
Artois wondered where they were going. Their skins were a rich orange color. From a distance in the sunlight
they looked like men of gold. Their cries and their fierce movements suggested some fantastic quest to lands
of mysterious tumult.
Artois wished that Vere could see them.
What were the inhabitants of the island doing?
Today his mind was beyond his governance, and roamed like a vagrant on a long, white road. Everything
that he saw below him in the calm radiance of the morning pushed it from thought to thought. Yet none of
these thoughts were valuable. None seemed fully formed. They resembled henids, things seen so far away
that one cannot tell what they are, but is only aware that they exist and can attract attention.
He came out upon his balcony. As he did so he looked down into the road, and saw a hired carriage drive up,
with Hermione in it.
She glanced up and saw him.
"May I come in for a minute?"
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He nodded, smiling, and went out to meet her, glad of this interruption.
They met at the door of the lift. As Hermione stepped out she cast a rather anxious glance at her friend, a
glance that seemed to say that she was not quite certain of her welcome. Artois' eyes reassured her.
"I feel guilty," she said.
"Why?"
"Coming at such an hour. Are you working?"
"No. I don't know why, but I am incapable of work. I feel both lazy and restless, an unfruitful combination.
Perhaps something in me secretly knew that you were coming."
"Then it is my fault."
They came into his sittingroom. It had four windows, two facing the sea, two looking on the road, and the
terraces and garden of the Hotel Hassler. The room scarcely suggested its present occupant. It contained a
lightyellow carpet with pink flowers strewn over it, red andgold chairs, mirrors, a white marble
mantelpiece, a grayandpink sofa with a pink cushion. Only the large writingtable, covered with
manuscripts, letters, and photographs in frames, said something individual to the visitor. Hermione and Vere
were among the photographs.
Hermione sat down on the sofa.
"I have come to consult you about something, Emile."
"What is it?"
"I really meant to ask you last night, but somehow I couldn't"
"Why?"
"I don't know. WeIthere seemed to be a sort of barrier between us didn't there?"
"I was in a bad humor. I was tired after the journey, and perhaps the weather upset me."
"It's all rightone can't be always Well, this is what I wanted to say. I alluded to it yesterday when I told
you about my visit to Naples with Madame Alliani. Do you remember?"
"You hinted you had seen, or heard of, some tragedy."
"Yes. I believe it is a quite ordinary one in Naples. We went to visit a consumptive woman in one of those
narrow streets going uphill to the left of the Via Roma, and while there by chance I heard of it. In the same
house as the sick woman there is a girl. Not many days ago she was beautiful!"
"Yes? What has happened to her?"
"I'll tell you. Her name is Peppina. She is only nineteen, but she has been one of those who are not given a
chance. She was left an orphan very young and went to live with an aunt. This aunt is a horrible old woman. I
believethey say she goes to the Galleria"
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Hermione paused.
"I understand," said Artois.
"She is greedy, wicked, merciless. We had the story from the woman we were visiting, a neighbor. This aunt
forced Peppina into sin. Her beauty, which must have been extraordinary, naturally attracted attention and
turned people's heads. It seems to have driven one man nearly mad. He is a fisherman, not young, and a
married man. It seems that he is notoriously violent and jealous, and thoroughly unscrupulous. He is a
member of the Camorra, too. He pestered Peppina with his attentions, coming day after day from Mergellina,
where he lives with his wife. One night he entered the house and made a scene. Peppina refused finally to
receive his advances, and told him she hated him before all the neighbors. He took out a razor and"
Hermione stopped.
"I understand," said Artois. "He disfigured her."
"Dreadfully."
"It is often done here. Sometimes a youth does it simply to show that a girl is his property. But what is it you
wish to do for Peppina? I see you have a plan in your head."
"I want to have her on the island."
"In what capacity?"
"As a servant. She can work. She is not a bad girl. She has only well, Emile, the aunt only succeeded in
forcing one lover on her. That is the truth. He was rich and bribed the aunt. But of course the neighbors all
know, andthe population here has its virtues, but it is not exactly a delicate population."
"Per Bacco!"
"And now that the poor girl is disfigured the aunt is going to turn her outofdoors. She says Peppina must
go and earn money for herself. Of course nobody will take her. I want to. I have seen her, talked to her. She
would be so thankful. She is in despair. Think of it! Nineteen, and all her beauty gone! Isn't it devilish?"
"And the man?"
"Oh, they say he'll get scarcely anything, if anything. Two or three months, perhaps. He is 'protected.' It
makes my blood boil."
Artois was silent, waiting for her to say more, to ask questions.
"The only thing isVere, Emile," she said.
"Vere?"
"Yes. You know how friendly she is with the servants. I like her to be. But of course till now they have been
all rightso far as I know."
"You do well to add that proviso."
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"Peppina would not wait on us. She would be in the kitchen. Am I justified in taking her? Of course I could
help her with money. If I had not seen her, talked to her, that is what I should have done, no doubt. But she
wantsshe wants everything, peace, a decent home, pure air. I feel she wants the island."
"And the other servants?"
"They need only know she was attacked. They need not know her past history. But all that does not matter. It
is only the question of Vere that troubles me."
"You mean that you are not decided whether you ought to bring into the house with Vere a girl who is not as
Vere is?"
"Yes."
"And you want me to advise you?"
"Yes."
"I can't do that, Hermione."
She looked at him almost as if she were startled.
"Why not? I always rely"
"No, no. This is not a man's business, my business."
He spoke with an odd brusqueness, and there were traces of agitation in his face. Hermione did not at all
understand what feeling was prompting him, but again, as on the previous evening, she felt as if there were a
barrier between themvery slight, perhaps, very shadowy, but definite nevertheless. There was no longer
complete frankness in their relations. At moments her friend seemed to be subtly dominated by some secret
irritation, or anxiety, which she did not comprehend. She had been aware of it yesterday. She was aware of it
now. After his last exclamation she said nothing.
"You are going to this girl now?" he asked.
"I mean to. Yes, I shall go."
She sat still for a minute, looking down at the pinkandyellow carpet.
"And what will you do?"
She looked up at him.
"I think I shall take her to the island. I am almost sure I shall. Emile, I don't believe in cowardice, and I
sometimes think I am inclined to be a coward about Vere. She is growing up. She will be seventeen this year,
very soon. There are girls who marry at sixteen, even English girls."
"That is true."
She could gather nothing from his tone; and now his face was perfectly calm.
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"My instinct is to keep Vere just as she is, to preserve the loveliness of childhood in her as long as possible,
to keep away from her all knowledge of sin, sorrow, the things that distract and torture the world. But I
mustn't be selfish about Vere. I mustn't keep her wrapped in cotton wool. That is unwholesome. And, after
all, Vere must have her life apart from me. Last night I realized that strongly."
"Last night?"
"Yes, from the way in which she treated the Marchese, and later from something else. Last night Vere
showed two sides of a woman's nature the capacity to hold her own, what is vulgarly called 'to keep her
distance,' and the capacity to be motherly."
"Was Vere motherly to the Marchesino, then?" asked Artois, not without irony.
"Noto Ruffo."
"That boy? But where was he last night?"
"When we got back to the island, and the launch had gone off, Vere and I stood for a minute at the foot of the
steps to listen to the roaring of the sea. Vere loves the sea."
"I know that."
As he spoke he thought of something that Hermione did not know.
"The pool was protected, and under the lee of the island it was comparatively calm. But the rain was falling in
torrents. There was one fishingboat in the pool, close to where we were, and as we were standing and
listening, Vere said, suddenly, 'Madre, that's Ruffo's boat!' I asked her how she knewbecause he has
changed into another boat latelyshe had told me that. 'I saw his head,' she answered. 'He's there and he's
not asleep. Poor boy, in all this rain!' Ruffo has been ill with fever, as I told you, and when Vere said that I
remembered it at once."
"Had you told Vere yet?" interposed Artois.
"No. But I did then. Emile, she showed an agitation thatwell, it was almost strange, I think. She begged me
to make him come into the house and spend the night there, safe from the wind and the rain."
"And you did, of course?"
"Yes. He was looking very pale and shaky. The men let him come. They were nice and sympathetic. I think
they are fond of the boy."
"Ruffo seems to know how to attract people to him."
"Yes."
"And so Vere played the mother to Ruffo?"
"Yes. I never saw that side of her before. She was a woman then. Eventually Ruffo slept with Gaspare."
"And how did Gaspare accept the situation?"
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"Better than I should have expected. I think he likes Ruffo personally, though he is inclined to be suspicious
and jealous of any strangers who come into our lives. But I haven't had time to talk to him this morning."
"Is Ruffo still in the house?"
"Oh no. He went off in the boat. They came for him about eight."
"Ah!"
Artois went to the window and looked out. But now he saw nothing, although the three women were still
talking and gesticulating on the terrace of the bathhouse, more fishingboats were being towed or rowed out
into the Bay, carts were passing by, and people were strolling in the sun.
"You say that Vere showed agitation last night?" he said, turning round after a moment.
"About Ruffo's illness? It really almost amounted to that. But Vere was certainly excited. Didn't you notice
it?"
"I think she was."
"Emile," Hermione said, after an instant of hesitation, "you remember my saying to you the other day that
Vere was not a stranger to me?"
"Yes, quite well."
"You said nothingI don't think you agreed. Well, since that day only since thenI have sometimes felt
that there is much in Vere that I do not understand, much that is hidden from me. Has she changed lately?"
"She is at an age when development seems sudden, and is often striking, even startling."
"I don't know why, butbut I dread something," Hermione said. "I feel as ifno, I don't know what I feel.
But if Vere should ever drift away from me I don't know how I could bear it. A boyone expects him to go
out into the world. But a girl! I want to keep Vere. I must keep Vere. If anything else were to be taken from
me I don't think I could bear it."
"Vere loves you. Be sure of that."
"Yes."
Hermione got up.
"Well, you won't give me your advice?"
"No, Hermione."
He looked at her steadily.
"You must treat Vere as you think best, order her life as you think right. In some things you do wisely to
consult me. But in this you must rely on yourself. Let your heart teach you. Do not ask questions of my
head."
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"Your head!" she exclaimed.
There was a trace of disappointment, even of surprise, in her voice. She looked at him as if she were going to
say more, but again she was disconcerted by something in his look, his attitude.
"Well, goodbye, Emile."
"I will come with you to the lift."
He went with her and touched the electric bell. As they waited for a moment he added:
"I should like to have an evening quietly on the island."
"Come tonight, or whenever you like. Don't fix a time. Come when the inclination whispers'I want to be
with friends.' "
He pressed her hand.
"Shall I see Peppina?"
"Chi lo sa?"
"And Ruffo?"
She laughed.
"The Marchesino, too, perhaps."
"No," said Artois, emphatically. "Disfigured girls and fisherboysas many as you like, but not the alta
aristocrazia Napoletana."
"But I thought"
"I like Doro, butI like him in his place."
"And his place?"
"Is not the islandwhen I wish to be quiet there."
The lift descended. Artois went out once more onto the balcony, and watched her get into the carriage and
drive away towards Naples. She did not look up again.
"She has gone to fetch that girl Peppina," Artois said to himself, "and I might have prevented it."
He knew very well the reason why he had not interfered. He had not interfered because he had wished too
much to interfere. The desire had been strong enough to startle him, to warn him.
An islet! That suggests isolation. Like Hermione, he wished to isolate Vere, to preserve her as she was in
character. He did not know when the wish had first been consciously in his mind, but he knew that since he
had been consulted by Vere, since she had broken through her reserve and submitted to him her poems,
unveiling for him alone what was really to her a holy of holies, the wish had enormously increased. He told
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himself that Vere was unique, and that he longed to keep her unique, so that the talent he discerned in her
might remain unaffected. How great her talent was he did not know. He would not know, perhaps, for a very
long time. But it was definite, it was intimate. It was Vere's talent, no one else's.
He had made up his mind very soon about Hermione's incapacity to produce work of value. Although Vere
was such a child, so inexperienced, so innocent, so cloistered, he knew at once that he dared not dash her
hopes. It was possible that she might eventually become what her mother certainly could never be.
But she must not be interfered with. Her connection with the sea must not be severed. And people were
coming into her lifeRuffo, the Marchesino, and now this wounded girl Peppina.
Artois felt uneasy. He wished Hermione were less generoushearted, less impulsive. She looked on him as a
guide, a check. He knew that. But this time he would not exercise his prerogative. Ruffo he did not mindat
least he thought he did not. The boy was a sea creature. He might even be an inspiring force to Vere.
Something Artois had read had taught him that. And Ruffo interested him, attracted him too.
But he hated Vere's acquaintance with the Marchesino. He knew that the Marchesino would make love to her.
And the knowledge was odious to him. Let Vere be loved by the sea, but by no man as yet.
And this girl, Peppina?
He thought of the horrors of Naples, of the things that happen "behind the shutter," of the lives led by some
men and women, some boys and girls of the great city beneath the watching volcano. He thought of evenings
he had spent in the Galleria. He saw before him an old woman about whom he had often wondered. Always
at night, and often in the afternoon, she walked in the Galleria. She was invariably alone. The first time he
had seen her he had noticed her because she had a slightly humped back. Her hair was snow white, and was
drawn away from her long, pale face and carefully arranged under a modest bonnet. She carried a small
umbrella and a tiny bag. Glancing at her casually, he had supposed her to be a respectable widow of the
borghese class. But then he had seen her again and again, and by degrees he had come to believe that she was
something very different. And then one night in late spring he had seen her in a new light dress with white
thread gloves. And she had noticed him watching her, and had cast upon him a look that was unmistakable, a
look from the world "behind the shutter"; and he had understood. Then she had followed him persistently.
When he sat before the "Gran caffe" sipping his coffee and listening to the orchestra of women that plays on
the platform outside the caffe, she had passed and repassed, always casting upon him that glance of sinister
understanding, of invitation, of dreary wickedness that sought for, and believed that it had found, an
answering wickedness in him.
Terrible old woman! Peppina's aunt might well be like that. And Peppina would sleep, perhaps tonight, in
the Casa del Mare, under the same roof as Vere.
He resolved to go that evening to the island, to see Peppina, to see Vere. He wished, too, to have a little talk
with Gaspare about Ruffo.
The watchdog instinct, which dwelt also in Gaspare, was alive in him.
But today it was alive to do service for Vere, not for Hermione. He knew that, and said to himself that it was
natural. For Hermione was a woman, with experience of life; but Vere was only upon the threshold of the
world. She needed protection more than Hermione.
Some time ago, when he was returning to Naples from the island on an evening of scirocco, Artois had in
thought transferred certain hopes of his from Hermione to Vere. He had said to himself that he must
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henceforth hope for Hermione in Vere.
Now was he not transferring something else from the mother to the child?
CHAPTER XV
Artois had intended to go that evening to the island. But he did not fulfil his intention. When the sun began to
sink he threw a light coat over his arm and walked down to the harbor of Santa Lucia. A boatman whom he
knew met him and said:
"Shall I take you to the island, Signore?"
Artois was there to take a boat. He meant to say yes. Yet when the man spoke he answered no. The fellow
turned away and found another customer. Two or three minutes later Artois saw his boat drawing out to sea
in the direction of Posilipo. It was a still evening, and very clear after the storm of the preceding night. Artois
longed to be in that travelling boat, longed to see the night come from the summit of the island with
Hermione and Vere. But he resisted the sea, its wide peace, its subtle summons, called a carriage and drove to
the Galleria. Arrived there, he took his seat at a little table outside the "Gran Caffe," ordered a small dinner,
and, while he was eating it, watched the people strolling up and down, seeking among them for a figure that
he knew.
As the hour drew near for the music to begin, and the girls dressed in white came out one by one to the
platform that, surrounded by a white railing edged with red velvet, is built out beyond the caffe to face the
crowd, the number of promenaders increased, and many stood still waiting for the first note, and debating the
looks of the players. Others thronged around Artois, taking possession of the many little tables, and calling
for ices, lemonwater, syrups, and liqueurs. Priests, soldiers, sailors, students, actorswho assemble in the
Galleria to seek engagementsnewsboys, and youths whose faces suggested that they were "ruffiani,"
mingled with foreigners who had come from the hotels and from the ships in the harbor, and whose demeanor
was partly curious and partly suspicious, as of one who longs to probe the psychology of a thief while safely
guarding his pockets. The buzz of voices, the tramp of feet, gained a peculiar and vivid sonorousness from
the high and vaulted roof; and in the warm air, under the large and winking electric lights, the perpetually
moving figures looked strangely capricious, hungry, determined, furtive, ardent, and intent. On their little
stands the electric fans whirred as they slowly revolved, casting an artificial breeze upon pallid faces, and
around the central dome the angels with gilded wings lifted their right arms as if pointing the unconscious
multitude the difficult way to heaven.
A priest sat down with two companions at the table next to Artois. He had a red cord round his shaggy black
hat. His face was like a parroquet's, with small, beady eyes full of an unintellectual sharpness. His plump
body suggested this world, and his whole demeanor, the movements of his dimpled, dirty hands, and of his
protruding lips, the attitude of his extended legs, the pose of his coarse shoulders, seemed hostile to things
mystical. He munched an ice, and swallowed hasty draughts of iced water, talking the while with a sort of
gluttonous vivacity. Artois looked at him and heard, with his imagination, the sound of the bell at the
Elevation, and saw the bowed heads of the crouching worshippers. The irony of life, that is the deepest
mystery of life, came upon him like the wave of some Polar sea. He looked up at the gilded angels, then
dropped his eyes and saw what he had come to see.
Slowly threading her way through the increasing throng, came the old woman whom he had watched so often
and by whom he had been watched. Tonight she had on her summer dress, a respectable, rather shiny gown
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of grayish mauve, a bonnet edged with white ribbon, a pair of white thread gloves. She carried her little bag
and a small Japanese fan. Walking in a strange, flatfooted way that was peculiar to her, and glancing
narrowly about her, yet keeping her hand almost still, she advanced towards the bandstand. As she came
opposite to Artois the orchestra of women struck up the "Valse Noir," and the old woman stood still, impeded
by the now dense crowd of listeners. While the demurely sinister music ran its course, she remained
absolutely immobile. Artois watched her with a keen interest.
It had come into his mind that she was the aunt of Peppina, the disfigured girl, who perhaps tonight was
sleeping in the Casa del Mare with Vere.
Presently, attracted, no doubt, by his gaze, the old woman looked across at Artois and met his eyes. Instantly
a sour and malignant expression came into her long, pale face, and she drew up a corner of her upper lip, as a
dog sometimes does, showing a tooth that was like a menace.
She was secretly cursing Artois.
He knew why. Encouraged by his former observation of her, she had scented a client in him and had been
deceived, and this deception had bred within her an acrid hatred of him. Tonight he would chase away that
hatred. For he meant to speak to her. The old woman looked away from him, holding her head down as if in
cold disdain. Artois read easily what was passing in her mind. She believed him wicked, but nervous in his
wickedness, desirous of her services but afraid to invite them. And she held him in the uttermost contempt.
Well, tonight he would undeceive her on one point at least. He kept his eyes upon her so firmly that she
looked at him again. This time he made a sign of recognition, of understanding. She stared as if in suspicious
amazement. He glanced towards the dome, then at her once more. At this moment the waiter came up. Artois
paid his bill slowly and ostentatiously. As he counted out the money upon the little tray he looked up once,
and saw the eyes in the long, pale face of the venerable temptress glitter while they watched. The music
ceased, the crowd before the platform broke up, and began quickly to melt away. Only the woman waited,
holding her little bag and her cheap Japanese fan.
Artois drew out a cigar, lit it slowly, then got up, and began to move out among the tables.
The priest looked after him, spoke rapidly to his companions, and burst into a throaty laugh which was loudly
echoed.
"Maria Fortunata is in luck tonight!" said some one.
Then the band began again, the waiter came with more ices, and the tall, longbearded forestiere was
forgotten.
Without glancing at the woman, Artois strolled slowly on. Many people looked at him, but none spoke to
him, for he was known now, as each stranger who stays long in Naples is known, summed up, labelled, and
either ignored or pestered. The touts and the ruffiani were aware that it was no use to pester the Frenchman,
and even the decrepit and indescribably seedy old men who hover before the huge plateglass windows of
the photograph shops, or linger near the entrance to the cinematograph, never peeped at him out of the
corners of their bloodshot eyes or whispered a word of the white slaves in his ear.
When he was beneath the dome, and could see the light gleaming upon the wings of the pointing angels,
Artois seemed to be aware of an individual step among the many feet behind him, a step soft, furtive, and
obstinate, that followed him like a fate's. He glanced up at the angels. A melancholy and halfbitter smile
came to his lips. Then he turned to the right and made his way still slowly towards the Via Roma, always
crowded from the early afternoon until late into the night. As he went, as he pushed through the mob of
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standing men at the entrance of the Galleria, and crossed the street to the far side, from which innumerable
narrow and evillooking alleys stretch away into the darkness up the hill, the influence of the following old
woman increased upon him, casting upon him like a mist her hateful eagerness. He desired to be rid of it, and,
quickening his walk, he turned into the first alley he came to, walked a little way up it, until he was in
comparative solitude and obscurity, then stopped and abruptly turned.
The shiny, grayish mauve gown and the whitetrimmed bonnet were close to him. Between them he faintly
perceived a widely smiling face, and from this face broke at once a sickly torrent of speech, half Neapolitan
dialect, half bastard French.
"Silenzio!" Artois said, sternly.
The old harridan stopped in surprise, showing her tooth.
"What has become of Peppina?"
"Maria Santissima!" she ejaculated, moving back a step in the darkness.
She paused. Then she said:
"You know Peppina!"
She came forward again, quite up to him, and peered into his face, seeking there for an ugly truth which till
now had been hidden from her.
"What had you to do with Peppina?"
"Nothing. Tell me about her, and"
He put his hand to the inside pocket of his coat, and showed her the edge of a little case containing paper
notes. The woman misunderstood him. He knew that by her face, which for the moment was as a battle field
on which lust fought with a desperate anger of disappointment. Then cunning came to stop the battle.
"You have heard of Peppina, Signore? You have never seen her?"
Artois played with her for a moment.
"Never."
Her smile widened. She put up her thin hands to her hair, her bonnet, coquettishly.
"There is not a girl in Naples as beautiful as Peppina. Mother of"
But the game was too loathsome with such a player.
"Beautiful! Macche!"
He laughed, made a gesture of pulling out a knife and smashing his face with it.
"Beautiful! Per Dio!"
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The coquetry, the cunning, dropped out of the long, pale face.
"The Signore knows?"
"Ma si! All Naples knows."
The old woman's face became terrible. Her two hands shot up, dropped, shot up again, imprecating, cursing
the world, the sky, the whole scheme of the universe, it seemed. She chattered like an ape. Artois soothed her
with a tenlire note.
That night, when he went back to the hotel, he had heard the aunt's version of Peppina, and knewthat
which really he had known before that Hermione had taken her to live on the island.
Hermione! What was she? An original, clever and blind, greathearted and unwise. An enthusiast, one
created to be carried away.
Never would she grow really old, never surely would the primal fires within her die down into the gray ashes
that litter so many of the hearths by which age sits, a bleak, uncomely shadow.
And Peppina was on the island, a girl from the stews of Naples; not wicked, perhaps, rather wronged, injured
by lifenevertheless, the niece of that horror of the Galleria.
He thought of Vere and shuddered.
Next day towards four o'clock the Marchesino strolled into Artois' room, with a peculiarly impudent look of
knowledge upon his face.
"Buon giorno, Caro Emilio," he said. "Are you busy?"
"Not specially."
"Will you come with me for a stroll in the Villa? Will you come to see the gathering together of the geese?"
"Che Diavolo! What's that?"
"This summer the Marchesa Pontini has organized a sort of club, which meets in the Villa every day except
Sundays. Three days the meeting is in the morning, three days in the afternoon. The silliest people of the
aristocracy belong to this club, and the Marchesa is the mother goose. Ecco! Will you come, oror have you
some appointment?" He smiled in his friend's face.
Artois wondered, but could not divine, what was at the back of his mind.
"No, I had thought of going on the sea."
"Or to the Toledo, perhaps?"
The Marchesino laughed happily.
"The Toledo? Why should I go there?"
"Non lo so. Put on your chapeau and come. Il fait tres beau cet apres midi."
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Doro was very proud of his French, which made Artois secretly shiver, and generally spoke it when he was in
specially good spirits, or was feeling unusually mischievous. As they walked along the seafront a moment
later, he continued in Italian:
"You were not at the island yesterday, Emilio?"
"No. Were you?"
"I naturally called to know how the ladies were after that terrible storm. What else could I do?"
"And how were they?"
"The Signora was in Naples, and of course the Signorina could not have received me alone. But the saints
were with me, Emilio. I met her on the sea; quite by herself, on the sea of the Saint's pool. She was lying back
in a little boat, with no hat on, her hands behind her head so, and her eyesher beautiful eyes, Emilio,
were full of dreams, of dreams of the sea."
"How do you know that?" said Artois, rather sharply.
"Cosa?"
"How do you know the Signorina was dreaming of the sea? Did shedid she tell you?"
"No, but I am sure. We walked together from the boats. I told her she was an enchantress of the sea, the spirit
of the waveI told her!"
He spread out his hands, rejoicing in the remembrance of his graceful compliments.
"The Signorina was delighted, but she could not stay long. She had a slight headache and was a little tired
after the storm. But she would have liked to ask me to the house. She was longing to. I could see that."
He seized his mustache.
"She turned her head away, trying to conceal from me her desire, but"
He laughed.
"Le donne! Le donne!" he happily exclaimed.
Artois found himself wondering why, until Doro had made the acquaintance of the dwellers on the island, he
had never wished to smack his smooth, complacent cheeks.
They turned from the sea into the broad walk of the Villa, and walked towards the kiosk. Near it, on the
small, green chairs, were some ladies swathed in gigantic floatingveils, talking to two or three very smart
young men in white suits and straw hats, who leaned forward eying them steadily with a determined yet
rather vacuous boldness that did not disconcert them. One of the ladies, dressed in blackandwhite check,
was immensely stout. She seemed to lead the conversation, which was carried on with extreme vivacity in
very loud and not melodious voices.
"Ecco the gathering of the geese!" said the Marchesino, touching Artois on the arm. "And that"he pointed
to the stout lady, who at this moment tossed her head till her veil swung loose like a sail suddenly deserted by
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the wind"is the goosemother. Buona sera, Marchesa! Buona seramolto piacere. Carlo, buona seraa
rivederci, Contessa! A questa sera."
He showed his splendid teeth in a fixed but winning smile, and, hat in hand, went by, walking from his hips.
Then, replacing his hat on his head, he added to his friend:
"The Marchesa is always hoping that the Duchessa d'Aosta will come one day, if only for a moment, to smile
upon the geese. Butwell, the Duchessa prefers to climb to the fourth story to see the poor. She has a heart.
Let us sit here, Emilio."
They sat down under the trees, and the Marchesino looked at his pointed boots for a moment in silence,
pushing forward his under lip until his blond mustache touched the jaunty tip of his nose. Then he began to
laugh, still looking before him.
"Emilio! Emilio!"
He shook his head repeatedly.
"Emilio mio! And that you should be asking me to show you Naples! It is too good! C'est parfait!"
The Marchesino turned towards Artois.
"And Maria Fortunata! Santa Maria of the Toledo, the whitehaired protectress of the strangers!
Emilioyou might have come to me! But you do not trust me. Ecco! You do not"
Artois understood.
"You saw me last night?"
"Ma si! All Naples saw you. Do you not know that the Galleria is full but fullof eyes?"
"Va bene! But you don't understand."
"Emilio!"
He shrugged his shoulders, lifted his hands, his eyebrows. His whole being seemed as if it were about to
mount ironically towards heaven.
"You don't understand. I repeat it."
Artois spoke quietly, but there was a sound in his voice which caused his frivolous companion to stare at him
with an inquiry that was, for a moment, almost sulky.
"You forget, Doro, how old I am."
"What has that to do with it?"
"You forget"
Artois was about to allude to his real self, to point out the improbability of a man so mental, so known, so
travelled as he was, falling like a schoolboy publicly into a sordid adventure. But he stopped, realizing the
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uselessness of such an explanation. And he could not tell the Marchesino the truth of his shadowy colloquy in
a bystreet with the old creature from behind the shutter.
"You have made a mistake about me," he said. "But it is of no consequence. Look! There is another goose
coming."
He pointed with his cane in the direction of the chatterers near the kiosk.
"It is papa! It is papa!"
"Pardon! I did not recognize"
The Marchesino got up.
"Let us go there. The Marchesa with papait is better than the Compagnia Scarpetta! I will present you."
But Artois was in no mood for a cataract of nothingness.
"Not now," he said. "I have"
The Marchesino shot a cruel glance of impudent comprehension at him, and touched his left hand in token of
farewell.
"I know! I know! The quickest horse to the Toledo. Aah! Aah! May the writer's saint go with you! Addio,
mio caro!"
There was a hint of real malice in his voice. He cocked his hat and strutted away towards the veils and the
piercing voices. Artois stared after him for a moment, then walked across the garden to the sea, and leaned
against the low wall looking towards Capri. He was vexed at this little episodeunreasonably vexed. In his
friend Doro he now discerned a possible enemy. An Italian who has trusted does not easily forgive if he is not
trusted in return. Artois was conscious of a dawning hostility in the Marchesino. No doubt he could check it.
Doro was essentially goodtempered and lighthearted. He could check it by an exhibition of frankness. But
this frankness was impossible to him, and as it was impossible he must allow Doro to suspect him of sordid
infamies. He knew, of course, the Neapolitan's habitual disbelief in masculine virtue, and did not mind it.
Then why should he mind Doro's laughing thought of himself as one of the elderly crew who cling to
forbidden pleasures? Why should he feel sore, angry, almost insulted?
Vere rose before him, as one who came softly to bring him the answer to his questionings. And he knew that
his vexation arose from the secret apprehension of a future in which he would desire to stand between her and
the Marchesino with clean hands, and tell Doro certain truths which are universal, not national. Such truths
would come ill from one whom the lectured held unclean.
As he walked home to the hotel his vexation grew.
When he was once more in his room he remembered his remark to Hermione, "We shall have many quiet,
happy evenings together this summer, I hope," and her strange and doubtful reply. And because he felt
himself invaded by her doubts he resolved to set out for the island. If he took a boat at once he could be there
between six and seven o'clock.
And perhaps he would see the new occupant of the Casa del Mare. Perhaps he would see Peppina.
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CHAPTER XVI
"I have come, you see," said Artois that evening, as he entered Hermione's room, "to have the first of our
quiet, happy evenings, about which you were so doubtful."
"Was I?"
She smiled at him from her seat between the big windows.
Outside the door he had, almost with a sudden passion, dismissed the vague doubts and apprehensions that
beset him. He came with a definite brightness, a strong intimacy, holding out his hands, intent really on
forcing Fate to weave her web in accordance with his will.
"We women are full of little fears, even the bravest of us. Chase mine away, Emile."
He sat down.
"What are they?"
She shook her head.
"Formlessor almost. But perhaps that adds to the uneasiness they inspire. To put them into words would be
impossible."
"Away with them!"
"Willingly."
Her eyes seemed to be asking him questions, to be not quite satisfied, not quite sure of something.
"What is it?" he asked.
"I wonder if you have it in you to be angry with me."
"Make your confession."
"I have Peppina here."
"Of course."
"You knew?"
"I have known you as an impulsive forhow many years? Why should you change?"
He looked at her in silence for a moment. Then he continued:
"Sometimes you remind mein spots, as it wereof George Sand."
She laughed, not quite without bitterness.
"In spots, indeed!"
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"She described herself once in a book as having 'a great facility' for illusions, a blind benevolence of
judgment, a tenderness of heart that was inexhaustible"
"Oh!"
"Wait! From these qualities, she said, came hurry, mistakes innumerable, heroic devotion to objects that were
worthless, much weakness, tremendous disappointments."
Hermione said nothing, but sat still looking grave.
"Well? Don't you recognize something of yourself in the catalogue, my friend?"
"Have I a great facility for illusions? Am I capable of heroic devotion to worthless objects?"
Suddenly Artois remembered all he knew and she did not know.
"At least you act hastily often," he said evasively. "And I think you are often so concentrated upon the person
who stands, perhaps suffering, immediately before you, that you forget who is on the right, who is on the
left."
"Emile, I asked your advice yesterday, and you would not give it me."
"A fair hit!" he said. "And so Peppina is here. How did the servants receive her?"
"I think they were rather surprised. Of course they don't know the truth."
"They will withinshall we say twentyfour hours, or less?"
"How can they? Peppina won't tell them."
"You are sure? And when Gaspare goes into Naples to 'fare la spesa'?"
"I told Gaspare last night."
"That was wisdom. You understand your watchdog's character."
"You grant that Gaspare is not an instance of a worthless object made the recipient of my heroic devotion?"
"Give him all you like," said Artois, with warmth. "You will never repent of that. Was he angry when you
told him?"
"I think he was."
"Why?"
"I heard him saying 'Testa della Madonna!' as he was leaving me.
Artois could not help smiling.
"And Vere?" he said, looking directly at her.
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"I have not told Vere anything about Peppina's past," Hermione said, rather hastily. "I do not intend to. I
explained that Peppina had had a sad life and had been attacked by a man who had fallen in love with her,
and for whom she didn't care."
"And Vere was all sympathy and pity?" said Artois, gently.
"She didn't seem much interested, I thought. She scarcely seemed to be listening. I don't believe she has seen
Peppina yet. When we arrived she was shut up in her room."
As she spoke she was looking at him, and she saw a slight change come over his face.
"Do you think" she began, and paused. "I wonder if she was reading," she added, slowly, after a moment.
"Even the children have their secrets," he answered. As he spoke he turned his head and looked out of the
window towards Ischia. "How clear it is tonight! There will be no storm."
"No. We can dine outside. I have told them." Her voice sounded slightly constrained. "I will go and call
Vere," she added.
"She is in the house?"
"I think so."
She went out, shutting the door behind her.
So Vere was working. Artois felt sure that her conversation with him had given to her mind, perhaps to her
heart, too, an impulse that had caused an outburst of young energy. Ah! the blessed ardors of youth! How
beautiful they are, and, even in their occasional absurdity, how sacred. What Hermione had said had made
him realize acutely the influence which his celebrity and its causethe self that had made it must have
upon a girl who was striving as Vere was. He felt a thrill of pleasure, even of triumph, that startled him, so
seldom now, jealous and careful as he was of his literary reputation, did he draw any definite joy from it.
Would Vere ever do something really good? He found himself longing that she might, as the proud godparent
longs for his godchild to gain prizes. He remembered the line at the close of Maeterlinck's "Pelleas and
Melisande," a line that had gone like a silver shaft into this soul when he first heard it"Maintenant c'est au
tour de la pauvre petite" (Now it's the child's turn.)
"Now it's the child's turn," he said it to himself, forming the words with his lips. At that moment he was freed
entirely from the selfishness of age, and warm with a generous and noble sympathy with youth, its
aspirations, its strivings, its winged hopes. He got up from his chair. He had a longing to go to Vere and tell
her all he was feeling, a longing to pour into heras just then he could have poured itinspiration molten in
a longtried furnace. He had no need of any one but Vere.
The doors opened and Hermione came back.
"Vere is coming, Emile," she said.
"You told her I was here?"
She looked at him swiftly, as if the ringing sound in his voice had startled her.
"Yes. She is glad, I know. Dear little Vere!"
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Her voice was dull, and she spokeor he fancied sorather mechanically. He remembered all she did not
know and was conscious of her false position. In their intercourse she had so often, so generally, been the
enthusiastic sympathizer. More than she knew she had inspired him.
"Dear Hermione! How good it is to be here with you!" he said, turning towards her the current of his
sympathy. "As one grows old one clings to the known, the proved. That passion at least increases while so
many others fade away, the passion for all that is faithful in a shifting world, for all that is real, that does not
suffer corruption, disintegration! How adorable is Time where Time is powerless!"
"Is Time ever powerless?" she said. "Ah, here is Vere!"
They dined outside upon the terrace facing Vesuvius. Artois sat between mother and child. Vere was very
quiet. Her excitement, her almost feverish gayety of the evening of the storm had vanished. Tonight dreams
hung in her eyes. And the sea was quiet as she was, repentant surely of its former furies. There seemed
something humble, something pleading in its murmur, as if it asked forgiveness and promised amendment.
The talk was chiefly between Hermione and Artois. It was not very animated. Perhaps the wide peace of the
evening influenced their minds. When coffee was carried out Artois lit his pipe, and fell into complete
silence, watching the sea. Giulia brought to Hermione a bit of embroidery on which she was working, cleared
away the dessert and quietly disappeared. From the house now and then came a sound of voices, of laughter.
It died away, and the calm of the coming night, the calm of the silent trio that faced it, seemed to deepen as if
in delicate protest against the interference. The stillness of Nature tonight was very natural. But was the
human stillness natural? Presently Artois, suddenly roused, he knew not why, to self consciousness, found
himself wondering. Vere lay back in her wicker chair like one at ease. Hermione was leaning forward over
her work with her eyes bent steadily upon it. Far off across the sea the smoke from the summit of Vesuvius
was dyed at regular intervals by the red fire that issued from the entrails of the mountain. Silently it rose from
its hidden world, glowed angrily, menacingly, faded, then glowed again. And the life that is in fire, and that
seems to some the most intense of all the forces of life, stirred Artois from his peace. The pulse of the
mountain, whose regular beating was surely indicated by the regularly recurring glow of the rising flame,
seemed for a moment to be sounding in his ears, and, with it, all the pulses that were beating through the
world. And he thought of the calm of their bodies, of Hermione's, of Vere's, of his own, as he had thought of
the calm of the steely sky, the steely sea, that had preceded the bursting of the storm that came from Ischia.
He thought of it as something unnatural, something almost menacing, a sort of combined lie that strove to
conceal, to deny, the leaping fires of the soul.
Suddenly Vere got up and went quietly away. While she had been with them silence had been easy. Directly
she was gone Artois felt that it was difficult, in another moment that it was no longer possible.
"Am I to see Peppina tonight?" he asked.
"Do you wish to?"
Hermione's hands moved a little faster about their work when he spoke.
"I feel a certain interest in her, as I should in any new inhabitant of the island. A very confined space seems
always to heighten the influence of human personality, I think. On your rock everybody must mean a good
deal, perhaps more than you realize, Hermione."
"I am beginning to realize that," she answered, quietly. "Perhaps they mean too much. I wonder if it is wise to
live as we do?"
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"In such comparative isolation, you mean?"
"Yes."
She laid her work down in her lap.
"I'm afraid that by nature I am a monopolist," she said. "And as I could never descend into the arena of life to
struggle to keep what I have, if others desired to take it from me, I am inclined jealously to guard it."
She took up her work again.
"I've been thinking that I am rather like the dog that buries his bone," she added, bending once more over the
embroidery.
"Are you thinking ofof your husband?"
"Yes, and of Vere. I isolated myself with Maurice. Now I am isolating myself with Vere. Perhaps it is
unwise, weak, this instinct to keep out the world."
"Are you thinking of changing your mode of life, then?" he asked.
In his voice there was a sound of anxiety which she noticed.
"Perhaps. I don't know."
She glanced at him and away, and he thought that there was something strange in her eyes. After a pause, she
said:
"What would you advise?"
"Surely you are happy here. Andand Vere is happy."
"Vere is happyyes."
He realized the thoughtlessness of his first sentence.
"But I must think of Vere's development. Lately, in these last days, I have been realizing that Vere is moving,
is beginning to move very fast. Perhaps it is time to bring her into contact with more people. Perhaps"
"You once asked my advice," he interrupted. "I give it now. Leave Vere alone. What she needs she will
obtain. Have no fear of that."
"You are sure?"
"Quite sure. Sometimes, often, the children know instinctively more than their elders know by experience."
Hermione's lips trembled.
"Sometimes," she said, in a low voice, "I think Vere knows far more than I do. Butbut I often feel that I am
very blind, very stupid. You called me an impulsiveI suppose I am one. But if I don't follow my impulses,
what am I to follow? One must have a guide."
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"Yes, and reason is often such a dull one, like a verger throwing one over a cathedral and destroying its
mystery and its beauty with every word he speaks. When one is young one does not feel that one needs a
guide at all."
"SometimesoftenI feel very helpless now," she said.
He was acutely conscious of the passionate longing for sympathy that was alive within her, and more faintly
aware of a peculiar depression that companioned her tonight. Yet, for some reason unknown to him, he
could not issue from a certain reserve that checked him, could not speak to her as he had spoken not long ago
in the cave. Indeed, as she came in her last words a little towards him, as one with hands tremblingly and a
little doubtfully held out, he felt that he drew back.
"I think we all feel helpless often when we have passed our first youth," he answered.
He got up and stretched himself, towering above her.
"Shall we stroll about a little?" he added. "I feel quite cramped with sitting."
"You go. I'll finish this flower."
"I'll take a turn and come back."
As he went she dropped her embroidery and sat staring straight before her at the sea.
Artois heard voices in the house, and listened for a new one, the voice of Peppina. But he could not
distinguish it. He went down into the tiny garden. No one was there, and he returned, and passing through the
house came out on its farther side. Here he met Gaspare coming up from the sea.
"Goodevening, Gaspare," he said.
"Goodevening, Signore."
"I hear there's a newcomer in the house."
"Signore?"
"A new servant."
Gaspare lifted his large eyes towards heaven.
"Testa della Madonna?" said Artois.
"Signore?"
"Have a cigar, Gaspare?"
"Grazie, Signore."
"Is she a good sort of girl, do you think?"
"Who, Signore?"
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"This Peppina."
"She is in the kitchen, Signore. I have nothing to do with her."
"I see."
Evidently Gaspare did not mean to talk. Artois decided to change the subject.
"I hear you had that boy, Ruffo, sleeping in the house the other night," he said.
"Si, Signore; the Signorina wished it."
Gaspare's voice sounded rather more promising.
"He seems popular on the island."
"He had been ill, Signore, and it was raining hard. Poveretto! He had had the fever. It was bad for him to be
out in the boat."
"So Ruffo's getting hold of you too!" thought Artois.
He pulled at his cigar once or twice. Then he said:
"Do you think he looks like a Sicilian?"
Gaspare's eyes met his steadily.
"A Sicilian, Signore?"
"Yes."
"Signore, he is a Sicilian. How should he not look like one?"
Gaspare's voice sounded rebellious.
"Va bene, Gaspare, va bene. Have you seen the Signorina?"
"I think she is at the wooden seat, Signore. The Signorina likes to look at the sea from there."
"I will go and see if I can find her."
"Va bene, Signore. And I will go to speak with the Signora."
He took off his hat and went into the house. Artois stood for a moment looking after him and pulling at his
beard. There was something very forcible in Gaspare's personality. Artois felt it the more because of his
knowledge of Gaspare's power of prolonged, perhaps of eternal silence. The Sicilian was both blunt and
subtle, therefore not always easily read. Tonight he puzzled Artois because he impressed him strongly, yet
vaguely. He seemed to be quietly concealing something that was not small. What it was Artois could not
divine. Only he felt positive that there was something. In Gaspare's eyes that evening he had seen an
expression such as had been in them long ago in Sicily, when Artois rode up after Maurice's death to see
Hermione, and Gaspare turned from him and looked over the wall of the ravine: an expression of dogged and
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impenetrable reserve, that was like a door closing upon unseen, just not seen, vistas.
"Che Diavolo!" muttered Artois.
Then he went up to look for Vere.
A little wind met him on the crest of the cliff, the definite caress of the night, which had now fallen ever so
softly. The troop of the stars was posted in the immeasurable deeps of the firmament. There was, there would
be, no moon, yet it was not black darkness, but rather a dimly purple twilight which lifted into its breast the
wayward songs of the sea. And the songs and the stars seemed twin children of the wedded wave and night.
Divinely soft was the wind, divinely dreamy the hour, and bearing something of youth as a galley from the
East bears odors. Over the spirit of Artois a magical essence seemed scattered. And the youngness that lives
forever, however deeply buried, in the man who is an artist, stirred, lifted itself up, stood erect to salute the
night. As he came towards Vere he forgot. The poppy draught was at his lips. The extreme consciousness,
which was both his strength and his curse, sank down for a moment and profoundly slept.
"Vere!" he said. "Vere, do I disturb you?"
The girl turned softly on the bench and looked at him.
"No. I often come here. I like to be here at nightfall. Madre knows that. Did she tell you?"
"No."
"You guessed?"
"I met Gaspare."
He stood near her.
"Where is Madre?"
"On the terrace. She preferred to stay quietly there. And so you have been working very hard?"
He spoke gently, half smilingly, but not at all derisively.
"Yes. But how did you know?"
"I gathered it from something your mother said. Do you know, Vere, I think soon she will begin to wonder
what you do when you are shut up for so long in your room."
The girl's face looked troubled for a moment.
"She doesn'tshe has no idea."
"Oh no."
Vere was silent for a while.
"I wonder if I ought to tell her, Monsieur Emile," she said at length.
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"Tell her!" Artois said, hastily. "But I thought"
He checked himself, suddenly surprised at the keenness of his own desire to keep their little secret.
"I know. You mean what I said the other day. Butif Madre should be hurt. I don't think I have ever had a
secret from her before, a real secret. Butit's like this. If Madre knows I shall feel horribly selfconscious,
because of what I told youher having tried and given it up. I shall feel guilty. Is it absurd?"
"No."
"AndandI don't believe I shall be able to go on. Of course some day, if it turns out that I ever can do
anything, I must tell. But that would be different. If it's certain that you can do a thing well it seems to me that
you have a right to do it. Buttill thenI'm a little coward, really."
She ended with a laugh that was almost deprecating.
"Don't tell your mother yet, Vere," said Artois, decisively. "It is as you say: if you told her before you have
thoroughly tried your wings you might be paralyzed. When, if ever, you can show her something really good
she will be the first to encourage you. Buttill thenI think with you that her influence in that direction
would probably be discouraging. Indeed, I feel sure of it."
"But if she should really begin to wonder! Perhaps she will ask. It's absurd, but I can't help feeling as if we,
you and I, were conspirators, Monsieur Emile."
He laughed happily.
"What a blessed place this is!" he said. "One is made free of the ocean here. What is that faraway light?"
He pointed.
"Low down? Oh, that must be the light of a fisherman, one of those who seek in the rocks for shellfish."
"How mysterious it looks, moving to and fro! One feels life there, the doings of unknown men in the
darkness."
"I wonder ifwould you hate to go out a little way in the boat? The men look so strange when one is near
them, almost like firepeople."
"Hate! Let us go."
"And we'll get Madre to come too."
"Oh yes."
Vere got up and they went into the house. As they came out upon the terrace Hermione took up her
embroidery, and Gaspare, who was standing beside her, picked up the tray with the coffeecups and went off
with it towards the kitchen.
"Well, Vere?"
"Madre, we are going out a little way in the boat, and we want you to come with us."
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"Where are you going?"
"To see the fishermen, just beyond the grotto of Virgilio. You will come?"
"Do come, my friend," added Artois.
But Hermione sat still.
"I'm a little tired tonight," she answered. "I think I would rather stay quietly here. You won't be long, will
you?"
"Oh no, Madre. Only a few minutes. But, really, won't you?" Vere laid her hand on her mother's. "It's so
lovely on the sea tonight."
"I know. But honestly, I'm lazy tonight."
Vere looked disappointed. She took away her hand gently.
"Then we'll stay with you, won't we, Monsieur Emile?"
"No, Vere," said her mother quickly, before he could answer. "You two go. I sha'n't be dull. You won't be
very long?"
"No, of course. But"
"Go, dearest, go. Are you going to row, Emile?"
"I could. Or shall we take Gaspare?"
"It's Gaspare's suppertime," said Vere.
"Hush, then!" said Artois, putting his finger to his lips. "Let us creep down softly, or he will think it his duty
to come with us, starving, and that would spoil everything. Au revoir, Hermione," he whispered.
"Goodbye, Madre," whispered Vere.
They glided away, the big man and the lightfooted child, going on tiptoe with elaborate precaution.
As Hermione looked after them, she said to herself:
"How young Emile is tonight!"
At that moment she felt as if she were much older than he was.
They slipped down to the sea without attracting the attention of Gaspare, got into the little boat, and rowed
gently out towards Nisida.
"I feel like a contrabandista," said Artois, as they stole under the lee of the island towards the open sea"as
if Gaspare would fire upon us if he heard the sound of oars."
"Quick! Quick! Let us get away. Pull harder, Monsieur Emile! How slow you are!"
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Laughingly Artois bent to the oars.
"Vere, you are a baby!" he said.
"And what are you, then, I should like to know?" she answered, with dignity.
"I! I am an old fellow playing the fool."
Suddenly his gayety had evaporated, and he was conscious of his years. He let the boat drift for a moment.
"Check me another time, Vere, if you see me inclined to be buffo," he said.
"Indeed I won't. Why should I? I like you best when you are quite natural."
"Do you?"
"Yes. Look! There are the lights! Oh, how strange they are. Go a little nearer, but not too near."
"Tell me, then. Remember, I can't see."
"Yes. One, two, three"
She counted. Each time she said a number he pulled. And she, like a little coxswain, bent towards him with
each word, giving him a bodily signal for the stroke. Presently she stretched out her hand.
"Stop!"
He stopped at once. For a minute the boat glided on. Then the impetus he had given died away from it, and it
floated quietly without perceptible movement upon the bosom of the sea.
"Now, Monsieur Emile, you must come and sit by me."
Treading softly he obeyed her, and sat down near her, facing the shadowy coast.
"Now watch!"
They sat in silence, while the boat drifted on the smooth and oily water almost in the shadow of the cliffs. At
some distance beyond them the cliffs sank, and the shore curved sharply in the direction of the island with its
fort. There was the enigmatic dimness, though not dense darkness, of the night. Nearer at hand the walls of
rock made the night seem more mysterious, more profound, and at their base flickered the flames which had
attracted Artois' attention. Fitfully now these flames, rising from some invisible brazier, or from some torch
fed by it, fell upon halfnaked forms of creatures mysteriously busy about some hidden task. Men they were,
yet hardly men they seemed, but rather unknown denizens of rock, or wave, or underworld; now redbodied
against the gleam, now ethereally black as are shadows, and whimsical and shifty, yet always full of meaning
that could not be divined. They bent, they crouched. They seemed to die down like a wave that is, then is not.
Then rising they towered, lifting brawny arms towards the stars. Silence seemed to flow from them, to exude
from their labors. And in the swiftness of their movements there was something that was sad. Or was it,
perhaps, only pathetic, wistful with the wistfulness of the sea and of all nocturnal things? Artois did not ask,
but his attention, the attention of mind and soul, was held by these distant voiceless beings as by a magic.
And Vere was still as he was, tense as he was. All the poetry that lay beneath his realism, all the credulity that
slept below his scepticism, all the ignorance that his knowledge strove to dominate, had its wild moment of
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liberty under the smiling stars. The lights moved and swayed. Now the seamed rock, with its cold veins and
slimy crevices was gilded, its nudity clothed with fire. Now on the water a trail of glory fell, and travelled and
died. Now the red men were utterly revealed, one watching with an ardor that was surely not of this world,
some secret in the blackness, another turning as if to strike in defence of his companion. Then both fell back
and were taken by the night. And out of the night came a strong voice across the water.
"Madre di Dio, che splendore!"
Artois got up, turned the boat, and began to row gently away, keeping near the base of the cliffs. He meant to
take Vere back at once to the island, leaving the impression made upon her by the men of the fire vivid, and
undisturbed by speech. But when they came to the huge mouth of the Grotto of Virgil, Vere said:
"Go in for a moment, please, Monsieur Emile."
He obeyed, thinking that the mother's love for this dark place was echoed by the child. Since his conversation
with Hermione on the day of scirocco he had not been here, and as the boat glided under the hollow blackness
of the vault, and there lay still, he remembered their conversation, the unloosing of her passion, the strength
and tenacity of the nature she had shown to him, gripping the past with hands almost as unyielding as the
tragic hands of death.
And he waited in silence, and with a deep expectation, for the revelation of the child. It seemed to him that
Vere had her purpose in coming here, as Hermione had had hers. And once more the words of the old man in
"Pelleas and Melisande" haunted him. Once more he heard them in his heart.
"Now it's the child's turn."
Vere dropped her right hand over the gunwale till it touched the sea, making a tiny splash.
"Monsieur Emile!" she said.
"Yes, Vere."
"Do you believe in the evil eye?"
Artois did not know what he had expected Vere to say, but her question seemed to strike his mind like a soft
blow, it was so unforeseen.
"No," he answered.
She was silent. It was too dark for him to see her face at all clearly. He had only a vague general impression
of her, of her slightness, vitality, youth, and halfdreamy excitement.
"Why do you ask me?"
"Giulia said to me this evening that she was sure the new servant had the evil eye."
"Peppina?"
"Yes, that is her name."
"Have you seen her?"
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"No, not yet. It's odd, but I feel as if I would rather not."
"Have you any reason for such a feeling?"
"I don't think so. Poor thing! I know she has a dreadful scar. But I don't believe it's that. It's just a feeling I
have."
"I dare say it will have gone by the time we get back to the island."
"Perhaps. It's nice and dark here."
"Do you like darkness, Vere?"
"Sometimes. I do now."
"Why?"
"Because I can talk better and be less afraid of you."
"Vere! What nonsense! You are incapable of fear."
She laughed, but the laugh sounded serious, he thought.
"Real fearperhaps. But you don't know"she paused"you don't know how I respect you."
There was a slight pressure on the last words.
"For all you've done, what you are. I never felt it as I have just lately, sincesinceyou know."
Artois was conscious of a movement of his blood.
"I should be a liar if I said I am not pleased. Tell me about the work, Verenow we are in the dark."
And then he heard the revelation of the child, there under the weary rock, as he had heard the revelation of
the mother. How different it was! Yet in it, too, there was the beating of the pulse of life. But there was no
regret, no looking back into the past, no sombre exhibition of force seekingas a thing groping, desperately
in a gulf an object on which to exercise itself. Instead there was aspiration, there was expectation, there
was the wonder of bright eyes lifted to the sun. And there was a reverence that for a moment recalled to
Artois the reverence of the dead man from whose loins this child had sprung. But Vere's was the reverence of
understanding, not of a dim amazementmore beautiful than Maurice's. When he had been with Hermione
under the brooding rock Artois had been impregnated with the passionate despair of humanity, and had seen
for a moment the world with outstretched hands, seeking, surely, for the nonexistent, striving to hold fast
the mirage. Now he was impregnated with humanity's passionate hope. He saw life lightfooted in a sweet
chase for things ideal. And all the blackness of the rock and of the silent sea was irradiated with the light that
streamed from a growing soul.
A voicean inquiring, searching voice, surely, rose quivering from some distance on the sea, startling Vere
and Artois. It was untrained but unshy, and the singer forced it with resolute hardihood that was indifferent to
the future. Artois had never heard the Marchesino sing before, but he knew at once that it was he. Some one
at the island must surely have told the determined youth that Vere was voyaging, and he was now in quest of
her, sending her an amorous summons couched in the dialect of Naples.
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Vere moved impatiently.
"Really!" she began.
But she did not continue. The quivering voice began another verse. Artois had said nothing, but, as he sat
listening to this fervid protestation, a message illuminated as it were by the vibrato, he began to hate the
terrible frankness of the Italian nature which, till now, he had thought he loved. The beauty of reticence
appealed to him in a new way. There was savagery in a bellowed passion. The voice was travelling. They
heard it moving onward towards Nisida. Artois wondered if Vere knew who was the singer. She did not leave
him long in doubt.
"Now's our chance, Monsieur Emile!" she said, suddenly, leaning towards him. "Row to the island for your
life, or the Marchesino will catch us!"
Without a word he bent to the oars.
"How absurd the Marchesino is!"
Vere spoke aloud, released from fear.
"Absurd? He is Neapolitan."
"Very well, then! The Neapolitans are absurd!" said Vere, with decision. "And what a voice! Ruffo doesn't
sing like that. That shaking soundssounds so artificial."
"And yet I dare say he is very much in earnest."
Artois was almost pleading a cause against his will.
"Oh!"
The girl gave almost a little puff that suggested a rather childish indignation.
"I like the people best," she added. "They say what they feel simply, and it means ever so much more. Am I a
democrat?"
He could not help laughing.
"Chi lo sa? An Anarchist perhaps."
She laughed too.
"Bella tu siBella tu si! It's too absurd! One would think"
"What, Vere?"
"Never mind. Don't be inquisitive, Monsieur Emile."
He rowed on meekly.
"There is San Francesco's light," she said, in a moment. "I wonder if it is late. Have we been away long? I
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have no idea."
"No more have I."
Nor had he.
When they reached land he made the boat fast and turned to walk up to the house with her. He found her
standing very still just behind him at the edge of the sea, with a startled look on her face.
"What is it, Vere?" he asked.
"Hush!"
She held up her hand and bent her head a little to one side, as one listening intently.
"I thought I heardI did hearsomething"
"Something?"
"Yesso strangeI can't hear it now."
"What was it like?"
She looked fixedly at him.
"Like some one cryinghorribly."
"Where? Near us?"
"Not far. Listen again."
He obeyed, holding his breath. But he heard nothing except the very faint lapping of the sea at their feet.
"Perhaps I imagined it," she said at length.
"Let us go up to the house," he said. "Come, Vere."
He had a sudden wish to take her into the house. But she remained where she was.
"Could it have been fancy, Monsieur Emile?"
"No doubt."
Her eyes were intensely grave, almost frightened.
"Butjust look, will you? Perhaps there really is somebody."
"Where? It's so dark."
Artois hesitated; but Vere's face was full of resolution, and he turned reluctantly to obey her. As he did so
there came to them both through the dark the sound of a woman crying and sobbing convulsively.
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"What is it? Oh, who can it be?" Vere cried out.
She went swiftly towards the sound.
Artois followed, and found her bending down over the figure of a girl who was crouching against the cliff,
and touching her shoulder.
"What is it? What is the matter? Tell me."
The girl looked up, startled, and showed a passionate face that was horribly disfigured. Upon the right cheek,
extending from the temple almost to the line of the jaw, a razor had cut a sign, a brutal sign of the cross. As
Vere saw it, showing redly through the darkness, she recoiled. The girl read the meaning of her movement,
and shrank backward, putting up her hand to cover the wound. But Vere recovered instantly, and bent down
once more, intent only on trying to comfort this sorrow, whose violence seemed to open to her a door into a
new and frightful world.
"Vere!" said Artois. "Vere, you had better"
The girl turned round to him.
"It must be Peppina!" she said.
"Yes. But"
"Please go up to the house, Monsieur Emile. I will come in a moment."
"But I can't leave you"
"Please go. Just tell Madre I'm soon coming."
There was something inexorable in her voice. She turned away from him and began to speak softly to
Peppina.
Artois obeyed and left her.
He knew that just then she would not acknowledge his authority. As he went slowly up the steps he
wonderedhe feared. Peppina had cried with the fury of despair, and the Neapolitan who is desperate knows
no reticence.
Was the red sign of passion to be scored already upon Vere's white life? Was she to pass even now, in this
night, from her beautiful ignorance to knowledge?
CHAPTER XVII
That night the Marchesino failed in his search for Vere, and he returned to Naples not merely disappointed
but incensed. He had learned from a fisherman in the Saint's Pool that she was out upon the sea "with a
Signore," and he had little difficulty in guessing who this Signore was. Of course it was "Caro Emilio," the
patron of Maria Fortunata. He began to consider his friend unfavorably. He remembered how frankly he had
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always told Emilio of his little escapades, with what enthusiasm, in what copious detail. Always he had
trusted Emilio. And now Emilio was trying to play him falseworse, was making apparently a complete
success of the attempt. For Emilio and Vere must have heard his beautiful singing, must have guessed from
whom that vibrant voice proceeded, must have deliberately concealed themselves from its possessor. Where
had they lain in hiding? His shrewd suspicion fell upon the very place. Virgilio's Grotto had surely been their
refuge.
"Ladro! Vigiliacco!" Words of no uncertain meaning flowed from his overcharged heart. His whole hot
nature was aroused. His spirit was up in arms. And now, almost for the first time, he drew a comparison
between his age and Emilio's. Emilio was an old man. He realized it. Why had he never realized it before?
Was he, full of youth, beauty, chivalrous energy and devotion, to be interfered with, set aside, for a man with
gray hairs thick upon his head, for a man who spent half his hours bent over a writingtable? Emilio had
never wished him to know the ladies of the island. He knew the reason now, and glowed with a fiery lust of
battle. Vere had attracted him from the first. But this opposition drove on attraction into something stronger,
more determined. He said to himself that he was madly in love. Never yet had he been worsted in an amour
by any man. The blood surged to his head at the mere thought of being conquered in the only battle of life
worth fightingthe battle for a woman, and by a man of more than twice his age, a man who ought long ago
to have been married and have had children as old as the Signorina Vere.
Well, he had been a good friend to Emilio. Now Emilio should see that the good friend could be the good
enemy. Late that night, as he sat alone in front of the Caffe Turco smoking innumerable cigarettes, he
resolved to show these foreigners the stuff a Neapolitan was made of. They did not know. Poor, ignorant
beings from cold England, drowned forever in perpetual yellow fogs, and from France, country of volatility
but not of passion, they did not know what the men of the South, of a volcanic soil, were capable of, once
they were roused, once their blood spoke and their whole nature responded! It was time they learned. And he
would undertake to teach them. As he drove towards dawn up the dusty hill to Capodimonte he was in a fever
of excitement.
There was excitement, too, in the house on the island, but it did not centre round the Marchesino.
That night, for the first time in her young life, Vere did not sleep. She heard the fisherman call, but the
enchantment of sea doings did not stir her. She was aware for the first time of the teeming horrors of life.
There, in the darkness beneath the cliff, Peppina had sobbed out her story, and Vere, while she listened, had
stepped from girlhood into womanhood.
She had come into the house quietly, and found Artois waiting for her alone. Hermione had gone to bed,
leaving word that she had a headache. And Vere was glad that night not to see her mother. She wished to see
no one, and she bade Artois goodbye at once, telling him nothing, and not meeting his eyes when he
touched her hand in adieu. And he had asked nothing. Why should he, when he read the truth in the grave,
almost stern face of the child?
Vere knew.
The veils that hung before the happy eyes of childhood had been torn away, and those eyes had looked for the
first time into the deeps of an unhappy human heart.
And he had thought it possible to preserve, perhaps for a long while, Vere's beautiful ignorance untouched.
He had thought of the island as a safe retreat in which her delicate, and as yet childish talent, might gradually
mature under his influence and the influence of the sea. She had been like some charming and unusual plant
of the sea, shot with sea colors, wet with sea winds, fresh with the freshness of the smoothbacked waves.
And now in a moment she was dropped into the filthy dust of city horrors. What would be the result upon her
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and upon her dawning gift?
The double question was in his mind, and quite honestly. For his interest of the literary man in Vere was very
vivid. Never yet had he had a pupil or dreamed of having one. There are writers who found a school, whose
fame is carried forward like a banner by young and eager hands. Artois had always stood alone, ardently
admired, ardently condemned, but not imitated. And he had been proud of his solitude. Butlatelyhad not
underthoughts come into his mind, thoughts of leaving an impress on a vivid young intellect, a soul that was
full of life, and the beginnings of energy? Had not he dreamed, however vaguely, of forming, like some
sculptor of genius, an exquisite statuettepoetry, in the slim form of a girlchild singing to the world?
And now Peppina had rushed into Vere's life, with sobs and a tumult of cries to the Madonna and the saints,
and, no doubt, with imprecations upon the wickedness of men. And where were the dreams of the sea? And
his dreams, where were they?
That night the irony that was in him woke up and smiled bitterly, and he asked himself how he, with his
burden of years and of knowledge of life, could have been such a fool as to think it possible to guard any one
against the assaults of the facts of life. Hermione, perhaps, had been wiser than he, and yet he could not help
feeling something that was almost like anger against her for what he called her quixotism. The woman of
passionate impulseshow dangerous she is, even when her impulses are generous, are noble! Action without
thought, though the prompting heart behind it be a heart of goldhow fatal may it be!
And then he remembered a passionate impulse that had driven a happy woman across a sea to Africa, and he
was ashamed.
Yet again the feeling that was almost like hostility returned. He said to himself that Hermione should have
learned caution in the passing of so many years, that she ought to have grown older than she had. But there
was something unconquerably young, unconquerably naïve, in her something that, it seemed, would never
die. Her cleverness went hand in hand with a shortsightedness that was like a rather beautiful, yet
sometimes irritating stupidity. And this latter quality might innocently make victims, might even make a
victim of her own child.
And then a strange desire rose up in Artois, a desire to protect Vere against her own mother.
But how could that be done?
Vere, guarded by the beautiful unconsciousness of youth, was unaware of the subtleties that were brought
into activity by her. That the Marchesino was, or thought himself, in love with her she realized. But she could
not connect any rootsincerity with his feeling. She was accustomed vaguely to think of all young Southern
Italians as perpetually sighing for some one's dark eyes. The air of the South was full of love songs that rose
and fell without much more meaning than a twitter of birds, that could not be stilled because it was so natural.
And the Marchesino was a young aristocrat who did absolutely nothing of any importance to the world. The
Northern blood in Vere demanded other things of a man than imitations of a seal, the clever driving of a
fourinhand, lightfooted dancing, and songs to the guitar. In Gaspare she saw more reality than she saw as
yet in the Marchesino. The dawning intellect of her began to grasp already the nobility of work. Gaspare had
his work to do, and did it with loyal efficiency. Ruffo, too, had his profession of the sea. He drew out of the
deep his livelihood. Even with the fever almost upon him he had been out by night in the storm. That which
she liked and respected in Gaspare, his perfect and natural acceptance of work as a condition of his life, she
liked and respected in Ruffo.
On the morning after the incident with Peppina, Vere came down looking strangely grave and tired. Her
mother, too, was rather heavyeyed, and the breakfast passed almost severely. When it was over Hermione,
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who still conducted Vere's education, but with a much relaxed vigor in the summer months, suggested that
they should read French together.
"Let us read one of Monsieur Emile's books, Madre," said Vere, with an awakening of animation. "You know
I have never read one, only two or three baby stories, and articles that don't count."
"Yes, but Emile's books are not quite suitable for you yet, Vere."
"Why, Madre?"
"They are very fine, but they dive deep into life, and life contains many sad and many cruel things."
"Oughtn't we to prepare ourselves for them, then?"
"Not too soon, I think. I am nearly sure that if you were to read Emile's books just yet you would regret it."
Vere said nothing.
"Don't you think you can trust me to judge for you in this matter, figlia mia? II am almost certain that
Emile himself would think as I do."
It was not without an effort, a strong effort, that Hermione was able to speak the last sentence. Vere came
nearer to her mother, and stood before her, as if she were going to say something that was decisive or
important. But she hesitated.
"What is it, Vere?" Hermione asked, gently.
"I might learn from life itself what Monsieur Emile's books might teach me."
"Some day. And when that time comes neither I nor he would wish to keep them out of your hands."
"I see. Well, Madre dear, let us read whatever you like."
Vere had been on the verge of telling her mother about the previous night and Peppina. But, somehow, at the
last moment she could not.
And thus, for the moment at least, Artois and she shared another secret of which Hermione was unaware.
But very soon Hermione noticed that Vere was specially kind always to Peppina. They did not meet, perhaps,
very often, but when by chance they did Vere spoke to the disfigured girl with a gentleness, almost a
tenderness, that were striking.
"You like Peppina, Vere?" asked her mother one day.
"Yes, because I pity her so much."
There was a sound that was almost like passion in the girl's voice; and, looking up, Hermione saw that her
eyes were full of light, as if the spirit had set two lamps in them.
"It is strange," Vere continued, in a quieter tone; "but sometimes I feel as if on the night of the storm I had
had a sort of consciousness of her comingas if, when I saw the Saint's light shining, and bent down to the
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water and made the sign of the Cross, I already knew something of Peppina's wound, as if I made the sign to
protect our Casa del Mare, to ward off something evil."
"That was coming to us with Peppina, do you mean?"
"I don't know, Madre."
"Are you thinking of Giulia's foolish words about the evil eye?"
"No. It's all vague, Madre. But Peppina's cross sometimes seems to me to be a sign, a warning come into the
house. When I see it it seems to say there is a cross to be borne by some one here, by one of us."
"How imaginative you are, Vere!"
"So are you, Madre! But you try to hide it from me."
Hermione was startled. She took Vere's hand, and held it for a moment in silence, pressing it with a force that
was nervous. And her luminous, expressive eyes, immensely sensitive, beautiful in their sensitiveness,
showed that she was moved. At last she said:
"Perhaps that is true. Yes, I suppose it is."
"Why do you try to hide it?"
"I supposeI think becausebecause it has brought to me a great deal of pain. And what we hide from
others we sometimes seem almost to be destroying by that very act, though of course we are not."
"No. But I think I should like to encourage my imagination."
"Do you encourage it?" the mother asked, looking at her closely.
Again, as Vere had been on the edge of telling her mother all she knew about Peppina, she was on the edge of
telling her about the poems of the sea. And again, moved by some sudden, obstinate reluctance, come she
knew not why, she withheld the words that were almost on her lips.
And each time the mother was aware of something avoided, of an impulse stifled, and therefore of a secret
deliberately kept. The first time Hermione had not allowed her knowledge to appear. But on this second
occasion for a moment she lost control of herself, and when, after a perceptible pause, Vere said, "I know I
love it," and was silent, she exclaimed:
"Keep your secrets, Vere. Every one has a right to their freedom."
"But, Madre" Vere began, startled by her mother's abrupt vehemence.
"No, Vere, no! My child, my dearest one, never tell me anything but of your own accord, out of your own
heart and desire. Such a confidence is beautiful. But anything elseanything else, I could not bear from
you."
And she got up and left the room, walking with a strange slowness, as if she put upon herself an embargo not
to hasten.
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The words andspecially thatthe way in which they were spoken made Vere suddenly and completely
aware of something that perhaps she had already latently knownthat the relation between her mother and
herself had, of late, not been quite what once it was. At moments she had felt almost shy of her mother, only
at moments. Formerly she had always told her mother everything, and had spokenas her mother had just
saidout of her own heart and desire, with eagerness, inevitably. Nowwell, now she could not always do
that. Was it because she was growing older? Children are immensely frank. She had been a child. But
nowshe thought of the Marchesino, of Peppina, of her conversation with Monsieur Emile in the Grotto of
Virgilio, and realized the blooming of her girlhood, was aware that she was changing. And she felt half
frightened, then eager, ardently eager. An impulse filled her, the impulse towards a fulness of life that, till
now, she had not known. And for a moment she loved those little, innocent secrets that she kept.
But then she thought again of her mother, the most beloved of all her world. There had been in her mother's
voice a sound of tragedy.
Vere stood for a long while by the window thinking.
The day was very hot. She longed to bathe, to wash away certain perplexities that troubled her in the sea. But
Gaspare was not on the island. He had gone she knew not where. She looked at the sea with longing. When
would Gaspare be back? Well, at least she could go out in the small boat. Then she would be near to the
water. She ran down the steps and embarked. At first she only rowed a little way out into the Saint's Pool, and
then leaned back against the white cushions, and looked up at the blue sky, and let her hand trail in the water.
But she was restless today. The Pool did not suffice her, and she began to paddle out along the coast
towards Naples. She passed a ruined, windowless house named by the fisherfolk "The Palace of the Spirits,"
and then a tiny hamlet climbing up from a minute harbor to an antique church. Children called to her. A
fisherman shouted: "Buon viaggio, Signorina!" She waved her hand to them apathetically and rowed slowly
on. Now she had a bourne. A little farther on there was a small inlet of the sea containing two caves, not
gloomy and imposing like the Grotto of Virgilio, but cosy, shady, and serene. Into the first of them she ran
the boat until its prow touched the sandy bottom. Then she lay down at full length, with her hands behind her
head on the cushions, and thoughtand thought.
Figures passed through her mind, a caravan of figures travelling as all are travelling: her mother, Gaspare,
Giulia, with her plump and swarthy face; Monsieur Emile, to whom she had drawn so pleasantly,
interestingly near in these last days; the Marchesino (strutting from the hips and making his bold eyes round),
Peppina, Ruffo. They went by and returned, gathered about her, separated, melted away as people do in our
musings. Her eyes were fixed on the low roof of the cave. The lilt of the water seemed to rock her soul in a
cradle. "MadreRuffo! MadreRuffo!" The words were in her mind like a refrain. And then the oddity, the
promiscuity of life struck her. How many differences there were in this small group of people by whom she
was surrounded! What would their fates be, and hers? Would her life be happy? She did not feel afraid.
Youth ran in her veins. Butwould it be? She saw the red cross on Peppina's cheek. Why was one singled
out for misery, another for joy? Which would be her fate? Ruffo seemed to be standing near her. She had
seen him several times in these last days, but only at evening, fugitively, when he came in the boat with the
fishermen. He was stronger now. He had saluted her eagerly. She had spoken to him from the shore. But he
had not landed again on the island. She felt as if she saw his bright and beaming eyes. And Ruffowould he
be happy? She hoped so. She wanted him to be happy. He was such a dear, active boysuch a real boy.
What must it be like to have a brother? Gaspare approved of Ruffo now, she thought; and Gaspare did not
like everybody, and was fearfully blunt in expressing his opinion. She loved his bluntness. How delightfully
his nose twitched when he was pleased! Dear old Gaspare! She could never feel afraid of anything or
anybody when he was near. Monsieur Emilethe poemsthe Marchesino singing. She closed her eyes to
think the better.
"Signorina! Signorina!"
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Vere woke and sat up.
"Signorina!"
Gaspare was looking at her from his boat.
"Gaspare!"
She began to realize things.
"I wasI was thinking."
"Si, Signorina. I always think like that when I am in bed."
She laughed. She was wide awake now.
"How did you find me?"
"I met one of the fishermen. He had seen you row into the cave."
"Oh!"
She looked at him more steadily. His brown face was hot. Perspiration stood on his forehead just under the
thick and waving hair.
"Where have you been, Gaspare? Not to Naples in all this heat?"
"I have been to Mergellina, Signorina."
"Mergellina! Did you see Ruffo?"
"Si, Signorina."
There was something very odd about Gaspare today, Vere thought. Or was she still not thoroughly awake?
His eyes looked excited, surely, as if something unusual had been happening. And they were fixed upon her
face with a scrutiny that was strange, almost as if he saw her now for the first time.
"What is it, Gaspare? Why do you look at me like that?"
Gaspare turned his eyes away.
"Like what, Signorina? Why should I not look at you?"
"What have you been doing at Mergellina?"
She spoke rather imperiously.
"Nothing particular, Signorina."
"Oh!"
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She paused, but he did not speak.
"Where did you see Ruffo?"
"At the harbor, Signorina."
"Tell me, Gaspare, do you like him?"
"Ruffo?"
"Yes."
"I do not dislike him, Signorina. He has never done me any harm."
"Of course not. Why should he?"
"I sayhe has not."
"I like Ruffo."
"Lo so."
Again he looked at her with that curious expression in his eyes. Then he said:
"Come, Signorina! It is getting late. We must go to the island."
And they pulled out round the point to the open sea.
During the hot weather the dwellers in the Casa del Mare made the siesta after the midday meal. The
awnings and blinds were drawn. Silence reigned, and the house was still as the Palace of the Sleeping Beauty.
At the foot of the cliffs the sea slept in the sunshine, and it was almost an empty sea, for few boats passed by
in those hot, still hours.
Today the servants were quiet in their quarters. Only Gaspare was outside. And he, in shirt and trousers,
with a white linen hat covering his brown face, was stretched under the dwarf trees of the little garden, in the
shadow of the wall, resting profoundly after the labors of the morning. In their respective rooms Hermione
and Vere were secluded behind shut doors. Hermione was lying down, but not sleeping. Vere was not lying
down. Generally she slept at this time for an hour. But today, perhaps because of her nap in the cave, she
had no desire for sleep.
She was thinking about her mother. And Hermione was thinking of her. Each mind was working in the midst
of its desert space, its solitude eternal.
What was growing up between them, and why was it growing?
Hermione was beset by a strange sensation of impotence. She felt as if her child were drifting from her. Was
it her fault, or was it no one's, and inevitable? Had Vere been able to divine certain feelings in her, the
mother, obscure pains of the soul that had travelled to mind and heart? She did not think it possible. Nor had
it been possible for her to kill those pains, although she had made her effort to conceal them. Long ago,
before she was married to Maurice, Emile had spoken to them of jealousy. At the time she had not understood
it. She remembered thinking, even saying, that she could not be jealous.
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But then she had not had a child.
Lately she had realized that there were forces in her of which she had not been aware. She had realized her
passion for her child. Was it strange that she had not always known how deep and strong it was? Her
mutilated life was more vehemently centred upon Vere than she had understood. Of Vere she could be
jealous. If Vere put any one before her, trusted any one more than her, confided anything to another rather
than to her, she could be frightfully jealous.
Recently she had suspectedshe had imagined
Restlessly she moved on her bed. A mosquitocurtain protected it. She was glad of that, as if it kept out
prying eyes. For sometimes she was ashamed of the vehemence within her.
She thought of her friend Emile, whom she had dragged back from death.
He, too, had he not drifted a little from her in these last days? It seemed to her that it was so. She knew that it
was so. Women are so sure of certain things, more almost than men are ever sure of anything. And why
should Vere have drifted, Emile have drifted, if there were not some link between themsome link between
the child and the middleaged man which they would not have her know of?
Vere had told to Emile something that she had kept, that she still kept from her mother. When Vere had been
shut up in her room she had not been reading. Emile knew what it was that she did during those long hours
when she was alone. Emile knew that, and perhaps other things of Vere that she, Hermione, did not know,
was not allowed to know.
Hermione, in their long intimacy, had learned to read Artois more clearly, more certainly than he realized.
Although often impulsive, and seemingly unconscious of the thoughts of others, she could be both sharply
observant and subtle, especially with those she loved. She had noticed the difference between his manner
when first they spoke of Vere's hidden occupation and his manner when last they spoke of it. In the interval
he had found out what it was, and that it was not reading. Of that she was positive. She was positive also that
he did not wish her to suspect this. Vere must have told him what it was.
It was characteristic of Hermione that at this moment she was free from any common curiosity as to what it
was that Vere did during those many hours when she was shut up in her room. The thing that hurt her, that
seemed to humiliate her, was the Emile should know what it was and not she, that Vere should have told
Emile and not told her.
As she lay there she cowered under the blow a mutual silence can give, and something woke up in her,
something fiery, something surely that could act with violence. It startled her, almost as a stranger rushing
into her room would have startled her.
For a moment she thought of her child and her loved friend with a bitterness that was cruel.
How long had they shared their secret? She wondered, and began to consider the recent days, searching their
hours for those tiny incidents, those small reticences, avoidances, that to women are revelations. When had
she first noticed a slight change in Emile's manner to her? When had Vere and he first seemed a little more
intimate, a little more confidential than before? When had she, Hermione, first felt a little "out of it," not
perfectly at ease with these two dear denizens of her life?
Her mind fastened at once upon the day of the storm. On the night of the storm, when she and Emile had been
left alone in the restaurant, she had felt almost afraid of him. But before then, in the afternoon on the island,
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there had been something. They had not been always at ease. She had been conscious of trying to tide over
moments that were almost awkwardonce or twice, only once or twice. But that was the day. Her woman's
instinct told her so. That was the day on which Vere had told Emile the secret she had kept from her mother.
How excited Vere had been, almost feverishly excited! And Emile had been very strange. When the
Marchesino and Vere went out upon the terrace, how restless, how irritable he
Suddenly Hermione sat up in her bed. The heat, the stillness, the white cage of the mosquito net, the silence
had become intolerable to her. She pulled aside the net. Yes, that was better. She felt more free. She would lie
down outside the net. But the pillow was hot. She turned it, but its pressure against her cheek almost
maddened her, and she got up, went across the room to the washstand and bathed her face with cold water.
Then she put some eau de Cologne on her forehead, opened a drawer and drew out a fan, went over to an
armchair near the window and sat down in it.
What had Emile written in the visitors' book at the Scoglio di Frisio? With a strange abruptness, with a flight
that was instinctive as that of a homing pigeon, Hermione's mind went to that book as to a book of revelation.
Just before he wrote he had been feeling acutely something. She had been aware of that at the time. He had
not wanted to write. And then suddenly, almost violently, he had written and had closed the book.
She longed to open that book now, at once, to read what he had written. She felt as if it would tell her very
much. There was no reason why she should not read it. The book was one that all might see, was kept to be
looked over by any chance visitor. She would go one day, one evening, to the restaurant and see what Emile
had written. He would not mind. If she had asked him that night of course he would have shown her the
words. But she had not asked him. She had been almost afraid of things that night. She remembered how the
wind had blown up the white tablecloth, her cold, momentary shiver of fear, her relief when she had seen
Gaspare walking sturdily into the room.
And now, at once, this thought of Gaspare brought to her a sense of relief again, of relief so great, so
sharppiercing down into the very deep of her naturethat by it she was able to measure something, her
inward desolation at this moment. Yes, she clung to Gaspare, because he was loyal, because he loved her,
because he had loved Mauricebut also because she was terribly alone.
Because he had loved Maurice! Had there been a time, really a time, when she had possessed one who
belonged utterly to her, who lived only in and for her? Was that possible? Today, with the fierceness of one
starving, she fastened upon this memory, her memory, hers only, shared by no one, never shared by living or
dead. That at least she had, and that could never be taken from her. Even if Vere, her child, slipped from her,
if Emile, her friend, whose life she had saved, slipped from her, the memory of her Sicilian was forever hers,
the memory of his love, his joy in their mutual life, his last kiss. Long ago she had taken that kiss as a gift
made to twoto her and to Vere unborn. Today, almost savagely, she took it to herself, alone, herself
alone. Hers it was, hers only, no part of it Vere's.
That she hadher memory, and Gaspare's loyal, openhearted devotion. He knew what she had suffered. He
loved her as he had loved his dead Padrone. He would always protect her, put her first without hesitation,
conceal nothing from her that it was her rightfor surely even the humblest, the least selfish, the least
grasping, surely all who love have their rightsthat it was her right to know.
Her cheeks were burning. She felt like one who had been making some physical exertion.
Deeply silent was the house. Her room was full of shadows, yet full of the hidden presence of the sun. There
was a glory outside, against which she was protected. But outside, and against assaults that were inglorious,
what protection had she? Her own personality must protect her, her own will, the determination, the strength,
the courage that belong to all who are worth anything in the world. And she called upon herself. And it
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seemed to her that there was no voice that answered.
There was a hideous moment of drama.
She sat there quietly in her chair in the pretty room. And she called again, and she listenedand again there
was silence.
Then she was afraid. She had a strange and horrible feeling that she was deserted by herself, by that which, at
least, had been herself and on which she had been accustomed to rely. And what was left was surely utterly
incapable, full of the flabby wickedness that seems to dwell in weakness. It seemed to her that if any one who
knew her well, if Vere, Emile, or even Gaspare, had come into the room just then, the intruder would have
paused on the threshold amazed to see a stranger there. She felt afraid to be seen and yet afraid to remain
alone. Should she do something definite, something defiant, to prove to herself that she had will and could
exercise it?
She got up, resolved to go to Vere. When she was there, with her child, she did not know what she was going
to do. She had said to Vere, "Keep your secrets." What if she went now and humbled herself, explained to the
child quite simply and frankly a mother's jealousy, a widow's loneliness, made her realize what she was in a
life from which the greatest thing had been ruthlessly withdrawn? Vere would understand surely, and all
would be well. This shadow between them would pass away. Hermione had her hand on the door. But she did
not open it. An imperious reserve, autocrat, tyrant, rose up suddenly within her. She could never make such a
confession to Vere. She could never plead for her child's confidencea confidence already given to Emile,
to a man. And now for the first time the common curiosity to which she had not yet fallen a victim came
upon her, flooded her. What was Vere's secret? That it was innocent, probably even childish, Hermione did
not question even for a moment. But what was it?
She heard a light step outside and drew back from the door. The step passed on and died away down the
paved staircase. Vere had gone out to the terrace, the garden, or the sea.
Hermione again moved forward, then stopped abruptly. Her face was suddenly flooded with red as she
realized what she had been going to do, she who had exclaimed that every one has a right to their freedom.
For an instant she had meant to go to Vere's room, to try to find out surreptitiously what Emile knew.
A moment later Vere, coming back swiftly for a pencil she had forgotten, heard the sharp grating of a key in
the lock of her mother's door.
She ran on lightly, wondering why her mother was locking herself in, and against whom.
CHAPTER XVIII
During the last days Artois had not been to the island, nor had he seen the Marchesino. A sudden passion for
work had seized him. Since the night of Vere's meeting with Peppina his brain had been in flood with
thoughts. Life often acts subtly upon the creative artist, repressing or encouraging his instinct to bring forth,
depressing or exciting him when, perhaps, he expects it least. The passing incidents of life frequently have
their hidden, their unsuspected part in determining his activities. So it was now with Artois. He had given an
impetus to Vere. That was natural, to be expected, considering his knowledge and his fame, his great
experience and his understanding of men. But now Vere had given an impetus to himand that was surely
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stranger. Since the conversation among the shadows of the cave, after the vision of the moving men of
darkness and of fire, since the sound of Peppina sobbing in the night, and the sight of her passionate face
lifted to show its gashed cross to Vere, Artois' brain and head had been alive with a fury of energy that
forcibly summoned him to work, that held him working. He even felt within him something that was like a
renewal of some part of his vanished youth, and remembered old days of student life, nights in the Quartier
Latin, his debut as a writer for the papers, the sensation of joy with which he saw his first article in the
Figaro, his dreams of fame, his hopes of love, his baptism of sentiment. How he had worked in those days
and nights! How he had hunted experience in the streets and the byways of the great city! How passionate
and yet how ruthless he had been, as artists often are, governed not only by their quick emotions, but also by
the something watchful and dogged underneath, that will not be swept away, that is like a detective hidden by
a house door to spy out all the comers in the night. Something, some breath from the former days, swept over
him again. In his ears there sounded surely the cries of Paris, urging him to the assault to the barricades of
Fame. And he sat down, and he worked with the vehement energy, with the pulsating eagerness of one of "les
jeunes." Hour after hour he worked. He took coffee, and wrote through the night. He slept when the dawn
came, got up, and toiled again.
He shut out the real world and he forgot ituntil the fit was past. And then he pushed away his paper, he laid
down his pen, he stretched himself, and he knew that his great effort had tired him tremendously
tremendously.
He looked at his right hand. It was cramped. As he held it up he saw that it was shaking. He had drunk a great
deal of black coffee during those days, had drunk it recklessly as in the days of youth, when he cared nothing
about health because he felt made of iron.
"Pfff!"
And so there was Naples outside, the waters of the Bay dancing in the sunshine of the bright summer
afternoon, people bathing and shouting to one another from the diving platforms and the cabins; people
galloping by in the little carriages to eat oysters at Posilipo. Lazy, heedless, pleasureloving wretches! He
thought of Doro as he looked at them.
He had given strict orders that he was not to be disturbed while he was at work, unless Hermione came. And
he had not once been disturbed. Now he rang the bell. An Italian waiter, with crooked eyes and a fair beard,
stepped softly in.
"Has any one been to see me? Has any one asked for me lately?" he said. "Just go down, will you, and inquire
of the concierge."
The waiter departed, and returned to say that no one had been for the Signore.
"Not the Marchese Isidoro Panacci?
"The concierge says that no one has been, Signore."
"Va bene."
The man went out.
So Doro had not come even once! Perhaps he was seriously offended. At their last parting in the Villa he had
shown a certain irony that had in it a hint of bitterness. Artois did not know of the fisherman's information,
that Doro had guessed who was Vere's companion that night upon the sea. He supposed that his friend was
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angry because he believed himself distrusted. Well, that could soon be put right. He thought of the
Marchesino now with lightness, as the worker who has just made a great and prolonged effort is inclined to
think of the habitual idler. Doro was like a feather on the warm wind of the South. He, Artois, was not in the
mood just then to bother about a feather. Still less was he inclined for companionship. He wanted some hours
of complete rest out in the air, with gay and frivolous scenes before his eyes.
He wanted to look on, but not to join in, the merry life that was about him, and that for so long a time he had
almost violently ignored.
He resolved to take a carriage, drive slowly to Posilipo, and eat his dinner there in some eyrie above the sea;
watching the pageant that unfolds itself on the evenings of summer about the ristoranti and the osterie, round
the stalls of the vendors of Fruitti di Mare, and the pianoorgans, to the accompaniment of which impudent
men sing love songs to the saucy, darkeyed beauties posed upon balconies, or gathered in knots upon the
little terraces that dominate the bathing establishments, and the distant traffic of the Bay. His brain longed for
rest, but it longed also for the hum and the stir of men. His heart lusted for the sight of pleasure, and must be
appeased.
Catching up his hat, almost with the hasty eagerness of a boy, he went downstairs. On the opposite side of
the road was a smart little carriage in which the coachman was asleep, with his legs cocked up on the driver's
seat, displaying a pair of startling orangeandblack socks. By the socks Artois knew his man.
"Pasqualino! Pasqualino!" he cried.
The coachman sprang up, showing a round, rosy face, and a pair of shrewd, rather small dark eyes.
"Take me to Posilipo."
"Si, Signore."
Pasqualino cracked his whip vigorously.
"Ahah! Ahah!" he cried to his gayly bedizened little horse, who wore a long feather on his head, flanked
by bunches of artificial roses.
"Not too fast, Pasqualino. I am in no hurry. Keep along by the sea."
The coachman let the reins go loose, and instantly the little horse went slowly, as if all his spirit and agility
had suddenly been withdrawn from him.
"I have not seen you for several days, Signore. Have you been ill?"
Pasqualino had turned quite round on his box, and was facing his client.
"No, I've been working."
"Si?"
Pasqualino made a grimace, as he nearly always did when he heard a rich Signore speak of working.
"And you? You have been spending money as usual. All your clothes are new."
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Pasqualino smiled, showing rows of splendid teeth under his little twistedup mustache.
"Si, Signore, all! And I have also new underclothing."
"Per Bacco!"
"Ecco, Signore!"
He pulled his trousers up to his knees, showing a pair of paleblue drawers.
"The suspendersthey are new, Signore!" He drew attention to the scarlet elastics that kept the
orangeandblack socks in place. "My boots!" He put his feet up on the box that Artois might see his lemon
colored boots, then unbuttoned and threw open his waistcoat. "My shirt is new! My cravat is new! Look at
the pin!" He flourished his plump, brown, and carefully washed hands. "I have a new ring." He bent his head.
"My hat is new."
Artois broke into a roar of laughter that seemed to do him good after his days of work.
"You young dandy! And where do you get the money?"
Pasqualino looked doleful and hung his head.
"Signore, I am in debt. But I say to myself, 'Thank the Madonna, I have a rich and generous Padrone who
wishes his coachman to be chic. When he sees my clothes he will be contented, and who knows what he will
do?' "
"Per Bacco! And who is this rich and generous Signore?"
"Ma!" Pasqualino passionately flung out the ringed hand that was not holding the reins"Ma!you,
Signore."
"You young rascal! Turn round and attend to your driving!"
But Artois laughed again. The impudent boyishness of Pasqualino, and his childish passion for finery, were
refreshing, and seemed to belong to a young and thoughtless world. The seabreeze was soft as silk, the
afternoon sunshine was delicately brilliant. The Bay looked as it often does in summerlike radiant liberty
held in happy arms, alluring, full of promises. And a physical wellbeing invaded Artois such as he had not
known since the day when he had tea with Vere upon the island.
He had been shut in. Now the gates were thrown open, and to what a brilliant world! He issued forth into it
with almost joyous expectation.
They went slowly, and presently drew near to the Rotonda. Artois leaned a little forward and saw that the
fishermen were at work. They stood in lines upon the pavement pulling at the immense nets which were still
a long way out to sea. When the carriage reached them Artois told Pasqualino to draw up, and sat watching
the work and the fierce energy of the workers. Half naked, with arms and legs and chests that gleamed in the
sun like copper, they toiled, slanting backward, one towards another, laughing, shouting, swearing with a sort
of almost angry joy. In their eyes there was a carelessness that was wild, in their gestures a lack of
selfconsciousness that was savage. But they looked like creatures who must live forever. And to Artois,
sedentary for so long, the sight of them brought a feeling almost of triumph, but also a sensation of envy.
Their vigor made him pine for movement.
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"Drive on slowly, Pasqualino," he said. "I will follow you on foot, and join you at the hill."
"Si Signore."
He got out, stood for a moment, then strolled on towards the Mergellina. As he approached this part of the
town, with its harbor and its population of fisherfolk, the thought of Ruffo came into his mind. He
remembered that Ruffo lived here. Perhaps he might see the boy this afternoon.
On the mole that serves as a slight barrier between the open sea and the snug little harbor several boys were
fishing. Others were bathing, leaping into the water with shouts from the rocks. Beyond, upon the slope of
dingy sand among the drawnup boats, children were playing, the girls generally separated from the boys.
Fishermen, in woolen shirts and white linen trousers, sat smoking in the shadow of their craft, or leaned
muscular arms upon them, standing at ease, staring into vacancy or calling to each other. On the still water
there was a perpetual movement of boats; and from the distance came a dull but continuous uproar, the yells
and the laughter of hundreds of bathers at the Stabilimento di Bagni beyond the opposite limit of the harbor.
Artois enjoyed the openair gayety, the freedom of the scene; and once again, as often before, found himself
thinking that the outdoor life, the life loosed from formal restrictions, was the only one really and fully
worth living. There was a carelessness, a camaraderie among these people that was of the essence of
humanity. Despite their frequent quarrels, their intrigues, their betrayals, their vendettas, they hung together.
There was a true and vital companionship among them.
He passed on with deliberation, observing closely, yet halflazily for his brain was slack and needed
restthe different types about him, musing on the possibilities of their lives, smiling at the gambols of the
intent girls, and the impudent frolics of the little boys who seemed the very spawn of sand and sea and sun,
till he had nearly passed the harbor, and was opposite to the pathway that leads down to the jetty, to the left of
which lie the steamyachts.
At the entrance to this pathway there is always a knot of people gathered about the shanty where the seamen
eat maccaroni and strange messes, and the stands where shellfish are exposed for sale. On the far side of the
tramway, beneath the tall houses which are let out in rooms and apartments for families, there is an open
space, and here in summer are set out quantities of strong tables, at which from noon till late into the evening
the people of Mergellina, and visitors of the humbler classes from Naples, sit in merry throngs, eating,
smoking, drinking coffee, syrups, and red and white wine.
Artois stood still for a minute to watch them, to partake from a distance, and unknown to them, in their
boisterous gayety. He had lit a big cigar, and puffed at it as his eyes roved from group to group, resting now
on a family party, now on a quartet of lovers, now on two stout men obviously trying to drive a bargain with
vigorous rhetoric and emphatic gestures, now on an elderly woman in a shawl spending an hour with her
soldier son in placid silence, now on some sailors from a ship in the distant port by the arsenal bent over a
game of cards, or a party of workmen talking wages or politics in their shirtsleeves with flowers above their
ears.
What a row they made, these people! Their animation was almost like the animation of a nightmare. Some
were ugly, some looked wicked; others mischievous, sympathetic, coarse, artful, seductive, boldly defiant or
boisterously excited. But however much they differed, in one quality they were nearly all alike. They nearly
all looked vivid. If they lacked anything, at least it was not life. Even their sorrows should be energetic.
As this thought came into his mind Artois' eyes chanced to rest on two people sitting a little apart at a table on
which stood a coffeecup, a thick glass half full of red wine, and a couple of tumblers of water. One was a
woman, the otheryes, the other was Ruffo.
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When Artois realized this he kept his eyes upon them. He forgot his interest in the crowd.
At first he could only see Ruffo's sideface. But the woman was exactly opposite to him.
She was neatly dressed in some dark stuff, and wore a thin shawl, purple in color, over her shoulders. She
looked middleaged. Had she been an Englishwoman Artois would have guessed her to be near fifty. But as
she was evidently a Southerner it was possible that she was very much younger. Her figure was broad and
matronly. Her face, once probably quite pretty was lined, and had the battered and almost corrugated look
that the faces of Italian women of the lower classes often reveal when the years begin to increase upon them.
The cheek bones showed harshly in it, by the long and dark eyes, which were surrounded by little puckers
of yellow flesh. But Artois' attention was held not by this woman's quite ordinary appearance, but by her
manner. Like the people about her she was vivacious, but her vivacity was tragicshe had not come here to
be gay. Evidently she was in the excitement of some great grief or passion. She was speaking vehemently to
Ruffo, gesticulating with her dark hands, on which there were two or three cheap rings, catching at her shawl,
swaying her body, nodding her head, on which the still black hair was piled in heavy masses. And her face
was distorted by an emotion that seemed of sorrow and anger mingled. In her ears, pretty and almost delicate
in contrast to the ruggedness of her face, were large gold rings, such as Sicilian women often wear. They
swayed in response to her perpetual movements. Artois watched her lips as they opened and shut, were
compressed or thrust forward, watched her white teeth gleaming. She lifted her two hands, doubled into fists,
till they were on a level with her shoulders, shook them vehemently, then dashed them down on the table.
The coffee cup was overturned. She took no notice of it. She was heedless of everything but the subject
which evidently obsessed her.
The boy, Ruffo, sat quite still listening to her. His attitude was calm. Now and then he sipped his wine, and
presently he took from his pocket a cigarette, lighted it carefully, and began to smoke. There was something
very boyish and happygolucky in his attitude and manner. Evidently, Artois thought, he was very much at
home with this middleaged woman. Probably her vehemence was to him an everyday affair. She laid one
hand on his arm and bent forward. He slightly shrugged his shoulders and shook his head. She kept her hand
on his arm, went on talking passionately, and suddenly began to weep. Tears rushed out of her eyes. Then the
boy took her hand gently, stroked it, and began to speak to her, always keeping her hand in his. The woman,
with a despairing movement, laid her face down on the table, with her forehead touching the wood. Then she
lifted it up. The paroxysm seemed to have passed. She took out a handkerchief from inside the bodice of her
dress and dried her eyes. Ruffo struck the table with his glass. An attendant came. He paid the bill, and the
woman and he got up to go. As they did so Ruffo presented for a moment his full face to Artois, and Artois
swiftly compared it with the face of the woman, and felt sure that they were mother and son.
Artois moved on towards the hill of Posilipo, but after taking a few steps turned to look back. The woman
and Ruffo had come into the road by the tramline. They stood there for a moment, talking. Then Ruffo
crossed over to the path, and the woman went away slowly towards the Rotonda. Seeing Ruffo alone Artois
turned to go back, thinking to have a word with the boy. But before he could reach him he saw a man step out
from behind the wooden shanty of the fishermen and join him.
This man was Gaspare.
Ruffo and Gaspare strolled slowly away towards the jetty where the yachts lie, and presently disappeared.
Artois found Pasqualino waiting for him rather impatiently not far from the entrance to the Scoglio di Frisio.
"I thought you were dead, Signore," he remarked, as Artois came up.
"I was watching the people."
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He got into the carriage.
"They are canaglia," said Pasqualino, with the profound contempt of the Neapolitan coachman for those who
get their living by the sea. He lived at Fuorigrotta, and thought Mergellina a place of outer darkness.
"I like them," returned Artois.
"You don't know them, Signore. I saythey are canaglia. Where shall I drive you?"
Artois hesitated, passing in mental review the various ristoranti on the hill.
"Take me to the Ristorante della Stella," he said, at length.
Pasqualino cracked his whip, and drove once more merrily onward.
When Artois came to the ristorante, which was perched high up on the side of the road farthest from the sea,
he had almost all the tables to choose from, as it was still early in the evening, and in the summer the
Neapolitans who frequent the more expensive restaurants usually dine late. He sat down at a table in the open
air close to the railing, from which he could see a grand view of the Bay, as well as all that was passing on
the road beneath, and ordered a dinner to be ready in half an hour. He was in no hurry, and wanted to finish
his cigar.
There was a constant traffic below. The trambell sounded its reiterated signal to the crowds of dusty
pedestrians to clear the way. Donkeys toiled upward, drawing carts loaded with vegetables and fruit.
Animated young men, wearing tiny straw hats cocked impertinently to one side, drove frantically by in light
gigs that looked like the skeletons of carriages, holding a rein in each hand, pulling violently at their horses'
mouths, and shouting "Ahah!" as if possessed of the devil. Smart women made the evening "Passeggiata"
in landaus and low victorias, wearing flamboyant hats, and gazing into the eyes of the watching men ranged
along the low wall on the seaside with a cool steadiness that was almost Oriental. Some of them were
talking. But by far the greater number leaned back almost immobile against their cushions; and their pale
faces showed nothing but the languid consciousness of being observed and, perhaps, desired. Stout
Neapolitan fathers, with bulging eyes, immense brown cheeks, and peppery mustaches, were promenading
with their children and little dogs, looking lavishly contented with themselves. Young girls went primly past,
holding their narrow, welldressed heads with a certain virginal stiffness that was yet not devoid of grace,
and casting down eyes that were supposed not yet to be enlightened. Their governesses and duennas
accompanied them. Barefooted brown children darted in and out, dodging pedestrians and horses. Priests and
blackrobed students chattered vivaciously. Schoolboys with peaked caps hastened homeward. The orphans
from Queen Margherita's Home, higher up the hill, marched sturdily through the dust to the sound of a boyish
but desperately martial music. It was a wonderfully vivid world, but the eyes of Artois wandered away from
it, over the terraces, the houses, and the treetops. Their gaze dropped down to the sea. Far off, Capri rose out
of the light mist produced by the heat. And beyond was Sicily.
Why had that woman, Ruffo's mother, wept just now? What was her tragedy? he wondered. Accurately he
recalled her face, broad now, and seamed with the wrinkles brought by trouble and the years.
He recalled, too, Ruffo's attitude as the boy listened to her vehement, her almost violent harangue. How
boyish, how careless it had beenyet not unkind or even disrespectful, only wonderfully natural and
wonderfully young.
"He was the deathless boy."
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Suddenly those words started into Artois' mind. Had he read them somewhere? For a moment he wondered.
Or had he heard them? They seemed to suggest speech, a voice whose intonations he knew. His mind was
still fatigued by work, and would not be commanded by his will. Keeping his eyes fixed on the ethereal
outline of Capri, he strove to remember, to find the book which had contained these words and given them to
his eyes, or the voice that had spoken them and given them to his ears.
"He was the deathless boy."
A pianoorgan struck up below him, a little way up the hill to the right, and above its hard accompaniment
there rose a powerful tenor voice singing. The song must have been struck forcibly upon some part of his
brain that was sleeping, must have summoned it to activity. For instantly, ere the voice had sung the first
verse, he saw imaginatively a mountain top in Sicily, evening lightsuch as was then shining over and
transfiguring Capriand a woman, Hermione. And he heard her voice, very soft, with a strange depth and
stillness in it, saying those words: "He was the deathless boy."
Of course! How could he have forgotten? They had been said of Maurice Delarey. And now idly, strangely,
he had recalled them as he thought of Ruffo's young and careless attitude by the table of the ristorante that
afternoon.
The waiter, coming presently to bring the French Signore the plate of oysters from Fusaro, which he had
ordered as the prelude to his dinner, was surprised by the deep gravity of his face, and said:
"Don't you like 'A Mergellina,' Signore? We are all mad about it. And it won the first prize at last year's festa
of Piedigrotta."
"Comment donc?" exclaimed Artois, as if startled. "What?noyes. I like it. It's a capital song. Lemon?
That's rightand red pepper. Va bene!"
And he bent over his plate rather hurriedly and began to eat.
The pianoorgan and the singing voice died away down the hill, going towards Mergellina.
But the effect, curious and surely unreasonable, of the song remained. Often, while he ate, Artois turned his
eyes towards the mountain of Capri, and each time that he did so he saw, beyond it and its circling sea, Sicily,
Monte Amato, the dying lights on Etna, the evening star above its plume of smoke, the figure of a woman set
in the shadow of her sorrow, yet almost terribly serene; and then another woman, sitting at a table,
vehemently talking, then bowing down her head passionately as if in angry grief.
When he had finished his dinner the sun had set, and night had dropped down softly over the Bay. Capri had
disappeared. The long serpent of lights had uncoiled itself along the sea. Down below, very far down, there
was the twang and the thin, acute whine of guitars and mandolines, the throbbing cry of Southern voices. The
stars were out in a deep sky of bloomy purple. There was no chill in the air, but a voluptuous, brooding
warmth, that shed over the city and the waters a luxurious benediction, giving absolution, surely, to all the
sins, to all the riotous follies of the South.
Artois rested his arms on the balustrade.
The ristorante was nearly full now, gay with lights and with a tempest of talk. The waiter came to ask if the
Signore would take coffee.
Artois hesitated a moment, then shook his head. He realized that his nerves had been tried enough in these
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last days and nights. He must let them rest for a while.
The waiter went away, and he turned once more towards the sea. Tonight he felt the wonder of Italy, of this
part of the land and of its people, as he had not felt it before, in a new and, as it seemed to him, a mysterious
way. A very modern man and, in his art, a realist, tonight there was surely something very young alert
within him, something of vague sentimentality that was like an echo from Byronic days. He felt
overshadowed, but not unpleasantly, by a dim and exquisite melancholy, in which he thought of nature and
of human nature pathetically, linking them together; those singing voices with the stars, the women who
leaned on balconies to listen with the sea that was murmuring below them, the fishermen upon that sea with
the deep and marvellous sky that watched their labors.
In a beautiful and almost magical sadness he too was one with the night, this night in Italy. It held him softly
in its arms. A golden sadness streamed from the stars. The voices below expressed it. The fishermen's torches
in the Bay, those travelling lights that are as the eyes of the South searching for charmed things in secret
places, lifted the sorrows of earth towards the stars, and they were golden too. There was a joy even in the
tears wept on such a night as this.
He loved detail. It was, perhaps, his fault to love it too much. But now he realized that the magician, Night,
knew better than he what were the qualities of perfection. She had changed Naples into a diaper of jewels
sparkling softly in the void. He knew that behind that lacework of jewels there were hotels, gaunt and
discolored houses full of poverty, shame, and wickedness, galleries in which men hunted the things that
gratify their lusts, alleys infected with disease and filth indescribable. He knew it, but he no longer felt it. The
glamour of the magician was upon him. Perhaps behind the stars there were terrors, too. But who, looking
upon them, could believe it? Detail might create a picture; its withdrawal let in upon the soul the spirit light
of the true magic.
It was a mistake to search too much, to draw too near, to seek always to see clearly.
The Night taught that in Italy, and many things not to be clothed with words.
Reluctantly at last he lifted his arms from the balcony rail and got up to leave the restaurant. He dreaded the
bustle of the street. As he came out into it he heard the sharp "Ting! Ting!" of a trambell higher up the hill,
and stepped aside to let the tram go by. Idly he looked at it as it approached. He was still in the vague, the
almost sentimental mood that had come upon him with the night. The tram came up level with him and
slipped slowly by. There was a number of people in it, but on the last seat one woman sat alone. He saw her
clearly as she passed, and recognized Hermione.
She did not see him. She was looking straight before her.
"Ahah! Ahah!"
A shower of objurgations in the Neapolitan dialect fell upon Artois from the box of a carriage coming up the
hill. He jumped back and gained the path. There again he stood still. The sweet and half melancholy
vagueness had quite left him now. The sight of his friend had swept it away. Why was she going to
Mergellina at that hour? And why did she look like that?
And he thought of the expression he had seen on her face as the tram slipped by, an expression surely of
excitement; but also a furtive expression.
Artois had seen Hermione in all her moods, and hers was a very changeful face. But never before had he seen
her look furtive. Nor could he have conceived it possible that she could look so.
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Perhaps the lights had deceived him. And he had only seen her for an instant.
But why was she going to Mergellina?
Then suddenly it occurred to him that she might be going to Naples, not to Mergellina at all. He knew no
reason why her destination should be Mergellina. He began to walk down the hill rather quickly. Some
hundreds of yards below the Ristorante della Stella there is a narrow flight of steps between high walls and
houses, which leads eventually down to the sea at a point where there are usually two or three boats waiting
for hire. Artois, when he started, had no intention of going to sea that night, but when he reached the steps he
paused, and finally turned from the path and began to descend them.
He had realized that he was really in pursuit, and abruptly relinquished his purpose. Why should he wish to
interfere with an intention of Hermione's that night?
He would return to Naples by sea.
As he came in sight of the water there rose up to him in a light tenor voice a melodious cry:
"Barca! Barca!"
He answered the call.
"Barca!"
The sailor who was below came gayly to meet him.
"It is a lovely night for the Signore. I could take the Signore to Sorrento or to Capri tonight."
He held Artois by the right arm, gently assisting him into the broad bottomed boat.
"I only want to go to Naples."
"To which landing, Signore?"
"The Vittoria. But go quietly and keep near the shore. Go round as near as you can to the Mergellina."
"Va bene, Signore."
They slipped out, with a delicious, liquid sound, upon the moving silence of the sea.
CHAPTER XIX
Hermione was not going to Mergellina, but to the Scoglio di Frisio. She had only come out of her room late
in the afternoon. During her seclusion there she had once been disturbed by Gaspare, who had come to ask
her if she wanted him for anything, and, if not, whether he might go over to Mergellina for the rest of the
afternoon to see some friends he had made there. She told him he was free till night, and he went away
quickly, after one searching, wideeyed glance at the face of his Padrona.
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When he had gone Hermione told herself that she was glad he was away. If he had been on the island she
might have been tempted to take one of the boats, to ask him to row her to the Scoglio that evening. But now,
of course, she would not go. It was true that she could easily get a boatman from the village on the mainland
near by, but without Gaspare's companionship she would not care to go. So that was settled. She would think
no more about it. She had tea with Vere, and strove with all her might to be natural, to show no traces in face
or manner of the storm that had swept over her that day. She hoped, she believed that she was successful. But
what a hateful, what an unnatural effort that was!
A woman who is not at her ease in her own home with her own girl where can she be at ease?
It was really the reaction from that effort that sent Hermione from the island that evening. She felt as if she
could not face another meal with Vere just then. She felt transparent, as if Vere's eyes would be able to see all
that she must hide if they were together in the evening. And she resolved to go away. She made some
excusethat she wished for a little change, that she was fidgety and felt the confinement of the island.
"I think I'll go over to the village," she said; "and walk up to the road and take the tram."
"Will you, Madre?"
Hermione saw in Vere's eyes that the girl was waiting for something.
"I'll go by myself, Vere," she said. "I should be bad company today. The black dog is at my heels."
She laughed, and added:
"If I am late in coming back, have dinner without me."
"Very well, Madre."
Vere waited a moment; then as if desiring to break forcibly through the restraint that bound them put out her
hand to her mother's and said:
"Why don't you go to Naples and have dinner with Monsieur Emile? He would cheer you up, and it is ages
since we have seen him."
"Only two or three days. No, I won't disturb Emile. He may be working."
Vere felt that somehow her eager suggestion had deepened the constraint. She said no more, and Hermione
presently crossed over to the mainland and began her walk to the road that leads from Naples to Bagnoli.
Where was she going? What was she really about to do?
Certainly she would not adopt the suggestion of Vere. Emile was the last person whom she wished to
seeby whom she wished to be seen just then.
The narrow path turned away from the sea into the shadow of high banks. She walked very slowly, like one
out for a desultory stroll; a lizard slipped across the warm earth in front of her, almost touching her foot,
climbed the bank swiftly, and vanished among the dry leaves with a faint rustle.
She felt quite alone today in Italy, and far off, as if she had no duties, no ties, as if she were one of those
solitary, drifting, middleaged women who vaguely haunt the beaten tracks of foreign lands. It was sultry in
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this path away from the sea. She was sharply conscious of the change of climate, the inland sensation, the
falling away of the freedom from her, the freedom that seems to exhale from wave and wind of the wave.
She walked on, meeting no one and still undecided what to do. The thought of the Scoglio di Frisio returned
to her mind, was dismissed, returned again. She might go and dine there quietly alone. Was she deceiving
herself, and had she really made up her mind to go to the Scoglio before she left the island? No, she had come
away mainly because she felt the need of solitude, the difficulty of being with Vere just for this one night.
Tomorrow it would be different. It should be different tomorrow.
She saw a row of houses in the distance, houses of poor people, and knew that she was nearing the road.
Clothes were hanging to dry. Children were playing at the edge of a vineyard. Women were washing linen,
men sitting on the doorsteps mending nasse. As she went by she nodded to them, and bade them "Buona
sera." They answered courteously, some with smiling faces, others with grave and searching looksor so
she thought.
The tunnel that runs beneath the road at the point where this path joins it came in sight. And still Hermione
did not know what she was going to do. As she entered the tunnel she heard above her head the rumble of a
tram going towards Naples. This decided her. She hurried on, turned to the right, and came out on the
highway before the little lonely ristorante that is set here to command the view of vineyards and of sea.
The tram was already gliding away at some distance down the road.
A solitary waiter came forward in his unsuitable black into the dust to sympathize with the Signora, and to
suggest that she should take a seat and drink some lemon water, or gazzosa, while waiting for the next tram.
Or would not the Signora dine in the upper room and watch the tramontare del sole. It would be splendid this
evening. And he could promise her an excellent risotto, sardines with pomidoro, and a bifteck such as
certainly she could not get in the restaurants of Naples.
"Very well," Hermione answered, quickly, "I will dine here, but not directlyin half an hour or
threequarters."
What Artois was doing at the Ristorante della Stella she was doing at the Trattoria del Giardinetto.
She would dine quietly here, and then walk back to the sea in the cool of the evening.
That was her decision. Yet when evening fell, and her bill was paid, she took the tram that was going down to
Naples, and passed presently before the eyes of Artois. The coming of darkness had revived within her much
of the mood of the afternoon. She felt that she could not go home without doing something definite, and she
resolved to go to the Scoglio di Frisio, have a cup of coffee there, look through the visitors' book, and then
take a boat and return by night to the island. The sea wind would cool her, would do her good.
Nothing told her when the eyes of her friend were for an instant fixed upon her, when the mind of her friend
for a moment wondered at the strange, new look in her face. She left the tram presently at the doorway above
which is Frisio's name, descended to the little terrace from which Vere had run in laughing with the
Marchesino, and stood there for a moment hesitating.
The long restaurant was lit up, and from it came the sound of music guitars, and a voice singing. She
recognized the throaty tenor of the blind man raised in a spurious and sickly rapture:
"Saantaa Luuciia! Santa Lucia!"
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It recalled her sharply to the night of the storm. For a moment she felt again the strange, the unreasonable
sense of fear, indefinable but harsh, which had come upon her then, as fear comes suddenly sometimes upon
a child.
Then she stepped into the restaurant.
As on the other night, there were but few people dining there, and they were away at the far end of the big
room. Near them stood the musicians under a lightseedy, depressed; except the blind man, who lifted his
big head, rolled his tongue, and swelled and grew scarlet in an effort to be impressive.
Hermione sat down at the first table.
For a moment no one saw her. She heard men's voices talking loudly and gayly, the clatter of plates, the clink
of knives and forks. She looked round for the visitors' book. If it were lying near she thought she would open
it, search for what Emile had written, and then slip away at once unobserved.
There was a furtive spirit within her tonight.
But she could not see the book; so she sat still, listening to the blind man and gazing at the calm sea just
below her. A boat was waiting there. She could see the cushions, which were white and looked ghastly in the
darkness, the dim form of the rower standing up to search for clients.
"Barca! Barca!"
He had seen her.
She drew back a little. As she did so her chair made a grating noise, and instantly the sharp ears of the
Padrone caught a sound betokening the presence of a newcomer in his restaurant. It might be a queen, an
empress! Who could tell?
With his stiff yet alert military gait, he at once came marching down towards her, staring hard with his big,
bright eyes. When he saw who it was he threw up his brown hands.
"The Signora of the storm!" he exclaimed. He moved as if about to turn around. "I must tell"
But Hermione stopped him with a quick, decisive gesture.
"One moment, Signore."
The Padrone approached aristocratically.
"The Marchese Isidoro Panacci is here dining with friends, the Duca di"
"Yes, yes. But I am only here for a moment, so it is not worth while to tell the Marchese."
"You are not going to dine, Signora! The food of Frisio does not please you!"
He cast up his eyes in deep distress.
"Indeed it does. But I have dined. What I want is a cup of coffee, and and a liqueurune fine. And may I
look over your wonderful visitors' book? To tell the truth, that is what I have come for, to see the marvellous
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book. I hadn't enough time the other night. May I?"
The Padrone was appeased. He smiled graciously and turned upon his heels.
"At once, Signora."
"Andnot a word to the Marchese! He is with friends. I would rather not disturb him."
The Padrone threw up his chin and clicked his tongue against his teeth. A shrewd, though not at all impudent,
expression had come into his face. A Signora alone, at night, in a restaurant! He was a man of the great
world. He understood. What a mercy it was to be "educato"!
He came back again almost directly, bearing the book as a sacristan might bear a blackletter Bible.
"Ecco, Signora."
With a superb gesture he placed it before her.
"The coffee, the fine. Attendez, Signora, pour un petit momento."
He stood to see the effect of his French upon her. She forced into her face a look of pious admiration, and he
at once departed. Hermione opened the book rather furtively. She had the unpleasant sensation of doing a
surreptitious action, and she was an almost abnormally straightforward woman by nature. The book was
large, and contained an immense number of inscriptions and signatures in handwritings that varied as
strangely as do the characters of men. She turned the leaves hastily. Where had Emile written? Not at the end
of the book. She remembered that his signature had been followed by others, although she had not seen, or
tried to see, what he had written. Perhaps his name was near Tolstoy's. They had read together Tolstoy's Vedi
Napoli e poi Mori.
But where was Tolstoy's name?
A waiter came with the coffee and the brandy. She thanked him quickly, sipped the coffee without tasting it,
and continued the search.
The voice of the blind man died away. The guitars ceased.
She started. She was afraid the musicians would come down and gather round her. Why had she not told the
Padrone she wished to be quite alone? She heard the shuffle of feet. They were coming. Feverishly she turned
the pages. Ah! here is was! She bent down over the page.
"La conscience, c'est la quantite de science innee que nous avons
en nous. EMILE ARTOIS.
"Nuit d'orage. Juin."
The guitars began a prelude. The blind man shifted from one fat leg to another, cast up his sightless eyes,
protruded and drew in his tongue, coughed, spat
"Cameriere!"
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Hermione struck upon the table sharply. She had forgotten all about the Marchesino. She was full of the
desire to escape, to get away and be out on the sea.
"Cameriere!"
She called more loudly.
A middleaged waiter came shuffling over the floor.
"The bill, please."
As she spoke she drank the brandy.
"Si, Signora."
He stood beside her.
"One coffee?"
"Si."
"One cognac!"
"Si, si."
The blind man burst into song.
"One fifty, Signora."
Hermione gave him a twolire piece and got up to go.
"Signorabuona sera! What a pleasure!"
The Marchesino stood before her, smiling, bowing. He took her hand, bent over it, and kissed it.
"What a pleasure!" he repeated, glancing round. "And you are alone! The Signorina is not here?"
He stared suspiciously towards the terrace.
"And our dear friend Emilio?"
"No, no. I am quite alone."
The blind man bawled, as if he wished to drown the sound of speech.
"Pleasecould you stop him, Marchese?" said Hermione. "Ireally give him this for me."
She gave the Marchese a lira.
"Signora, it isn't necessary. Silenzio! Silenzio! Pshshsh!"
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He hissed sharply, almost furiously. The musicians abruptly stopped, and the blind man made a gurgling
sound, as if he were swallowing the unfinished portion of his song.
"No; please pay them."
"It's too much."
"Never mind."
The Marchese gave the lire to the blind man, and the musicians went drearily out.
Then Hermione held out her hand at once.
"I must go now. It is late."
"You are going by sea, Signora?"
"Yes."
"I will accompany you."
"No, indeed. I couldn't think of it. You have friends."
"They will understand. Have you your own boat?"
"No."
"Then of course I shall come with you."
But Hermione was firm. She knew that tonight the company of this young man would be absolutely
unbearable.
"Marchese, indeed I cannotI cannot allow it. We Englishwomen are very independent, you know. But you
may call me a boat and take me down to it, as you are so kind."
"With pleasure, Signora."
He went to the open window. At once the boatman's cry rose up.
"Barca! Barca!"
"That is Andrea's voice," said the Marchesino. "I know him. Barca si!"
The boat began to glide in towards the land.
As they went out the Marchesino said:
"And how is the Signorina?"
"Very well."
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"I have had a touch of fever, Signora, or I should have come over to the island again. I stayed too long in the
sea the other day, or" He shrugged his shoulders.
"I'm sorry," said Hermione. "You are very pale tonight."
For the first time she looked at him closely, and saw that his face was white, and that his big and boyish eyes
held a tired and yet excited expression.
"It is nothing. It has passed. And our friendEmilio? How is he?"
A hardness had come into his voice. Hermione noticed it.
"We have not seen him lately. I suppose he has been busy."
"Probably. Emilio has much to do in Naples," said the Marchesino, with an unmistakable sneer. "Do allow
me to escort you to the island, Signora."
They had reached the boat. Hermione shook her head and stepped in at once.
"Then when may I come?"
"Whenever you like."
"Tomorrow?"
"Certainly."
"At what time?"
Hermione suddenly remembered his hospitality and felt that she ought to return it.
"Come to lunchhalfpast twelve. We shall be quite alone."
"Signora, for loneliness with you and the Signorina I would give up every friend I have ever had. I would
give up"
"Halfpast twelve, then, Marchese. Addio!"
"A rivederci, Signora! A demain! Andrea, take care of the Signora. Treat her as you would treat the
Madonna. Do you hear?"
The boatman grinned and took off his cap, and the boat glided away across the path of yellow light that was
shed from the window of Frisio's.
Hermione leaned back against the white cushions. She was thankful to escape. She felt tired and confused.
That dreadful music had distracted her, thatand something else, her tricked expectation. She knew now that
she had been very foolish, perhaps even very fantastic. She had felt so sure that Emile had written in that
bookwhat?
As the boat went softly on she asked herself exactly what she had expected to find written there, and she
realized that her imagination had, as so often before, been galloping like a frightened horse with the reins
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upon its neck. And then she began to consider what he had written.
"La conscience, c'est la quantite de science innee que nous avons en nous."
She did not know the words. Were they his own or another's? And had he written them simply because they
had chanced to come into his mind at the moment, or because they expressed some underthought or feeling
that had surged up in him just then? She wished she knew.
It was a fine saying, she thought, but for the moment she was less interested in it than in Emile's mood, his
mind, when he had written it. She realized now, on this calm of the sea, how absurd had been the thought that
a man so subtle as Emile would flagrantly reveal a passing phase of his nature, a secret irritability, a jealousy,
perhaps, or a sudden hatred in a sentence written for any eyes that chose to see. But he might covertly reveal
himself to one who understood him well.
She sat still, trying to match her subtlety against his.
From the shore came sounds of changing music, low down or falling to them from the illuminated heights
where people were making merry in the night. Now and then a boat passed them. In one, young men were
singing, and interrupting their song to shout with laughter. Here and there a fisherman's torch glided like a
great firefly above the oily darkness of the sea. The distant trees of the gardens climbing up the hill made an
ebony blackness beneath the stars, a blackness that suggested impenetrable beauty that lay deep down with
hidden face. And the lights dispersed among them, gaining significance by their solitude, seemed to summon
adventurous or romantic spirits to come to them by secret paths and learn their revelation. Over the sea lay a
delicate warmth, not tropical, not enervating, but softly inspiring. And beyond the circling lamps of Naples
Vesuvius lit up the firmament with a torrent of rosecolored fire that glowed and died, and glowed again,
constantly as beats a heart.
And to Hermione came a melancholy devoid of all violence, soft almost as the warmth upon this sea, quite as
the resignation of the fatalistic East. She felt herself for a moment such a tiny, dark thing caught in the
meshes of the great net of the Universe, this Universe that she could never understand. What could she do?
She must just sink down upon the breast of this mystery, let it take her, hold her, do with her what it would.
Her subtlety against Emile's! She smiled to herself in the dark. What a combat of midgets! She seemed to see
two marionettes battling in the desert.
And yetand yet! She remembered a saying of Flaubert's, that man is like a nomad journeying on a camel
through the desert; and he is the nomad, and the cameland the desert.
How true that was, for even now, as she felt herself to be nothing, she felt herself to be tremendous.
She heard the sound of oars from the darkness before them, and saw the dim outline of a boat, then the eyes
of Emile looking straight into hers.
"Emile!"
"Hermione!"
His face was gone. But yielding to her impulse she made Andrea stop, and, turning round, saw that the other
boat had also stopped a little way from hers. It began to back, and in a moment was level with them.
"Emile! How strange to meet you! Haveyou haven't been to the island?"
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"No. I was tired. I have been working very hard. I dined quietly at Posilipo."
He did not ask her where she had been.
"Yes. I think you look tired," she said. He did not speak, and she added: "I felt restless, so I took the tram
from the Trattoria del Giardinetto as far as the Scoglio di Frisio, and am going back, as you see, by boat."
"It is exquisite on the sea tonight," he said.
"Yes, exquisite, it makes one sad."
She remembered all she had been through that day, as she looked at his powerful face.
"Yes," he answered. "It makes one sad."
For a moment she felt that they were in perfect sympathy, as they used to be. Their sadness, born of the
dreaming hour, united them.
"Come soon to the island, dear Emile," she said, suddenly and with the impulsiveness that was part of her,
forgetting all her jealousy and all her shadowy fears. "I have missed you."
He noticed that she ruled out Vere in that sentence; but the warmth of her voice stirred warmth in him, and he
answered:
"Let me come tomorrow."
"Dodo!"
"In the morning, to lunch, and to spend a long day."
Suddenly she remembered the Marchesino and the sound of his voice when he had spoken of his friend.
"Lunch?" she said.
Instantly he caught her hesitation, her dubiety.
"It isn't convenient, perhaps?"
"Perfectly, onlyonly the Marchesino is coming."
"TomorrowTo lunch?"
The hardness of the Marchesino's voice was echoed now in the voice of Artois. There was antagonism
between these men. Hermione realized it.
"Yes. I invited him this evening."
There was a slight pause. Then Artois said:
"I'll come some other day, Hermione. Well, my friend, au revoir, and bon voyage to the island."
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His voice had suddenly become cold, and he signed to his boatman.
"Avanti!"
The boat slipped away and was lost in the darkness.
Hermione had said nothing. Once againwhy, she did not knowher friend had made her feel guilty.
Andrea, the boatman, still paused. Now she saw him staring into her face, and she felt like a woman publicly
deserted, almost humiliated.
"Avanti, Andrea!" she said.
Her voice trembled as she spoke.
He bent to his oars and rowed on.
And man is the nomad, and the cameland the desert.
Yes, she carried the desert within her, and she was wandering in it alone. She saw herself, a poor, starved,
shrinking figure, travelling through a vast, a burning, a waterless expanse, with an iron sky above her, a
brazen land beneath. She was in rags, barefoot, like the poorest nomad of them all.
But even the poorest nomad carries something.
Against her breast, to her heart, she claspeda memorythe sacred memory of him who had loved her,
who had taken her to be his, who had given her himself.
CHAPTER XX
That night when Hermione drew near to the island she saw the Saint's light shining, and remembered how, in
the storm, she had longed for it how, when she had seen it above the roaring sea, she had felt that it was a
good omen. Tonight it meant nothing to her. It was just a lamp lit, as a lamp might be lit in a street, to give
illumination in darkness to any one who passed. She wondered why she had thought of it so strangely.
Gaspare met her at the landing. She noticed at once a suppressed excitement in his manner. He looked at
Andrea keenly and suspiciously.
"How late you are, Signora!"
He put out his strong arm to help her to the land.
"Am I, Gaspare? Yes, I suppose I amyou ought all to be in bed."
"I should not go to bed while you were out, Signora."
Again she linked Gaspare with her memory, saw the nomad not quite alone on the journey.
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"I know."
"Have you been to Naples, Signora?"
"Noonly to"
"To Mergellina?"
He interrupted her almost sharply.
"No, to the Scoglio di Frisio. Pay the boatman this, Gaspare. Good night, Andrea."
"Goodnight, Signora."
Gaspare handed the man his money, and at once the boat set out on its return to Posilipo.
Hermione stood at the water's edge watching its departure. It passed below the Saint, and the gleam of his
light fell upon it for a moment. In the gleam the black figure of Andrea was visible stooping to the water. He
was making the fishermen's sign of the Cross. The cross on Peppina's facewas it an enemy of the Cross
that carried with it San Francesco's blessing? Vere's imagination! She turned to go up to the house.
"Is the Signorina in bed yet, Gaspare?"
"No, Signora."
"Where is she? Still out?"
"Si, Signora."
"Did she think I was lost?"
"Signora, the Signorina is on the cliff with Ruffo."
"With Ruffo?"
They were going up the steps.
"Si, Signora. We have all been together."
Hermione guessed that Gaspare had been playing chaperone, and loved him for it.
"And you heard the boat coming from the cliff?"
"I saw it pass under the Saint's light, Signora. I did not hear it."
"Well, but it might have been a fisherman's boat."
"Si, Signora. And it might have been your boat."
The logic of this faithful watcher was unanswerable. They came up to the house.
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"I think I'll go and see Ruffo," said Hermione.
She was close to the door of the house, Gaspare stood immediately before her. He did not move now, but he
said:
"I can go and tell the Signorina you are here, Signora. She will come at once."
Again Hermione noticed a curious, almost dogged, excitement in his manner. It recalled to her a night of
years ago when he had stood on a terrace beside her in the darkness and had said: "I will go down to the sea.
Signora, let me go down to the sea!"
"There's nothing the matter, is there, Gaspare?" she said, quickly. "Nothing wrong?"
"Signora, of course not! What should there be?"
"I don't know."
"I will fetch the Signorina."
On that night, years ago, she had battled with Gaspare. He had been forced to yield to her. Now she yielded to
him.
"Very well," she answered. "Go and tell the Signorina I am here."
She turned and went into the house and up to the sittingroom. Vere did not come immediately. To her
mother it seemed as if she was a very long time coming; but at last her light step fell on the stairs, and she
entered quickly.
"Madre! How late you are! Where have you been?"
"Am I late? I dined at the little restaurant at the top of the hill where the tram passes."
"There? But you haven't been there all this time?"
"No. Afterwards I took the tram to Posilipo and came home by boat. And what have you been doing?"
"Oh, all sorts of thingswhat I always do. Just now I've been with Ruffo."
"Gaspare told me he was here."
"Yes. We've been having a talk."
Hermione waited for Vere to say something more, but she was silent. She stood near the window looking out,
and the expression on her face had become rather vague, as if her mind had gone on a journey.
"Well," said the mother at last, "and what does Ruffo say for himself, Vere?"
"Ruffo? Oh, I don't know."
She paused, then added:
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"I think he has rather a hard time, do you know, Madre?"
Hermione had taken off her hat. She laid it on a table and sat down. She was feeling tired.
"But generally he looks so gay, so strong. Don't you remember that first day you saw him?"
"Ahthen!"
"Of course, when he had fever"
"No, it wasn't that. Any one might be ill. I think he has things at home to make him unhappy sometimes."
"Has he been telling you so?"
"Oh, he doesn't complain," Vere said, quickly, and almost with a touch of heat. "A boy like that couldn't
whine, you know, Madre. But one can understand things without hearing them said. There is some trouble. I
don't know what it is exactly. But I think his stepfatherhis Patrigno, as he calls himmust have got into
some bother, or done something horrible. Ruffo seemed to want to tell me, and yet not to want to tell me.
And, of course, I couldn't ask. I think he'll tell me tomorrow, perhaps."
"Is he coming here tomorrow?"
"Oh, in summer I think he comes nearly every night."
"But you haven't said anything about him just lately."
"No. Because he hasn't landed till tonight since the night of the storm."
"I wonder why?" said Hermione.
She was interested; but she still felt tired, and the fatigue crept into her voice.
"So do I," Vere said. "He had a reason, I'm sure. You're tired Madre, so I'll go to bed. Goodnight."
She came to her mother and kissed her. Moved by a sudden overwhelming impulse of tenderness, Hermione
put her arms round the child's slim body. But even as she did so she remembered Vere's secret, shared with
Emile and not with her. She could not abruptly loose her arms without surprising her child. But they seemed
to her to stiffen, against her will, and her embrace was surely mechanical. She wondered if Vere noticed this,
but she did not look into her eyes to see.
"Goodnight, Vere."
"Goodnight."
Vere was at the door when Hermione remembered her two meetings of that evening.
"Bytheway," she said, "I met the Marchesino tonight. He was at the Scoglio di Frisio."
"Was he?"
"And afterwards on the sea I met Emile."
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"Monsieur Emile! Then he isn't quite dead!"
There was a sound almost of irritation in Vere's voice.
"He has been working very hard."
"Oh, I see."
Her voice had softened.
"The Marchesino is coming here to lunch tomorrow."
"Oh, Madre!"
"Does he bore you? I had to ask him to something after accepting his dinner, Vere."
"Yes, yes, of course. The Marchese is all right."
She stood by the door with her bright, expressive eyes fixed on her mother. Her dark hair had been a little
roughened by the breeze from Ischia, and stuck up just above the forehead, giving to her face an odd, almost
a boyish look.
"What is it, Vere?"
"And when is Monsieur Emile coming? Didn't he say?"
"No. He suggested tomorrow, but when I told him the Marchese was coming he said he wouldn't."
As Hermione said this she looked very steadily at her child. Vere's eyes did not fall, but met hers simply,
fearlessly, yet not quite childishly.
"I don't wonder," she said. "To tell the truth, Madre, I can't see how a man like the Marchesino could interest
a man like Monsieur Emileat any rate, for long. Well" She gave a little sigh, throwing up her pretty
chin. "A letto si va!"
And she vanished.
When she had gone Hermione thought she too would go to bed. She was very tired. She ought to go. Yet now
she suddenly felt reluctant to go, and as if the doings of the day for her were not yet over. And, besides, she
was not going to sleep well. That was certain. The dry, the almost sandy sensation of insomnia was upon her.
What was the matter with Gaspare tonight? Perhaps he had had a quarrel with some one at Mergellina. He
had a strong temper as well as a loyal heart.
Hermione went to a window. The breeze from Ischia touched her. She opened her lips, shut her eyes, drank it
in. It would be delicious to spend the whole night upon the sea, like Ruffo. Had he gone yet? Or was he in the
boat asleep, perhaps in the Saint's Pool? How interested Vere was in all the doings of that boyhow
innocently, charmingly interested!
Hermione stood by the window for two or three minutes, then went out of the room, down the stairs, to the
front door of the house. It was already locked. Yet Gaspare had not come up to say goodnight to her. And he
always did that before he went to bed. She unlocked the door, went out, shut it behind her, and stood still.
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How strangely beautiful and touching the faint noise of the sea round the island was at night, and how full of
meaning not quite to be divined! It came upon her heart like the whisper of a world trying to tell its secret to
the darkness. What depths, what subtleties, what unfailing revelations of beauty, and surely, too, of love,
there were in Nature! And yet in Nature what terrible indifference there was: a powerful, an almost terrific
inattention, like that of the sphinx that gazes at what men cannot see. Hermione moved away from the house.
She walked to the brow of the island and sat down on the seat that Vere was fond of. Presently she would go
to the bridge and look over into the Pool and listen for the voices of the fishermen. She sat there for some
time gaining a certain peace, losing something of her feeling of weary excitement and desolation under the
stars. At last she thought that sleep might come if she went to bed. But before doing so she made her way to
the bridge and leaned on the rail, looking down into the Pool.
It was very dark, but she saw the shadowy shape of a fishingboat lying close to the rock. She stood and
watched it, and presently she lost herself in a thicket of night thoughts, and forgot where she was and why she
had come there. She was recalled by hearing a very faint voice singing, scarcely more than humming, beneath
her.
"Oh, dolce luna bianca de l' Estate
Mi fugge il sonno accanto a la marina:
Mi destan le dolcissime serate
Gli occhi di Rosa e il mar di Mergellina."
It was the same song that Artois had heard that day as he leaned on the balcony of the Ristorante della Stella.
But this singer of it sang the Italian words, and not the dialetto. The song that wins the prize at the Piedigrotta
Festival is on the lips of every one in Naples. In houses, in streets, in the harbor, in every piazza, and upon the
sea it is heard incessantly.
And now Ruffo was singing it softly and rather proudly in the Italian, to attract the attention of the dark figure
he saw above him. He was not certain who it was, but he thought it was the mother of the Signorina, andhe
did not exactly know whyhe wished her to find out that he was there, squatting on the dry rock with his
back against the cliff wall. The ladies of the Casa del Mare had been very kind to him, and tonight he was
not very happy, and vaguely he longed for sympathy.
Hermione listened to the pretty, tripping words, the happy, youthful words. And Ruffo sang them again, still
very softly.
"Oh, dolce luna bianca de l' Estate"
And the poor nomad wandering in the desert? But she had known the rapture of youth, the sweet white
moons of summer in the South. She had known them long ago for a little while, and therefore she knew them
while she lived. A woman's heart is tenacious, and wide as the world, when it contains that world which is the
memory of something perfect that gave it satisfaction.
"Mi destan le dolcissime serate
Gli occhi do Rosa e il mar di Mergellina."
Dear happy, lovable youth that can sing to itself like that in the deep night! Like that once Maurice, her
sacred possession of youth, sang. She felt a rush of tenderness for Ruffo, just because he was so young, and
sangand brought back to her the piercing truth of the everlasting renewal that goes hand in hand with the
everlasting passing away.
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"RuffoRuffo!"
Almost as Vere had once called "Pescator!" she called. And as Ruffo had once come running up to Vere he
came now to Vere's mother.
"Goodevening, Ruffo."
"Goodevening, Signora."
She was looking at the boy as at a mystery which yet she could understand. And he looked at her simply,
with a sort of fearless gentleness, and readiness to receive the kindness which he knew dwealt in her for him
to take.
"Are you better?"
"Si, Signora, much better. The fever has gone. I am strong, you know."
"You are so young."
She could not help saying it, and her eyes were tender just then.
"Si, Signora, I am very young."
His simple voice almost made her laugh, stirred in her that sweet humor which has its dwelling at the core of
the heart.
"Young and happy," she said.
And as she said it she remembered Vere's words that evening; "I think he has rather a hard time."
"At least, I hope you are happy, Ruffo," she added.
"Si, Signora."
He looked at her. She was not sure which he meant, whether his assent was to her hope or to the fact of his
happiness. She wondered which it was.
"Young people ought to be happy," she said.
"Ought they, Signora?"
"You like your life, don't you? You like the sea?"
"Si, Signora. I could not live away from the sea. If I could not see the sea every day I don't know what I
should do."
"I love it, too."
"The Signorina loves the sea."
He had ignored her love for it and seized on Vere's. She thought that this was very characteristic of his youth.
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"Yes. She loves being here. You talked to her tonight, didn't you?"
"Si, Signora."
"And to Gaspare?"
"Si, Signora. And this afternoon, too. Gaspare was at Mergellina this afternoon."
"And you met there, did you?"
"Si, Signora. I had been with my mamma, and when I left my mamma poverettaI met Gaspare."
"I hope your mother is well."
"Signora, she is not very well just now. She is a little sad just now."
Hermione felt that the boy had some trouble which, perhaps, he would like to tell her. Perhaps some instinct
made him know that she felt tender towards him, very tender that night.
"I am sorry for that," she said"very sorry."
"Si, Signora. There is trouble in our house."
"What is it, Ruffo?"
The boy hesitated to answer. He moved his bare feet on the bridge and looked down towards the boat.
Hermione did not press him, said nothing.
"Signora," Ruffo said, at last, coming to a decision, "my Patrigno is not a good man. He makes my mamma
jealous. He goes after others."
It was the old story of the South, then! Hermione knew something of the persistent infidelities of Neapolitan
men. Poor women who had to suffer them!
"I am sorry for your mother," she said, gently. "That must be very hard."
"Si, Signora, it is hard. My mamma was very unhappy today. She put her head on the table, and she cried.
But that was because my Patrigno is put in prison."
"In prison! What has he done?"
Ruffo looked at her, and she saw that the simple expression had gone out of his eyes.
"Signora, I thought perhaps you knew."
"I? But I have never seen your stepfather."
"No, Signora. Butbut you have that girl here in your house."
"What girl?"
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Suddenly, almost while she was speaking, Hermione understood.
"Peppina!" she said. "It was your Patrigno who wounded Peppina?"
"Si, Signora."
There was a silence between them. Then Hermione said, gently:
"I am very sorry for your poor mother, Ruffovery sorry. Tell me, can she manage? About money, I mean?"
"It is not so much the money she was crying about, Signora. But, of course, while Patrigno is in prison he
cannot earn money for her. I shall give her my money. But my mamma does not like all the neighbors
knowing about that girl. It is a shame for her."
"Yes, of course it is. It is very hard."
She thought a moment. Then she said:
"It must be horriblehorrible!"
She spoke with all the vehemence of her nature. Again, as long ago, when she knelt before a mountain shrine
in the night, she had put herself imaginatively in the place of a woman, this time in the place of Ruffo's
mother. She realized how she would have felt if her husband, her "man," had ever been faithless to her.
Ruffo looked at her almost in surprise.
"I wish I could see your poor mother, Ruffo," she said. "I would go to see her, onlywell, you see, I have
Peppina here, and"
She broke off. Perhaps the boy would not understand what she considered the awkwardness of the situation.
She did not quite know how these people regarded certain things.
"Wait here a moment, Ruffo," she said. "I am going to give you something for your mother. I won't be a
moment."
"Grazie, Signora."
Hermione went away to the house. The perfect naturalness and simplicity of the boy appealed to her. She was
pleased, too, that he had not told all this to Vere. It showed a true feeling of delicacy. And she was sure he
was a good son. She went up to her room, got two ten lira notes, and went quickly back to Ruffo, who was
standing upon the bridge.
"There, Ruffo," she said, giving them to him. "These are for your mother."
The boy's brown face flushed, and into his eyes there came an expression of almost melting gentleness.
"Oh, Signora!" he said.
And there was a note of protest in his voice.
"Take them to her, Ruffo. Andand I want you to promise me something. Will you?"
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"Si, Signora. I will do anythinganything for you."
Hermione put her hand on his shoulder.
"Be very, very kind to your poor mother, Ruffo."
"Signora, I always am good for my poor mamma."
He spoke with warm eagerness.
"I am sure you are. But just now, when she is sad, be very good to her."
"Si, Signora."
She took her hand from the boy's shoulder. He bent to kiss her hand, and again, as he was lifting up his head,
she saw the melting look in his eyes. This time it was unmingled with amazement, and it startled her.
"Oh, Ruffo!" she said, and stopped, staring at him in the darkness.
"Signora! What is it? What have you?"
"Nothing. Goodnight, Ruffo."
"Goodnight, Signora."
He took off his cap and ran down to the boat. Hermione leaned over the railing, bending down to see the boy
reappear below. When he came he looked like a shadow. From this shadow there rose a voice singing very
softly.
"Oh, dolce luna bianca de l' Estate"
The shadow went over to the boat, and the voice died away.
"Gli occhi di Rosa e il mar di Mergellina."
Hermione still was bending down. And she formed the last words with lips that trembled a little.
"Gli occhi di Rosa e il mar di Mergellina."
Then she said: "MauriceMaurice!"
And then she stood trembling.
Yes, it was Maurice whom she had seen again for an instant in the melting look of Ruffo's face. She felt
frightened in the dark. Maurice when he kissed her for the last time, had looked at her like that. It could
not be fancy. It was not.
Was this the very first time she had noticed in Ruffo a likeness to her dead husband? She asked herself if it
was. Yes. She had neveror had there been something? Not in the face, perhaps. Butthe voice? Ruffo's
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singing? His attitude as he stood up in the boat? Had there not been something? She remembered her
conversation with Artois in the cave. She had said to him thatshe did not know whythe boy, Ruffo, had
made her feel, had stirred up within her slumbering desires, slumbering yearnings.
"I have heard a hundred boys sing on the Bayand just this one touches some chord, and all the strings of
my soul quiver."
She had said that.
Then there was something in the boy, something not merely fleeting like that look of gentlenesssomething
permanent, subtle, that resembled Maurice.
Now she no longer felt frightened, but she had a passionate wish to go down to the boat, to see Ruffo again,
to be with him again, now that she was awake to this strange, and perhaps only faint, imitation by another of
the one whom she had lost. Nonot imitation; this fragmentary reproduction of some characteristic, some
She lifted herself up from the railing. And now she knew that her eyes were wet. She wiped them with her
handkerchief, drew a deep breath, and went back to the house. She felt for the handle of the door, and, when
she found it, opened the door, went in, and shut it rather heavily, then locked it. As she bent down to push
home the bolt at the bottom a voice called out:
"Who's there?"
She was startled and turned quickly.
"Gaspare!"
He stood before her half dressed, with his hair over his eyes, and a revolver in his hand.
"Signora! It is you!"
"Si. What did you think? That it was a robber?"
Gaspare looked at her almost sternly, went to the door, bent down and bolted it, then he said:
"Signora, I heard a noise in the house a few minutes ago. I listened, but I heard nothing more. Still, I thought
it best to get up. I had just put on my clothes when again I heard a noise at the door. I myself had locked it for
the night. What should I think?"
"I was outside. I came back for something. That was what you heard. Then I went out again."
"Si."
He stood there staring at her in a way that seemed, she fancied, to rebuke her. She knew that he wished to
know why she had gone out so late, returned to the house, then gone out once more.
"Come upstairs for a minute, Gaspare," she said. "I want to speak to you."
He looked less stern, but still unlike himself.
"Si, Signora. Shall I put on my jacket?"
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"No, no, never mind. Come like that."
She went upstairs, treading softly, lest she might disturb Vere. He followed. When they were in her
sittingroom she said:
"Gaspare, why did you go to bed without coming to say goodnight to me?"
He looked rather confused.
"Did I forget, Signora? I was tired. Forgive me."
"I don't know whether you forgot. But you never came."
As Hermione spoke, suddenly she felt as if Gaspare, too, were going, perhaps, to drift from her. She looked at
him with an almost sharp intensity which hardened her whole face. Was he, too, being insincere with her, he
whom she trusted implicitly?
"Did you forget, Gaspare?" she said.
"Signora," he repeated, with a certain, almost ugly doggedness, "I was tired. Forgive me."
She felt sure that he had chosen deliberately not to come to her for the evening salutation. It was a trifle, yet
tonight it hurt her. For a moment she was silent, and he was silent, looking down at the floor. Then she
opened her lips to dismiss him. She intended to say a curt "Goodnight"; butnoshe could not let
Gaspare retreat from her behind impenetrable walls of obstinate reserve. And she did know his nature through
and through. If he was odd tonight, unlike himself, there was some reason for it; and it could not be a reason
that, known to her, would make her think badly of him. She was certain of that.
"Never mind, Gaspare," she said gently. "But I like you to come and say goodnight to me. I am accustomed
to that, and I miss it if you don't come."
"Si, Signora," he said, in a very low voice.
He turned a little away from her, and made a small noise with his nose as if he had a cold.
"Gaspare," she said, with an impulse to be frank, "I saw Ruffo tonight."
He turned round quickly. She saw moisture in his eyes, but they were shining almost fiercely.
"He told me something about his Patrigno. Did you know it?"
"His Patrigno and Peppina?"
Hermione nodded.
"Si Signora; Ruffo told me."
"I gave the boy something for his mother."
"His motherwhy?"
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There was quick suspicion in Gaspare's voice.
"Poor woman! Because of all this trouble. Her husband is in prison."
"Lo so. But he will soon be out again. He is 'protected.' "
"Who protects him?"
But Gaspare evaded the answer, and substituted something that was almost a rebuke.
"Signora," he said, bluntly, if I were you I would not have anything to do with these people. Ruffo's Patrigno
is a bad man. Better leave them alone."
"But, Ruffo?"
"Signora?"
"You like him, don't you?"
"Si, Signora. There is no harm in him."
"And the poor mother?"
"I am not friends with his mother, Signora. I do not want to be."
Hermione was surprised by his harshness.
"But why not?"
"There are people at Mergellina who are bad people," he said. "We are not Neapolitan. We had better keep to
ourselves. You have too much heart, Signora, a great deal too much heart, and you do not always know what
people are."
"Do you think I ought not to have given Ruffo that money for his mother?" Hermione asked, almost meekly.
"Si, Signora. It is not for you to give his mother money. It is not for you."
"Well, Gaspare, it's done now."
"Si, it's done now."
"You don't think Ruffo bad, do you?"
After a pause, Gaspare answered:
"No, Signora. Ruffo is not bad."
Hermione hesitated. She wanted to ask Gaspare something, but she was not sure that the opportunity was a
good one. He was odd tonight. His temper had surely been upset. Perhaps it would be better to wait. She
decided not to speak of what was in her mind.
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"Well, Gaspare, goodnight," she said.
"Goodnight, Signora."
She smiled at him.
"You see, after all, you have had to say goodnight to me!"
"Signora," he answered, earnestly, "even if I do not come to say good night to you always, I shall stay with
you till death."
Again he made the little noise with his nose, as he turned away and went out of the room.
That night, as she got into bed, Hermione called down on that faithful watchdog's dark head a blessing, the
best that heaven contained for him. Then she put out the light, and lay awake so long that when a boat came
round the cliff from the Saint's Pool to the open sea, in the hour before the dawn, she heard the soft splash of
the oars in the water and the sound of a boy's voice singing.
"Oh, dolce luna bianca de l' Estate
Mi fugge il sonno accanto a la marina:
Mi destan le dolcissime serate
Gli occhi di Rosa e il mar di Mergellina."
She lifted herself up on her pillow and listenedlistened until across the sea, going towards the dawn, the
song was lost.
"Gli occhi di Rosa e il mar di Mergellina."
When the voice was near, had not Maurice seemed near to her? And when it died away, did not he fade with
itfade until the Ionian waters took him?
She sat up in the darkness until long after the song was hushed. But she heard it still in the whisper of the sea.
CHAPTER XXI
The Marchesino had really been unwell, as he had told Hermione. The Panacci disposition, of which he had
once spoken to Artois, was certainly not a calm one, and Isidoro, was, perhaps, the most excitable member of
an abundantly excitable family. Although changeable, he was vehement. He knew not the meaning of the
word patience, and had always been accustomed to get what he wanted exactly when he wanted it. Delay in
the gratification of his desires, opposition to his demands, rendered him as indignant as if he were a spoiled
child unable to understand the fixed position and function of the moon. And since the night of his vain
singing along the shore to the Nisida he had been ill with fever, brought on by jealousy and disappointment,
brought on partly also by the busy workings of a heated imagination which painted his friend Emilio in colors
of inky black.
The Marchesino had not the faintest doubt that Artois was in love with Vere. He believed this not from any
evidence of his eyes, for, even now, in not very lucid moments, he could not recall any occasion on which he
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had seen Emilio paying court to the pretty English girl. But, then, he had only seen them together twiceon
the night of his first visit to the island and on the night of the storm. It was the general conduct of his friend
that convinced him, conduct in connection not with Vere, but with himselfapart from that one occasion
when Emilio must have lain hidden with Vere among the shadows of the grotto of Virgil. He had been
deceived by Emilio. He had thought of him as an intellectual, who was also a bon vivant and interested in
Neapolitan life. But he had not thought of him as a libertine. Yet that was what he certainly was. The
interview with Maria Fortunata in the alley beyond the Via Roma had quite convinced the Marchesino. He
had no objection whatever to loose conduct, but he had a contempt for hypocrisy which was strong and
genuine. He had trusted Emilio. Now he distrusted him, and was ready to see subtlety, deceit, and guile in all
his undertakings.
Emilio had been trying to play with him. Emilio looked upon him as a boy who knew nothing of the world.
The difference in their respective ages, so long ignored by him, now glared perpetually upon the Marchesino,
even roused within him a certain condemnatory something that was almost akin to moral sense, a rare enough
bird in Naples. He said to himself that Emilio was a wicked old man, "un vecchio briccone." The delights of
sin were the prerogative of youth. Abruptly this illuminating fact swam, like a new comet, within the ken of
the Marchesino. He towered towards the heights of virtuous indignation. As he lay upon his fevered pillow,
drinking a tisane prepared by his anxious mamma, he understood the inner beauty of settling downfor the
old, and whitehaired age, still intent upon having its fling, appeared to him so truly pitiable and disgusting
that he could almost have wept for Emilio had he not feared to make himself more feverish by such an act of
enlightened friendship.
And the sense and appreciation of the true morality, ravishing in its utter novelty for the young barbarian, was
cherished by the Marchesino until he began almost to swell with virtue, and to start on stilts to heaven, big
with the message that wickedness was for the young and must not be meddled with by any one over
thirtythe age at which, till now, he had always proposed to himself to marry some rich girl and settle down
to the rigid asceticism of Neapolitan wedded life.
And as the Marchesino had lain in bed tingling with morality, so did he get up and issue forth to the world,
and even set sail upon the following day for the island. Morality was thick upon him, as upon that "briccone"
Emilio, something else was thick. About mediaeval chivalry he knew precisely nothing. Yet, as the white
wings of his pretty yacht caught the light breeze of morning, he felt like a most virtuous knight sans peur et
sans reproche. He even felt like a steadygoing person with a mission.
But he wished he thoroughly understood the English nation. Towards the English he felt friendly, as do most
Italians; but he knew little of them, except that they were very rich, lived in a perpetual fog, and were "un
poco pazzi." But the question was how madin other words, how different from Neapolitansthey were!
He wished he knew. It would make things easier for him in his campaign against Emilio.
Till he met the ladies of the island he had never said a hundred words to any English person. The Neapolitan
aristocracy is a very conservative body, and by no means disposed to cosmopolitanism. To the Panacci Villa
at Capodimonte came only Italians, except Emilio. The Marchesino had inquired of Emilio if his mother
should call upon the Signora Delarey, but Artois, knowing Hermione's hatred of social formalities, had
hastened to say that it was not necessary, that it would even be a surprising departure from the English
fashion of life, which ordained some knowledge of each other by the ladies of two families, or at least some
formal introduction by a mutual woman friend, before an acquaintance could be properly cemented. Hitherto
the Marchesino had felt quite at ease with his new friends. But hitherto he had been, as it were, merely at play
with them. The interlude of fever had changed his views and enlarged his consciousness. And Emilio was no
longer at hand to be explanatory if desired.
The Marchesino wished very much that he thoroughly understood the inner workings of the minds of English
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ladies.
How mad were the English? How mad exactly, for instance, was the Signora Delarey? And how mad exactly
was the Signorina? It would be very valuable to know. He realized that his accurate knowledge of Neapolitan
women, hitherto considered by him as amply sufficient to conduct him without a false step through all the
intricacies of the world feminine, might not serve him perfectly with the ladies of the island. His fever had, it
seemed, struck a little blow on his self confidence, and rendered him so feeble as to be almost thoughtful.
And then, what exactly did he want? To discomfit Emilio utterly? That, of course, did not need saying, even
to himself. And afterwards? There were two perpendicular lines above his eyebrows as the boat drew near to
the island.
But when he came into the little drawingroom, where Hermione was waiting to receive him, he looked
young and debonair, though still pale from his recent touch of illness.
Vere was secretly irritated by his coming. Her interview with Peppina had opened her eyes to many things,
among others to a good deal that was latent in the Marchesino. She could never again meet him, or any man
of his type, with the complete and masterful simplicity of ignorant childhood that can innocently coquet by
instinct, that can manage by heredity from Eve, but that does not understand thoroughly, either, what it is
doing or why it is doing it.
Vere was not in the mood for the Marchesino.
She had been working, and she had been dreaming, and she wanted to have another talk with Monsieur
Emile. Pretty, delicate, yet strong fibred ambitions were stirring within her, and the curious passion to use
life as a material, but not all of life that presented itself to her. With the desire to use that might be greedy
arose the fastidious prerogative of rejection.
And that very morning, mentally, Vere had rejected the Marchesino as something not interesting in life,
something that was only lively, like the very shallow stream. What a bore it would be having to entertain him,
to listen to his compliments, to avoid his glances, to pretend to be at ease with him.
"But Madre can have him for a little first," she said to herself, as she looked into the glass to see that her hair
was presentable. "Madre asked him to come. I didn't. I shall have nothing to say to him."
She had quite forgotten her eagerness on the night of the storm, when she heard the cry of the siren that
betokened his approach. Again she looked in the glass and gave a pat to her hair. And just as she was doing it
she thought of that day after the bathe, when Gaspare had come to tell her that Monsieur Emile was waiting
for her. She had run down, then, just as she was, and now
"Mamma mia! Am I getting vain!" she said to herself.
And she turned from the glass, and reluctantly went to meet their guest.
She had said to herself that it was a bore having the Marchesino to lunch, that he was uninteresting, frivolous,
emptyheaded. But directly she set eyes upon him, as he stood in the drawingroom by her mother, she felt a
change in him. What had happened to him? She could not tell. But she was conscious that he seemed much
more definite, much more of a personage, than he had seemed to her before. Even his face looked different,
though paler, stronger. She was aware of surprise.
The Marchesino, too, though much less instinctively observant than Vere, noted a change in her. She looked
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more developed, more grown up. And he said to himself:
"When I told Emile she was a woman I was right."
Their meeting was rather grave and formal, even a little stiff. The Marchesino paid Vere two or three
compliments, and she inquired perfunctorily after his health, and expressed regret for his slight illness.
"It was only a chill, Signorina. It was nothing."
"Perhaps you caught it that night," Vere said.
"What night, Signorina?"
Vere had been thinking of the night when he sang for her in vain. Suddenly remembering how she and
Monsieur Emile had lain in hiding and slipped surreptitiously home under cover of the darkness, she flushed
and said:
"The night of the stormyou got wet, didn't you?"
"But that was long ago, Signorina," he answered, looking steadily at her, with an expression that was
searching and almost hard.
Had he guessed her inadvertence? She feared so, and felt rather guilty, and glad when Giulia came in to
announce that lunch was ready.
Hermione, when they sat down, feeling a certain constraint, but not knowing what it sprang from, came to the
rescue with an effort. She was really disinclined for talk, and was perpetually remembering that the presence
of the Marchesino had prevented Emile from coming to spend a long day. But she remembered also her
guest's hospitality at Frisio's, and her social instinct defied her natural reluctance to be lively. She said to
herself that she was rapidly developing into a fogey, and must rigorously combat the grievous tendency. By a
sheer exertion of willpower she drove herself into a different, and conversational, mood. The Marchesino
politely responded. He was perfectly selfpossessed, but he was not lighthearted. The unusual effort of
being thoughtful had, perhaps, distressed or even outraged his brain. And the worst of it was that he was still
thinkingfor him quite profoundly.
However, they talked about risotto, they talked about Vesuvius, they spoke of the delights of summer in the
South and of the advantages of living on an island.
"Does it not bore you, Signora, having the sea all round?" asked the Marchesino. "Do you not feel in a prison
and that you cannot escape?"
"We don't want to escape, do we, Madre?" said Vere, quickly, before Hermione could answer.
"I am very fond of the island, certainly," said Hermione. "Still, of course, we are rather isolated here."
She was thinking of what she had said to Artoisthat perhaps her instinct to shut out the world was morbid,
was bad for Vere. The girl at once caught the sound of hesitation in her mother's voice.
"Madre!" she exclaimed. "You don't mean to say that you are tired of our island life?"
"I do not say that. And you, Vere?"
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"I love being here. I dread the thought of the autumn."
"In what month do you go away, Signora?" asked the Marchesino.
"By the end of October we shall have made our flitting, I suppose."
"You will come in to Naples for the winter?"
Hermione hesitated. Then she said:
"I almost think I shall take my daughter to Rome. What do you say, Vere?"
The girls face had become grave, even almost troubled.
"I can't look forward in this weather," she said. "I think it's almost wicked to. Oh, let us live in the moment,
Madre, and pretend it will be always summer, and that we shall always be living in our Casa del Mare!"
There was a sound of eager youth in her voice as she spoke, and her eyes suddenly shone. The Marchesino
looked at her with an admiration he did not try to conceal.
"You love the sea, Signorina?" he asked.
But Vere's enthusiasm abruptly vanished, as if she feared that he might destroy its completeness by trying to
share it.
"Oh yes," she said. "We all do here; Madre, Gaspare, Monsieur Emile everybody."
It was the first time the name of Artois had been mentioned among them that day. The Marchesino's full red
lips tightened over his large white teeth.
"I have not seen Signor Emilio for some days," he said.
"Nor have we," said Vere, with a touch of childish discontent.
He looked at her closely.
Emiliohe knew all about Emilio. But the Signorina? What were her feelings towards the "vecchio
briccone"? He did not understand the situation, because he did not understand precisely the nature of madness
of the English. Had the ladies been Neapolitans, Emilio an Italian, he would have felt on sure ground. But in
England, so he had heard, there is a fantastic, cold, sexless something called friendship that can exist between
unrelated man and woman.
"Don Emilio writes much," he said, with less than his usual alacrity. "When one goes to see him he has
always a pen in his hand."
He tried to speak of Emilio with complete detachment, but could not resist adding:
"When one is an old man one likes to sit, one cannot be forever running to and fro. One gets tired, I suppose."
There was marked satire in the accent with which he said the last words. And the shrug of his shoulders was
an almost audible "What can I know of that?"
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"Monsieur Emile writes because he has a great brain, not because he has a tired body," said Vere, with
sudden warmth.
Her mother was looking at her earnestly.
"Oh, Signorina, I do not mean But for a man to be always shut up," began the Marchesino, "it is not life."
"You don't understand, Marchese. One can live in a little room with the door shut as one can never live"
Abruptly she stopped. A flush ran over her face and down to her neck. Hermione turned away her eyes. But
they had read Vere's secret. She knew what her child was doing in those hours of seclusion. And she
remembered her own passionate attempts to stave off despair by work. She remembered her own failure.
"Poor little Vere!" That was her first thought. "But what is Emile doing?" That was the second. He had
discouraged her. He had told her the truth. What was he telling Vere? A flood of bitter curiosity seemed to
rise in her, drowning many things.
"What I like is life, Signorina," said the Marchesino. "Driving, riding, swimming, sport, fencing, being with
beautiful ladiesthat is life."
"Yes, of course, that is life," she said.
What was the good of trying to explain to him the inner life? He had no imagination.
Her youth made her very drastic, very sweeping, in her secret mental assertions.
She labelled the Marchesino "Philistine," and popped him into his drawer.
Lunch was over, and they got up.
"Are you afraid of the heat outofdoors, Marchese?" Hermione asked, "or shall we have coffee in the
garden? There is a trellis, and we shall be out of the sun."
"Signora, I am delighted to go out."
He got his straw hat, and they went into the tiny garden and sat down on basketwork chairs under a trellis,
set in the shadow of some fig trees. Giulia brought them coffee, and the Marchesino lighted a cigarette.
He said to himself that he had never been in love before.
Vere wore a white dress. She had no hat on, but held rather carelessly over her small, dark head a red parasol.
It was evident that she was not afraid even of the midday sun. That new look in her face, soft womanhood at
the windows gazing at a world more fully, if more sadly, understood, fascinated him, sent the blood up to his
head. There was a great change in her. Today she knew what before she had not known.
As he stared at Vere with adoring eyes suddenly there came into his mind the question: "Who has taught
her?"
And then he thought of the night when all in vain he had sung upon the sea, while the Signorina and "un
Signore" were hidden somewhere near him.
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The blood sang in his head, and something seemed to expand in his brain, to press violently against his
temples, as if striving to force its way out. He put down his coffee cup, and the two perpendicular lines
appeared above his eyebrows, giving him an odd look, cruel and rather catlike.
"If Emilio"
At that moment he longed to put a knife into his friend.
But he was not sure. He only suspected.
Hermione's role in this summer existence puzzled him exceedingly. The natural supposition in a Neapolitan
would, of course, have been that Artois was her lover. But when the Marchesino looked at Hermione's eyes
he could not tell.
What did it all mean? He felt furious at being puzzled, as if he were deliberately duped.
"Your cigarette has gone out, Marchese," said Hermione. "Have another."
The young man started.
"It's nothing."
"Vere, run in and get the Marchese a Khali Targa."
The girl got up quickly.
"No, no! I cannot permitI have another here."
He opened his case. It was empty.
Vere laughed.
"You see!"
She went off before he could say another word, and the Marchesino was alone for a moment with Hermione.
"You are fortunate, Signora, in having such a daughter," he said, with a sigh that was boyish.
"Yes," Hermione said.
That bitter curiosity was still with her, and her voice sounded listless, almost cold. The Marchesino looked
up. Ah! Was there something here that he could understand? Something really feminine? A creeping
jealousy? He was on the qui vive at once.
"And such a good friend as Don Emilio," he added. "You have known Emilio for a long time, Signora?"
"Oh yes, for a very long time."
"He is a strange man," said the Marchesino, with rather elaborate carelessness.
"Do you think so? In what way?"
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"He likes to know, but he does not like to be known."
There was a great deal of truth in the remark. Its acuteness surprised Hermione, who thought the Marchesino
quick witted but very superficial.
"As he is a writer, I suppose he has to study people a good deal," she said, quietly.
"I do not think I can understand these great people. I think they are too grand for me."
"Oh, but Emile likes you very much. He told me so."
"It is very good of him," said the Marchesino, pulling at his mustaches.
He was longing to warn Hermione against Emilioto hint that Emilio was not to be trusted. He believed that
Hermione must be very blind, very unfitted to look after a lovely daughter. But when he glanced at her face
he did not quite know how to hint what was in his mind. And just then Vere came back and the opportunity
was gone. She held out a box to the Marchesino. As he thanked her and took a cigarette he tried to look into
her eyes. But she would not let him. And when he struck his match she returned once more to the house,
carrying the box with her. Her movement was so swift and unexpected that Hermione had not time to speak
before she was gone.
"But"
"I should not smoke another, Signora," said the Marchesino, quickly.
"You are sure?"
"Quite."
"Still, Vere might have left the box. She is inhospitable today."
Hermione spoke lightly.
"Oh, it is bad for cigarettes to lie in the sun. It ruins them."
"But you should have filled your case. You must do so before you go."
"Thank you."
His head was buzzing again. The touch of fever had really weakened him. He knew it now. Never gifted with
much selfcontrol, he felt today that, with a very slight incentive, he might lose his head. The new
atmosphere which Vere diffused around her excited him strangely. He was certain that she was able to
understand something of what he was feeling, that on the night of the storm she would not have been able to
understand. Again he thought of Emilio, and moved restlessly in his chair, looking sideways at Hermione,
then dropping his eyes. Vere did not come back.
Hermione exerted herself to talk, but the task became really a difficult one, for the Marchesino looked
perpetually towards the house, and so far forgot himself as to show scarcely even a wavering interest in
anything his hostess said. As the minutes ran by a hot sensation of anger began to overcome him. A spot of
red appeared on each cheek.
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Suddenly he got up.
"Signora, you will want to make the siesta. I must not keep you longer."
"No, really; I love sitting out in the garden, and you will find the glare of the sun intolerable if you go so
early."
"On the sea there is always a breeze. Indeed, I must not detain you. All our ladies sleep after the colazione
until the bathing hour. Do not you?"
"Yes, we lie down. But today"
"You must not break the habit. It is a necessity. My boat will be ready, and I must thank you for a delightful
entertainment."
His round eyes were fierce, but he commanded his voice.
"A rive"
"I will come with you to the house if you really will not stay a little longer."
"Perhaps I may come again?" he said, quickly, with a sudden hardness, a fighting sound in his voice. "One
evening in the cool. Or do I bore you?"
"No; do come."
Hermione felt rather guilty, as if they had been inhospitable, she and Vere; though, indeed, only Vere was in
fault.
"Come and dine one night, and I shall ask Don Emilio."
As she spoke she looked steadily at her guest.
"He was good enough to introduce us to each other, wasn't he?" she added. "We must all have an evening
together, as we did at Frisio's."
The Marchesino bowed.
"With pleasure, Signora."
They came into the house.
As they did so Peppina came down the stairs. When she saw them she murmured a respectful salutation and
passed quickly by, averting her wounded cheek. Almost immediately behind her was Vere. The Marchesino
looked openly amazed for a moment, then even confused. He stared first at Hermione, then at Vere.
"I am sorry, Madre; I was kept for a moment," the girl said. "Are you coming upstairs?"
"The Marchese says he must go, Vere. He is determined not to deprive us of our siesta."
"One needs to sleep at this hour in the hot weather," said the Marchesino.
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The expression of wonder and confusion was still upon his face, and he spoke slowly.
"Goodbye, Marchese," Vere said, holding out her hand.
He took it and bowed over it and let it go. The girl turned and ran lightly upstairs.
Directly she was gone the Marchesino said to Hermione:
"Pardon me, Signora, II"
He hesitated. His selfpossession seemed to have deserted him for the moment. He looked at Hermione
swiftly, searchingly, then dropped his eyes.
"What is it, Marchese?" she asked, wondering what was the matter with him.
He still hesitated. Evidently he was much disturbed. At last he said again:
"Pardon me, Signora. Ias you know, I am Neapolitan. I have always lived in Naples."
"Yes, I know."
"I know Naples like my pocket"
He broke off.
Hermione waited for him to go on. She had no idea what was coming.
"Yes?" she said, at length to help him.
"Excuse me, Signora! But that girlthat girl who passed by just now"
"My servant, Peppina."
He stared at her.
"Your servant, Signora?"
"Yes."
"Do you know what she is, where she comes from? But no, it is impossible."
"I know all about Peppina, Marchese," Hermione replied, quietly.
"Truly? Ah!"
His large round eyes were still fixedly staring at her.
"Goodbye, Signora!" he said. "Thank you for a very charming colazione. And I shall look forward with all
my heart to the evening you have kindly suggested."
"I shall write directly I have arranged with Don Emilio."
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"Thank you! Thank you! A rivederci, Signora."
He cast upon her one more gravely staring look, and was gone.
When he was outside and alone, he threw up his hands and talked to himself for a moment, uttering many
exclamations. In truth, he was utterly amazed. Maria Fortunata had spread abroad diligently the fame of her
niece's beauty, and the Marchesino, like the rest of the gay young men of Naples, had known of and had
misjudged her. He had read in the papers of the violence done to her, and had at once dismissed her from his
mind with a muttered "Povera Ragazza!"
She was no longer beautiful.
And now he discovered her living as a servant with the ladies of the island. Who could have put her there? He
thought of Emilio's colloquy with Maria Fortunata. But the Signora? A mother? What did it all mean? Even
the madness of the English could scarcely be so pronounced as to make such a proceeding as this quite a
commonplace manifestation of the national life and eccentricity. He could not believe that.
He stepped into his boat. As the sailors rowed it out from the Pool the wind had gone down and the sails
were uselesshe looked earnestly up to the windows of the Casa del Mare, longing to pierce its secrets.
What was Emilio in that house? A lover, a friend, a bad genius? And the Signora? What was she?
The Marchesino was no believer in the virtue of women. But the lack of beauty in Hermione, and her age,
rendered him very doubtful as to her role in the life on the island. Vere's gay simplicity had jumped to the
eyes. But now she, too, was becoming something of a mystery.
He traced it all to Emilio, and was hot with a curiosity that was linked closely with his passion.
Should he go to see Emilio? He considered the question and resolved not to do so. He would try to be patient
until the night of the dinner on the island. He would be birbante, would play the fox, as Emilio surely had
done. The Panacci temper should find out that one member of the family could control it, when such control
served his purpose.
He was on fire with a lust for action as he made his resolutions. Vere's coolness to him, even avoidance of
him, had struck hammerlike blows upon his amour propre. He saw her nowyes, he saw hercoming
down the stairs behind Peppina. Had they been together? Did they talk together, the cold, the prudish
Signorina Ingleseso he called Vere now in his angerand the former decoy of Maria Fortunata?
And then a horrible conception of Emilio's role in all this darted into his mind, and for a moment he thought
of Hermione as a blind innocent, like his subservient mother, of Vere as a preordained victim. Then the blood
coursed through his veins like fire, and he felt as if he could no longer sit still in the boat.
"Avanti! avanti!" he cried to the sailors. "Dio mio! There is enough breeze to sail. Run up the sail! Madonna
Santissima! We shall not be to Naples till it is night. Avanti! avanti!"
Then he lay back, crossed his arms behind his head, and, with an effort, closed his eyes.
He was determined to be calm, not to let himself go. He put his fingers on his pulse.
"That cursed fever! I believe it is coming back," he said to himself.
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He wondered how soon the Signora would arrange that dinner on the island. He did not feel as if he could
wait long without seeing Vere again. But would it ever be possible to see her alone? Emilio saw her alone.
His white hairs brought him privileges. He might take her out upon the sea.
The Marchesino still had his fingers on his pulse. Surely it was fluttering very strangely. Like many young
Italians he was a mixture of fearlessness and weakness, of boldness and childishness.
"I must go to mamma! I must have medicinethe doctor," he thought, anxiously. "There is something wrong
with me. Perhaps I have been looked on by the evil eye."
And down he went to the bottom of a gulf of depression.
CHAPTER XXII
Hermione was very thankful that the Marchesino had gone. She felt that the lunch had been a failure, and was
sorry. But she had done her best. Vere and the young man himself had frustrated her, she thought. It was a
bore having to entertain any one in the hot weather. As she went upstairs she said to herself that her guest's
addio had been the final fiasco of an unfortunate morning. Evidently he knew something of Peppina, and had
been shocked to find the girl in the house. Emile had told herHermionethat she was an impulsive. Had
she acted foolishly in taking Peppina? She had been governed in the matter by her heart, in which dwelt pity
and a passion for justice. Surely the sense of compassion, the love of fair dealing could not lead one far
astray. And yet, since Peppina had been on the island the peace of the life there had been lessened. Emile had
become a little different, Vere too. And even Gasparewas there not some change in him?
She thought of Giulia's assertion that the disfigured girl had the evil eye.
She had laughed at the idea, and had spoken very seriously to Giulia, telling her that she was not to
communicate her foolish suspicion to the other servants. But certainly the joy of their life in this House of the
Sea was not what it had been. And even Vere had had forebodings with which Peppina had been connected.
Perhaps the air of Italy, this clear, this radiant atmosphere which seemed created to be the environment of
happiness, contained some subtle poison that was working in them all, turning them from cool reason.
She thought of Emile, calling up before her his big frame his powerful face with the steady eyes. And a wave
of depression went over her, as she understood how very much she had relied on him since the death of
Maurice. Without him she would indeed have been a derelict.
Again that bitter flood of curiosity welled up in her. She wondered where Vere was, but she did not go to the
girl's room. Instead, she went to her own sittingroom. Yesterday she had been restless. She had felt driven.
Today she felt even worse. But today she knew what yesterday she had not knownVere's solitary
occupation. Why had not Vere told her, confided in her? It was a very simple matter. The only reason why it
now assumed an importance to her was because it had been so carefully concealed. Why had not Vere told
her all about it, as she told her other little matters of their island life, freely, without even a thought of
hesitation?
She sought the reason of this departure which was paining her. But at first she did not find it.
Perhaps Vere wanted to give her a surprise. For a moment her heart grew lighter. Vere might be preparing
something to please or astonish her mother, and Emile might be in the secret, might be assisting in some way.
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But no! Vere's mysterious occupation had been followed too long. And then Emile had not always known
what it was. He had only known lately.
Those long reveries of Vere upon the sea, when she lay in the little boat in the shadow cast by the cliffs over
the Saint's Poolthey were the prelude to work; imaginative, creative perhaps.
And Vere was not seventeen.
Hermione smiled to herself rather bitterly, thinking of the ignorance, of the inevitable folly of youth. The
child, no doubt, had dreams of fame. What clever, what imaginative and energetic child has not such dreams
at some period or other? How absurd we all are, thinking to climb to the stars almost as soon as we can see
them!
And then the smile died away from Hermione's lips as the great tenderness of the mother within her was
moved by the thought of the disappointments that come with a greater knowledge of life. Vere would suffer
when she learned the truth, when she knew the meaning of failure.
Quite simply and naturally Hermione was including her child inevitably within the circle of her own disaster.
If Emile knew, why did he not tell Vere what he had told her mother?
But Emile had surely shown much greater interest in Vere just lately than ever before?
Was Emile helping Vere in what she was doing? But if he was, then he must believe in Vere's capacity to do
something that was worth doing.
Hermione knew the almost terrible sincerity of Artois in the things of the intellect, his clear, unwavering
judgment, his ruthless truthfulness. Nothing would ever turn him from that. Nothing, unless he
Her face became suddenly scarlet, then pale. A monstrous idea had sprung up in her mind; an idea so
monstrous that she strove to thrust it away violently, without even contemplating it. Why had Vere not told
her? There must be some good and sufficient reason. Vehemently to escape from that monstrous
ideashe sought it. Why had everything else in her child been revealed to her, only this one thing been
hidden from her?
She searched the past, Vere and herself in that past. And now, despite her emotion, her full intelligence was
roused up and at work. And presently she remembered that Emile and Vere shared the knowledge of her own
desire to create, and her utter failure to succeed in creation. Emile knew the whole naked truth of that. Vere
did not. But Vere knew something. Could that mutual knowledge be the reason of this mutual secrecy? As
women often do, Hermione had leaped into the very core of the heart of the truth, had leaped out of the void,
guided by some strange instinct never alive in man. But, as women very seldom do, she shrank away from the
place she had gained. Instead of triumphing, she was afraid. She remembered how often her imagination had
betrayed her, how it had created phantoms, had ruined for her the lagging hours. Again and again she had
said to herself, "I will beware of it." Now she accused it of playing her false once more, of running wild.
Sharply she pulled herself up. She was assuming things. That was her great fault, to assume that things were
that which perhaps they were not.
How often Emile had told her not to trust her imagination! She would heed him now. She knew nothing. She
did not even know for certain that Vere's flush, Vere's abrupt hesitation at lunch, were a betrayal of the child's
secret.
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But that she would find out.
Again the fierce curiosity besieged and took possession of her. After all, she was a mother. A mother had
rights. Surely she had a right to know what another knew of her child.
"I will ask Vere," she said to herself.
Once before she had said to herself that she would do that, and she had not done it. She had felt that to do it
would be a humiliation. But now she was resolved to do it, for she knew more of her own condition and was
more afraid of herself. She began to feel like one who has undergone a prolonged strain of work, who
believes that it has not been too great and has been capably supported, and who suddenly is aware of a
yielding, of a downward and outward movement, like a wide and spreading disintegration, in which brain,
nerves, the whole body are involved.
Yet what had been the strain that she had been supporting, that now suddenly she began to feel too much?
The strain of a loss. Time should have eased it. But had Time eased it, or only lengthened the period during
which she had been forced to carry her load? People ought to get accustomed to things. She knew that it is
supposed by many that the human body, the human mind, the human heart can get accustomedby which is
apparently meant can cease passionately and instinctively to strive to repelcan get accustomed to anything.
Well she could not. Never could she get accustomed to the loss of love, of man's love. The whole world
might proclaim its proverbs. For her they had no truth. For herand for how many other silent women!
And now suddenly she felt that for years she had been struggling, and that the struggle had told upon her far
more than she had ever suspected. Nothing must be added to her burden or she would sink down. The dust
would cover her. She would be as nothingor she would be as something terrible, nameless.
She must ask Vere, do what she had said to herself that she would not do. Unless she had the complete
confidence of her child she could not continue to do without the cherishing love she had lost. She saw herself
a cripple, something maimed. Hitherto she had been supported by blessed human crutches: by Vere, Emile,
Gaspare. How heavily she had leaned upon them! She knew that now. How heavily she must still lean if she
were to continue on her way. And a fierce, an almost savage something, desperate and therefore arbitrary,
said within her:
"I will keep the little that I have: I willI will."
"The little!" Had she said that? It was wicked of her to say that. But she had had the wonderful thing. She had
held for a brief time the magic of the world within the hollow of her hands, within the shadow of her heart.
And the others? Children slip from their parents' lives into the arms of another whose call means more to
them than the voices of those who made them love. Friends drift away, scarcely knowing why, divided from
each other by the innumerable channels that branch from the main stream of existence. Even a faithful
servant cannot be more than a friend.
There is one thing that is great, whose greatness makes the smallness of all the other things. And so Hermione
said, "the little that I have," and there was truth in it. And there was as vital a truth in the fact of her whole
nature recognizing that little's enormous value to her. Not for a moment did she underrate her possession.
Indeed, she had to fight against the tendency to exaggeration. Her intellect said to her that, in being so deeply
moved by such a thing as the concealment from her by Vere of something innocent of which Emile knew, she
was making a water drop into an ocean. Her intellect said that. But her heart said no.
And the voice of her intellect sank away like the frailest echo that ever raised its spectral imitation of a
reality. And the voice of her heart rang out till it filled her world.
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And so the argument was over.
She thought she heard a step below, and looked out of the window into the sunshine.
Gaspare was there. It was his hour of repose, and he was smoking a cigarette. He was dressed in white linen,
without a coat, and had a white linen hat on his head. He stood near the house, apparently looking out to sea.
And his pose was meditative. Hermione watched him. The sight of him reminded her of another question she
wished to ask.
Gaspare had one hand in the pocket of his white trousers. With the other he held the cigarette. Hermione saw
the wreaths of pale smoke curling up and evaporating in the shining, twinkling air, which seemed full of
joyous, dancing atoms. But presently his hand forgot to do its work. The cigarette, only half smoked, went
out, and he stood there as if plunged in profound thought. Hermione wondered what he was thinking about.
"Gaspare!"
She said it softly. Evidently he did not hear.
"Gaspare! Gaspare!"
Each time she spoke a little louder, but still he took no notice.
She leaned farther out and called:
"Gaspare!"
This time he heard and started violently, dropped the cigarette, then, without looking up, bent down slowly,
recovered it, and turned round.
"Signora?"
The sun shone full on his upturned face, showing to Hermione the dogged look which sometimes came to it
when anything startled him.
"I made you jump."
"No, Signora."
"But I did. What were you thinking about?"
"Nothing, Signora. Why are you not asleep?"
He spoke almost as if she injured him by being awake.
"I couldn't sleep today. What are you going to do this afternoon?"
"I don't know, Signora. Do you wish me to do anything for you?"
"Well"
She had a wish to clear things up, to force her life, the lives of those few she cared for, out of mystery into a
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clear light. She had a desire to chastise thought by strong, bracing action.
"I rather want to send a note to Don Emilio."
"Si, Signora."
His voice did not sound pleased.
"It is too hot to row all the way to Naples. Couldn't you go to the village and take the tram to the hotelif I
write the note?"
"If you like, Signora."
"Or would it be less bother to row as far as Mergellina, and take a tram or carriage from there?
"I can do that, Signora."
He sounded a little more cheerful.
"I think I'll write the note, Gaspare, then. And you might take it some timewhenever you like. You might
come and fetch it in five minutes."
"Very well, Signora."
He moved away and she went to her writingtable. She sat down, and slowly, with a good deal of hesitation
and thought, she wrote part of a letter asking Emile to come to dine whenever he liked at the island. And now
came the difficulty. She knew Emile did not want to meet the Marchesino there. Yet she was going to ask
them to meet each other. She had told the Marchesino so. Should she tell Emile? Perhaps, if she did, he
would refuse to come. But she could never lay even the smallest trap for a friend. So she wrote on, asking
Emile to let her know the night he would come as she had promised to invite the Marchesino to meet him.
"Be a good friend and do this for me," she ended, "even if it bores you. The Marchese lunched here alone
with us today, and it was a fiasco. I think we were very inhospitable, and I want to wipe away the
recollection of our dulness from his mind. Gaspare will bring me your answer."
At the bottom she wrote "Hermione." But just as she was going to seal the letter in its envelope she took it
out, and added, "Delarey" to her Christian name.
"Hermione Delarey." She looked at the words for a long time before she rang the bell for Gaspare.
When she gave him the letter, "Are you going by Mergellina?" she asked him.
"Si, Signora."
He stood beside her for a moment; then, as she said nothing more, turned to go out.
"Gaspare, wait one minute," she said, quickly.
"Si, Signora."
"I meant to ask you last night, butwell, we spoke of other things, and it was so late. Have you ever noticed
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anything about that boy, Ruffo, anything at all, that surprised you?"
"Surprised me, Signora?"
"Surprised you, or reminded you of anything?"
"I don't know what you mean, Signora."
Gaspare's voice was hard and cold. He looked steadily at Hermione, as a man of strong character sometimes
looks when he wishes to turn his eyes away from the glance of another, but will not, because of his manhood.
Hermione hesitated to go on, but something drove her to be more explicit.
"Have you never noticed in Ruffo a likeness toto your Padrone?" she said, slowly.
"My Padrone!"
Gaspare's great eyes dropped before hers, and he stood looking on the floor. She saw a deep flush cover his
brown skin.
"I am sure you have noticed it, Gaspare," she said. "I can see you have. Why did you not tell me?"
At that moment she felt angry with herself and almost angry with him. Had he noticed this strange, this subtle
resemblance between the fisherboy and the dead man at once, long before she had? Had he been swifter to
see such a thing than she?
"What do you mean, Signora? What are you talking about?"
He looked ugly.
"How can a fisherboy, a nothing from Mergellina, look like my Padrone?"
Now he lifted his eyes, and they were fierceor so she thought.
"Signora, how can you say such a thing?"
"Gaspare?" she exclaimed, astonished at his sudden vehemence.
"Signorascusi! Butbut there will never be another like my Padrone."
He opened the door and went quickly out of the room, and when the door shut it was as if an iron door shut
upon a furnace.
Hermione stood looking at this door. She drew a long breath.
"But he has seen it!" she said, aloud. "He has seen it."
And Emile?
Had she been a blind woman, she who had so loved the beauty that was dust? She thought of Vere and Ruffo
standing together, so youthful, so happy in their simple, casual intercourse.
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It was as if Vere had been mysteriously drawn to this boy because of his resemblance to the father she had
never seen.
Vere! Little Vere!
Again the mother's tenderness welled up in Hermione's heart, this time sweeping away the reluctance to be
humble.
"I will go to Vere now."
She went to the door, as she had gone to it the previous day. But this time she did not hesitate to open it. A
strong impulse swept her along, and she came to her child's room eagerly.
"Vere!"
She knocked at the door.
"Vere! May I come in?"
She knocked again. There was no answer.
Then she opened the door and went in. Possibly Vere was sleeping. The mosquitonet was drawn round the
bed, but Hermione saw that her child was not behind it. Vere had gone out somewhere.
The mother went to the big window which looked out upon the sea. The green Venetian blind was drawn. She
pushed up one of its flaps and bent to look through. Below, a little way out on the calm water, she saw Vere's
boat rocking softly in obedience to the small movement that is never absent from the sea. The white awning
was stretched above the sternseats, and under it lay Vere in her white linen dress, her small head, not
protected by a hat, supported by a cushion. She lay quite still, one arm on the gunwale of the boat, the other
against her side. Hermione could not see whether her eyes were shut or open.
The mother watched her for a long time through the blind.
How much of power was enclosed in that young figure that lay so still, so perfectly at ease, cradled on the
great sea, warmed and cherished by the tempered fires of the sun! How much of power to lift up and to cast
down, to be secret, to create sorrow, to be merciful! Wonderful, terrible human power!
The watching mother felt just then that she was in the hands of the child.
"Now it's the child's turn."
Surely Vere must be asleep. Such absolute stillness must mean temporary withdrawal of consciousness.
Just as Hermione was thinking this, Vere's left hand moved. The girl lifted it up to her face, and gently and
repeatedly rubbed her eyebrow.
Hermione dropped the flap of the blind. The little, oddly natural movement had suddenly made her feel that it
was not right to be watching Vere when the child must suppose herself to be unobserved and quite alone with
the sea.
As she came away from the window she glanced quickly round the room, and upon a small writingtable at
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the foot of the bed she saw a number of sheets of paper lying loose, with a piece of ribbon beside them. They
had evidently been taken out of the writingtable drawer, which was partially open, and which, as Hermione
could see, contained other sheets of a similar kind. Hermione looked, and then looked away. She passed the
table and reached the door. When she was there she glanced again at the sheets of paper. They were covered
with writing. They drew, they fascinated her eyes, and she stood still, with her hand resting on the
doorhandle. As a rule it would have seemed perfectly natural to her to read anything that Vere had left lying
about, either in her own room or anywhere else. Until just lately her child had never had, or dreamed of
having any secret from her. Never had Vere received a letter that her mother had not seen. Secrets simply did
not exist between themsecrets, that is, of the child from the mother.
But it was not so now. And that was why those sheets of paper drew and held the mother's eyes.
She had, of course, a perfect right to read them. Or had sheshe who had said to Vere, "Keep your secrets"?
In those words had she not deliberately relinquished such a right? She stood there thinking, recalling those
words, debating within herself this questionand surely with much less than her usual great honesty.
Emile, she was sure, had read the writing upon those sheets of paper.
She did not know exactly why she was certain of thisbut she was certain, absolutely certain. She
remembered the longago days, when she had submitted to him similar sheets. What Emile had read surely
she might read. Again that intense and bitter curiosity mingled with something else, a strange, new jealousy
in which it was rooted. She felt as if Vere, this child whom she had loved and cared for, had done her a cruel
wrong, had barred her out from the life in which she had always been till now the best loved, the most
absolutely trusted dweller. Why should she not take that which she ought to have been given?
Again she was conscious of that painful, that piteous sensation of one who is yielding under a strain that has
been too prolonged. Something surely collapsed within her, something of the part of her being that was
moral. She was no longer a free woman in that moment. She was governed. Or so she felt, perhaps deceiving
herself.
She went swiftly and softly over to the table and bent over the sheets.
At first she stood. Then she sat down. She took up the paper, handled it, held it close to her eyes.
Verses! Vere was writing verses. Of course! Every one begins by being a poet. Hermione smiled, almost
laughed aloud. Poor little Vere with her poor little secret! There was still that bitterness in the mother, that
sense of wrong. But she read on and on. And presently she started and her hand shook.
She had come to a poem that was corrected in Vere's handwriting, and on the margin was written, "Monsieur
Emile's idea."
So there had been a conference, and Emile was advising Vere.
Hermione's hand shook so violently that she could not go on reading for a moment, and she laid the paper
down. She felt like one who has suddenly unmasked a conspiracy against herself. It was useless for her
intellect to deny this conspiracy, for her heart proclaimed it.
Long ago Emile had told her frankly that it was in vain for her to waste her time in creative work, that she
had not the necessary gift for it. And now he was secretly assisting her own childa child of sixteento do
what he had told her, the mother, not to do. Why was he doing this?
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Again the monstrous idea that she had forcibly dismissed from her mind that day returned to Hermione.
There is one thing that sometimes blinds the most clearsighted men, so that they cannot perceive truth.
ButHermione again bent over the sheets of paper, this time seeking for a weapon against the idea which
assailed her. On several pages she found emendations, excisions, on one a whole verse completely changed.
And on the margins were pencilled "Monsieur Emile's suggestion"; "Monsieur E.'s advice"; and once, "These
two lines invented by Monsieur Emile."
When had Vere and Emile had the opportunity for this long and secret discussion? On the day of the storm
they had been together alone. They had had tea together alone. And on the night Emile dined on the island
they had been out in the boat together for a long time. All this must have been talked over then.
Yes.
She read on. Had Vere talent? Did her child possess what she had longed for, and had been denied? She
strove to read critically, but she was too excited, too moved to do so. All necessary calm was gone. She was
painfully upset. The words moved before her eyes, running upward in irregular lines that resembled creeping
things, and she saw rings of light, yellow in the middle and edged with pale blue.
She pushed away the sheets of paper, got up and went again to the window. She must look at Vere once
more, look at her with this new knowledge, look at her critically, with a piercing scrutiny. And she bent down
as before, and moved a section of the blind, pushing it up.
There was no boat beneath her on the sea.
She dropped the blind sharply, and all the blood in her body seemed to make a simultaneous movement away
from the region of the heart.
Vere was perhaps already in the house, running lightly up to the room. She would come in and find her
mother there. She would guess what her mother had been doing.
Hermione did not hesitate. She crossed the room swiftly, opened the door, and went out. She reached her own
room without meeting Vere. But she had not been in it for more than a minute and a half when she heard
Vere come upstairs, the sound of her door open and shut.
Hermione cleared her throat. She felt the need of doing something physical. Then she pulled up her blinds
and let the hot sun stream in upon her.
She felt dark just thenblack.
In a moment she found that she was perspiring. The sun was fierce that, of course, must be the reason. But
she would not shut the sun out. She must have light around her, although there was none within her.
She was thankful she had escaped in time. If she had not, if Vere had run into the room and found her there,
she was sure she would have frightened her child by some strange outburst. She would have said or done
somethingshe did not at all know whatthat would perhaps have altered their relations irrevocably. For,
in that moment, the sense of selfcontrol, of being herselfso she put ithad been withdrawn from her.
She would regain it, no doubt. She was even now regaining it. Already she was able to say to herself that she
was not seeing things in their true proportions, that some sudden crisis of the nerves, due perhaps to some
purely physical cause, had plunged her into a folly of feeling from which she would soon escape entirely. She
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was by nature emotional and unguarded: therefore specially likely to be the victim in mind of any bodily ill.
And then she was not accustomed to be unwell. Her strength of body was remarkable. Very seldom had she
felt weak.
She remembered one night, long ago in Sicily, when an awful bodily weakness had overtaken her. But that
had been caused by dread. The mind had reacted upon the body. Now, she was sure of it, body had reacted on
mind.
Yet she had not been ill.
She felt unequal to the battle of pros and cons that was raging within her.
"I'll be quiet," she thought. "I'll read."
And she took up a book.
She read steadily for an hour, understanding thoroughly all she read, and wondering how she had ever fancied
she cared about reading. Then she laid the book down and looked at the clock. It was nearly four. Tea would
perhaps refresh her. And after tea? She had loved the island, but today she felt almost as if it were a prison.
What was there to be done? She found herself wondering for the first time how she had managed to "get
through" week after week there. And in a moment her wonder made her realize the inward change in her, the
distance that now divided her from Vere, the gulf that lay between them.
A day with a stranger may seem long, but a month with a friend how short! To live with Vere had been like
living with a part of herself. But now what would it be like? And when Emile came, and they three were
together?
When Hermione contemplated that reunion, she felt that it would be to her intolerable. And yet she desired it.
For she wanted to know something, and she was certain that if she, Vere, and Emile could be together,
without any fourth person, she would know it.
A little while ago, when she had longed for bracing action, she had resolved to ask Emile to meet the
Marchesino. She had felt as if that meeting would clear the air, would drive out the faint mystery which
seemed to be encompassing them about. The two men, formerly friends, were evidently in antagonism now.
She wanted to restore things to their former footing, or to make the enmity come out into the open, to
understand it thoroughly, and to know if she and Vere had any part in it. Her desire had been to throw open
windows and let in light.
But now things were changed. She understood, she knew more. And she wanted to be alone with Emile and
with Vere. Then, perhaps, she would understand everything.
She said this to herself quite calmly. Her mood was changed. The fire had died down in her, and she felt
almost sluggish, although still restless. The monstrous idea had come to her again. She did not vehemently
repel it. By nature she was no doubt an impulsive. But now she meant to be a watcher. Before she took up her
book and began to read she had been, perhaps, almost hysterical, had been plunged in a welter of emotion in
which reason was drowned, had not been herself.
But now she felt that she was herself.
There was something that she wished to know, something that the knowledge she had gained in her child's
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room that day suggested as a possibility.
She regretted her note to Emile. Why had not she asked him to come alone, tomorrow, or even
tonightyes, tonight?
If she could only be with him and Vere for a few minutes tonight!
CHAPTER XXIII
When Artois received Hermione's letter he asked who had brought it, and obtained from the waiter a fairly
accurate description of Gaspare.
"Please ask him to come up," he said. "I want to speak to him."
Two or three minutes later there was a knock at the door and Gaspare walked in, with a largeeyed inquiring
look.
"Goodday, Gaspare. You've never seen my quarters before, I think," said Artois, cordially.
"No, Signore. What a beautiful room!"
"Then smoke a cigar, and I'll write an answer to this letter."
"Thank you, Signore."
Artois gave him a cigar, and sat down to answer the letter, while Gaspare went out on to the balcony and
stood looking at the bathers who were diving from the high wooden platform of the bath establishment over
the way. When Artois had finished writing he joined Gaspare. He had a great wish that day to break down a
reserve he had respected for many years, but he knew Gaspare's determined character, his power of obstinate,
of dogged silence. Gaspare's will had been strong when he was a boy. The passing of the years had certainly
not weakened it. Nevertheless, Artois was moved to make the attempt which he foresaw would probably end
in failure.
He gave Gaspare the letter, and said:
"Don't go for a moment. I want to have a little talk with you."
"Si, Signore."
Gaspare put the letter into the inner pocket of his jacket, and stood looking at Artois, holding the cigar in his
left hand. In all these years Artois had never found out whether Gaspare liked him or not. He wished now that
he knew.
"Gaspare," he said, "I think you know that I have a great regard for your Padrona."
"Si, Signore. I know it."
The words sounded rather cold.
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"She has had a great deal of sorrow to bear."
"Si, Signore."
"One does not wish that she should be disturbed in any waythat any fresh trouble should come into her
life."
Gaspare's eyes were always fixed steadily upon Artois, who, as he spoke the last words, fancied he saw come
into them an expression that was almost severely ironical. It vanished at once as Gaspare said:
"No, Signore."
Artois felt the iron of this faithful servant's impenetrable reserve, but he continued very quietly and
composedly:
"You have always stood between the Padrona and trouble whenever you could. You always willI am sure
of that."
"Si, Signore."
"Do you think there is any danger to the Signora's happiness here?"
"Here, Signore?"
Gaspare's emphasis seemed to imply where they were just then standing. Artois was surprised, then for a
moment almost relieved. Apparently Gaspare had no thought in common with the strange, the perhaps
fantastic thought that had been in his own mind.
"Hereno!" he said, with a smile. "Only you and I are here, and we shall not make the Signora unhappy."
"Chi lo sa?" returned Gaspare.
And again that ironical expression was in his eyes.
"By here I meant here in Naples, where we all areor on the island, for instance."
"Signore, in this life there is trouble for all."
"But some troubles, some disasters can be avoided."
"It's possible."
"Gaspare"Artois looked at him steadily, searchingly even, and spoke very gravely"I respect you for
your discretion of many years. But if you know of any trouble, any danger that is near to the Signora, and
against which I could help you to protect her, I hope you will trust me and tell me. I think you ought to do
that."
"I don't know what you mean, Signore."
"Are you quite sure, Gaspare? Are you quite sure that no one comes to the island who might make the
Signora very unhappy?"
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Gaspare had dropped his eyes. Now he lifted them, and looked Artois straight in the face.
"No, Signore, I am not sure of that," he said.
There was nothing rude in his voice, but there was something stern. Artois felt as if a strong, determined man
stood in his path and blocked the way. But why? Surely they were at cross purposes. The working of
Gaspare's mind was not clear to him.
After a moment of silence, he said:
"What I mean is this. Do you think it would be a good thing if the Signora left the island?"
"Left the island, Signore?"
"Yes, and went away from Naples altogether."
"The Signorina would never let the Padrona go. The Signorina loves the island and my Padrona loves the
Signorina."
"But the Signorina would not be selfish. If it was best for her mother to go"
"The Signorina would not think it was best; she would never think it was best to leave the island."
"But what I want to know, Gaspare, is whether you think it would be best for them to leave the island. That's
what I want to knowand you haven't told me."
"I am a servant, Signore. I cannot tell such things."
"You are a servantyes. But you are also a friend. And I think nobody could tell better than you."
"I am sure the Signora will not leave the island till October, Signore. She says we are all to stay until the end
of October."
"And now it's July."
"Si, Signore. Now it's July."
In saying the last words Gaspare's voice sounded fatalistic, and Artois believed that he caught an echo of a
deepdown thought of his own. With all his virtues Gaspare had an admixture of the spirit of the East that
dwells also in Sicily, a spirit that sometimes, brooding over a nature however fine, prevents action, a spirit
that says to a man, "This is ordained. This is destiny. This is to be."
"Gaspare," Artois said, strong in this conviction, "I have heard you say, 'e il destino.' But you know we can
often get away from things if we are quickwitted."
"Some things, Signore."
"Most things, perhaps. Don't you trust me?"
"Signore!"
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"Don't you think, after all these years, you can trust me?"
"Signore, I respect you as I respect my father."
"Well, Gaspare, remember this. The Signora has had trouble enough in her life. We must keep out any more."
"Signore, I shall always do what I can to spare my Padrona. Thank you for the cigar, Signore. I ought to go
now. I have to go to Mergellina for the boat."
"To Mergellina?"
Again Artois looked at him searchingly.
"Si, Signore; I left the boat at Mergellina. It is very hot to row all the way here."
"Yes. A rivederci, Gaspare. Perhaps I shall sail round to the island tonight after dinner. But I'm not sure. So
you need not say I am coming."
"A rivederci, Signore."
When Gaspare had gone, Artois said to himself, "He does not trust me."
Artois was surprised to realize how hurt he felt at Gaspare's attitude towards him that day. Till now their
mutual reserve had surely linked them together. Then silence had been a bond. But there was a change, and
the bond seemed suddenly loosened.
"Damn the difference between the nations!" Artois thought. "How can we grasp the different points of view?
How can even the cleverest of us read clearly in others of a different race from our own?"
He felt frustrated, as he had sometimes felt frustrated by Orientals. And he knew an anger of the brain as well
as an anger of the heart. But this anger roused him, and he resolved to do something from which till now he
had instinctively shrunk, strongwilled man though he was. If Gaspare would not help him he would act for
himself. Possibly the suspicion, the fear that beset him was groundless. He had put it away from him more
than once, had said that it was absurd, that his profession of an imaginative writer rendered him, perhaps,
more liable to strange fancies than were other men, that it encouraged him to seek instinctively for drama,
and that what a man instinctively and perpetually seeks he will often imagine that he has found. Now he
would try to prove what was the truth.
He had written to Hermione saying that he would be glad to dine with her on any evening that suited the
Marchesino, that he had no engagements. Why she wished him to meet the Marchesino he did not know. No
doubt she had some woman's reason. The one she gave was hardly enough, and he divined another beneath it.
Certainly he did not love Doro on the island, but perhaps it was as well that they should meet there once, and
get over their little antagonism, an antagonism that Artois thought of as almost childish. Life was not long
enough for quarrels with boys like Doro. Artois had refused Hermione's invitation on the sea abruptly. He
had felt irritated for the moment, because he had for the moment been unusually expansive, and her
announcement that Doro was to be there had fallen upon him like a cold douche. And then he had been
nervous, highly strung from overwork. Now he was calm, and could look at things as they were. And if he
noticed anything leading him to suppose that the Marchesino was likely to try to abuse Hermione's hospitality
he meant to have it out with him. He would speak plainly and explain the English point of view. Doro would
no doubt attack him on the ground of his interview with Maria Fortunata. He did not care. Somehow his
present preoccupation with Hermione's fate, increased by the visit of Gaspare, rendered his irritation against
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the Marchesino less keen than it had been. But he thought he would probably visit the island tonightafter
another visit which he intended to pay. He could not start at once. He must give Gaspare time to take the boat
and row off. For his first visit was to Mergellina.
After waiting an hour he started on foot, keeping along by the sea, as he did not wish to meet acquaintances,
and was likely to meet them in the Villa. As he drew near to Mergellina he felt a great and growing
reluctance to do what he had come to do, to make inquiries into a certain matter; and he believed that this
reluctance, awake within him although perhaps he had scarcely been aware of it, had kept him inactive during
many days. Yet he was not sure of this. He was not sure when a faint suspicion had first been born in his
mind. Even now he said to himself that what he meant to do, if explained to the ordinary man, would
probably seem to him ridiculous, that the ordinary man would say, "What a wild idea! Your imagination runs
riot." But he thought of certain subtle things which had seemed like indications, like shadowy pointing
fingers; of a look in Gaspare's eyes when they had met hisa hard, defiant look that seemed shutting him out
from something; of a look in another face one night under the moon; of some words spoken in a cave with a
passion that had reached his heart; of two children strangely at ease in each other's society. And again the
thought pricked him, "Is not everything possibleeven that?" All through his life he had sought truth with
persistence, sometimes almost with cruelty, yet now he was conscious of timidity, almost of cowardiceas if
he feared to seek it.
Long ago he had known a cowardice akin to this, in Sicily. Then he had been afraid, not for himself but for
another. Today again the protective instinct was alive in him. It was that instinct which made him afraid, but
it was also that instinct which kept him to his first intention, which pushed him on to Mergellina. No safety
can be in ignorance for a strong man. He must know. Then he can act.
When Artois reached Mergellina he looked about for Ruffo, but he could not see the boy. He had never
inquired Ruffo's second name. He might make a guess at it. Should he? He looked at a group of fishermen
who were talking loudly on the sand just beyond the low wall. One of them had a handsome face bronzed by
the sun, frank hazel eyes, a mouth oddly sensitive for one of his class. His woolen shirt, wide open, showed a
medal resting on his broad chest, one of those amulets that are said to protect the fishermen from the dangers
of the sea. Artois resolved to ask this man the question he wished, yet feared to put to some one. Afterwards
he wondered why he had picked out this man. Perhaps it was because he looked happy.
Artois caught the man's eye.
"You want a boat, Signore?"
With a quick movement the fellow was beside him on the other side of the wall.
"I'll take your boatperhaps this evening."
"At what hour, Signore?"
"We'll see. But first perhaps you can tell me something."
"What is it?"
"You live here at Mergellina?"
"Si, Signore."
"Do you know any one calledcalled Buonavista?"
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The eyes of Artois were fixed on the man's face.
"Buonavistasi, Signore."
"You do?"
"Ma si, Signore," said the man, looking at Artois with a sudden flash of surprise. "The family Buonavista, I
have known it all my life."
"The family? Oh, then there are many of them?"
The man laughed.
"Enrico Buonavista has made many children, and is proud of it, I can tell you. He has tenhis father before
him"
"Then they are Neapolitans?"
"Neapolitans! No, Signore. They are from Mergellina."
Artois smiled. The tension which had surprised the sailor left his face.
"I understand. But there is no Sicilian here called Buonavista?"
"A Sicilian, Signore? I never heard of one. Are there Buonavistas in Sicily?"
"I have met with the name there once. But perhaps you can tell me of a boy, one of the fishermen, called
Ruffo?"
"Ruffo Scarla? You mean Ruffo Scarla, who fishes with Giuseppe Mandano Giuseppe, Signore?"
"It may be. A young fellow, a Sicilian by birth, I believe."
"Il Siciliano! Si, Signore. We call him that, but he has never been in Sicily, and was born in America."
"That's the boy."
"Do you want him, Signore? But he is not here today. He is at sea today."
"I did want to speak to him."
"But he is not a boatman, Signore. He does not go with the travellers. He is a fisherman."
"Yes. Do you know his mother?"
"Si, Signore."
"What is her name?"
"Bernari, Signore. She is married to Antonio Bernari, who is in prison."
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"In prison? What's he been doing?"
"He is always after the girls, Signore. And now he has put a knife into one."
The man shrugged his shoulders.
"Diavolo! He is jealous. He has not been tried yet, perhaps he never will be. His wife has gone into Naples
today to see him."
"Oh, she's away?"
"Si, Signore."
"And her name, her Christian name? It's Maria, isn't it?"
"No, Signore, MaddalenaMaddalena Bernari."
Artois said nothing for a minute. Then he added:
"I suppose there are plenty of Maddalenas here in Mergellina?"
The man laughed.
"Si Signore. Marias and Maddalenasyou find them everywhere. Why, my own mamma is Maddalena, and
my wife is Maria, and so is my sister."
"Exactly. And your name? I want it, so that when next I take a boat here I can ask for yours."
"Fabiano, Signore, Lari Fabiano, and my boat is the Stella del Mare."
"Thank you, Fabiano."
Artois put a lira into his hand.
"I shall take the Star of the Sea very soon."
"This evening, Signore; it will be fine for sailing this evening."
"If not this evening, another day. A rivederci, Fabiano."
"A rivederci, Signore. Buon passeggio."
The man went back to his companions, and, as Artois walked on began talking eagerly to them, and pointing
after the stranger.
Artois did not know what he would do later on in the evening, but he had decided on the immediate future.
He would walk up the hill to the village of Posilipo, then turn down to the left, past the entrance to the Villa
Rosebery, and go to the Antico Giuseppone, where he could dine by the waterside. It was quiet there, he
knew; and he could have a cutlet and a zampaglione, a cup of coffee and a cigar, and sit and watch the night
fall. And when it had fallen? Well, he would not be far from the island, nor very far from Naples, and he
could decide then what to do.
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He followed out this plan, and arrived at the Giuseppone at evening. As he came down the road between the
big buildings near the waterside he saw in the distance a small group of boys and men lounging by the three
or four boats that lie at the quay, and feared to find, perhaps, a bustle and noise of people round the corner at
the ristorante. But when he turned the corner and came to the little tables that were set out in the open air, he
was glad to see only two men who were bending over their plates of fish soup. He glanced at them, almost
without noticing them, so preoccupied was he with his thoughts, sat down at an adjoining table and ordered
his simple meal. While it was being got ready he looked out over the sea.
The two men near him conversed occasionally in low voices. He paid no heed to them. Only when he had
dined slowly and was sipping his black coffee did they attract his attention. He heard one of them say to the
other in French:
"What am I to do? It would be terrible for me! How am I to prevent it from happening?"
His companion replied:
"I thought you had been wandering all the winter in the desert."
"I have. What has that to do with it?"
"Have you learned its lesson?"
"What lesson?"
"The lesson of resignation, of obedience to the thing that must be."
Artois looked towards the last speaker and saw that he was an Oriental, and that he was very old. His
companion was a young Frenchman.
"What do those do who have not learned?" continued the Oriental. "They seek, do they not? They rebel, they
fight, they try to avoid things, they try to bring things about. They lift up their hands to disperse the grains of
the sandstorm. They lift up their voices to be heard by the wind from the South. They stretch forth their
hands to gather the mirage into their bosom. They follow the drum that is beaten among the dunes. They are
afraid of life because they know it has two kinds of gifts, and one they snatch at, and one they would refuse.
And they are afraid still more of the door that all must enter, Sultan and Nomad he who has washed
himself and made the threefold pilgrimage, and he who is a leper and is eaten by flies. So it is. And
nevertheless all that is to come must come, and all that is to go must go at the time appointed; just as the
cloud falls and lifts at the time appointed, and the wind blows and fails, and Ramadan is here and is over."
As he ceased from speaking he got up from his chair, and, followed by the young Frenchman, he passed in
front of Artois, went down to the waterside, stepped into a boat, and was rowed away into the gathering
shadows of night.
Artois sat very still for a time. Then he, too, got into a boat and was rowed away across the calm water to the
island.
He found Hermione sitting alone, without a lamp, on the terrace, meditating, perhaps, beneath the stars.
When she saw him she got up quickly, and a strained look of excitement came into her face.
"You have come!"
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"Yes. Youare you surprised? Did you wish to be alone?"
"No. Will you have some coffee?"
He shook his head.
"I dined at the Giuseppone. I had it there."
He glanced round.
"Are you looking for Vere? She is out on the cliff, I suppose. Shall we go to her?"
He was struck by her nervous uneasiness. And he thought of the words of the old Oriental, which had made
upon him a profound impression, perhaps because they had seemed spoken, not to the young Frenchman, but
in answer to unuttered thoughts of his own.
"Let us sit here for a minute," he said.
Hermione sat down again in silence. They talked for a little while about trifling things. And then Artois was
moved to tell her of the conversation he had that evening overheard, to repeat to her, almost word for word,
what the old Oriental had said. When he had finished Hermione was silent for a minute. Then she moved her
chair and said, in an unsteady voice:
"I don't think I should ever learn the lesson of the desert. Perhaps only those who belong to it can learn from
it."
"If it is so it is sadfor the others."
"Let us go and find Vere," she said.
"Are you sure she is on the cliff?" he asked, as they passed out by the front door.
"I think so. I am almost certain she is."
They went forward, and almost immediately heard a murmur of voices.
"Vere is with some one," said Artois.
"It must be Ruffo. It is Ruffo."
She stood still. Artois stood still beside her. The night was windless. Voices travelled through the dreaming
silence.
"Don't be afraid. Sing it to me."
Vere's voice was speaking. Then a boy's voice rang out in the song of Mergellina. The obedient voice was
soft and very young, though manly. And it sounded as if it sang only for one person, who was very near. Yet
it was impersonal. It asked nothing from, it told nothing to, that person. Simply, and very naturally, it just
gave to the night a very simple and a very natural song.
As Artois listened he felt as if he learned what he had not been able to learn that day at Mergellina. Strange as
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this thing wasif indeed it washe felt that it must be, that it was ordained to be, it and all that might
follow from it. He even felt almost that Hermione must already know it, have divined it, as if, therefore, any
effort to hide it from her must be fruitless, or even contemptible, as if indeed all effort to conceal truth of
whatever kind was contemptible.
The words of the Oriental had sunk deep into his soul.
When the song was over he turned resolutely away. He felt that those children should not be disturbed.
Hermione hesitated for a moment. Then she fell in with his caprice. At the house door he bade her good
bye. She scarcely answered. And he left her standing there alone in the still night.
CHAPTER XXIV
Her unrest was greater than ever, and the desire that consumed her remained ungratified, although Emile had
come to the island as if in obedience to her fierce mental summons. But she had not seen him even for a
moment with Vere. Why had she let him go? When would he come again? She might ask him to come for a
long day, or she might get Vere to ask him.
Vere must surely be longing to have a talk with her secret mentor, with her admirer and inspirer. And then
Hermione remembered how often she had encouraged Emile, how they had discussed his work together, how
he had claimed her sympathy in difficult moments, how by her enthusiasm she had even inspired himso at
least he had told her. And now he was fulfilling in her child's life an office akin to hers in his life.
The knowledge made her feel desolate, driven out. Yes, she felt as if this secret shared by child and friend
had expelled her from their lives. Was that unreasonable? She wished to be reasonable, to be calm.
Calm? She thought of the old Oriental, and of his theory of resignation. Surely it was not for her, that theory.
She was of different blood. She did not issue from the loins of the immutable East. And yet how much better
it was to be resigned, to sit enthroned above the chances of life, to have conquered fate by absolute
submission to its decrees!
Why was her heart so youthful in her middleaged body? Why did it still instinctively clamor for sympathy,
like a child's? Why could she be so easily and so cruelly wounded? It was weak. It was contemptible. She
hated herself. But she could only be the thing she at that moment hated.
Her surreptitious act of the afternoon seemed to have altered her irrevocably, to have twisted her out of
shapeyet she could not wish it undone, the knowledge gained by it withheld. She had needed to know what
Emile knew, and chance had led her to learn it, as she had learned it, with her eyes instead of from the lips of
her child.
She wondered what Vere would have said if she had been asked to reveal the secret. She would never know
that now. But there were other things that she felt she must know: why Vere had never told herand
something else.
Her act of that day had twisted her out of shape. She was awry, and she felt that she must continue to be as
she was, that her fearless honesty was no longer needed by her, could no longer rightly serve her in the new
circumstances that others had created for her. They had been secret. She could not be open. She was
constrained to watch, to concealto be awry, in fact.
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Yet she felt guilty even while she said this to herself, guilty and ashamed, and then doubtful. She doubted her
new capacity to be furtive. She could watch, but she did not know whether she could watch without showing
what she was doing. And Emile was terribly observant.
This thought, of his subtlety and her desire to conceal, made her suddenly realize their altered relations with a
vividness that frightened her. Where was the beautiful friendship that had been the comfort, the prop of her
bereaved life? It seemed already to have sunk away into the past. She wondered what was in store for her, if
there were new sorrows being forged for her in the cruel smithy of the great Ruler, sorrows that would hang
like chains about her till she could go no farther. The Egyptian had said: "What is to come will come, and
what is to go will go, at the time appointed." And Vere had said she felt as if perhaps there was a cross that
must be borne by some one on the island, by "one of us." Was she, Hermione, picked out to bear that cross?
Surely God mistook the measure of her strength. If He had He would soon know how feeble she was. When
Maurice had died, somehow she had endured it. She had staggered under the weight laid upon her, but she
had upheld it. But now she was much older, and she felt as if suffering, instead of strengthening, had
weakened her character, as if she had not much "fight" left in her.
"I don't believe I could endure another great sorrow," she said to herself. "I'm sure I couldn't."
Just then Vere came in to bid her goodnight.
"Goodnight, Vere," Hermione said.
She kissed the girl gently on the forehead, and the touch of the cool skin suddenly made her long to sob, and
to say many things. She took her lips away.
"Emile has been here," she said.
"Monsieur Emile!"
Vere looked round.
"But"
"He has gone."
"Gone! But I haven't seen him!"
Her voice seemed thoroughly surprised.
"He only stayed five minutes or so."
"Oh, Madre, I wish I had known!"
There was a touch of reproach in Vere's tone, and there was something so transparently natural, so
transparently innocent and girlish in her disappointment, that it told her mother something she was glad to
know. Not that she had doubted itbut she was glad to know.
"We came to look for you."
"Well, but I was only on the cliff, where I always go. I was there having a little talk with Ruffo."
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"I know."
"And you never called me, Madre!" Vere looked openly hurt. "Why didn't you?"
In truth, Hermione hardly knew. Surely it had been Emile who had led them away from the singing voice of
Ruffo.
"Ruffo was singing."
"A song about Mergellina. Did you hear it? I do like it and the way he sings it."
The annoyance had gone from her face at the thought of the song.
"And when he sings he looks so careless and gay. Did you listen?"
"Yes, for a moment, and then we went away. I think it was Emile who made us go. He didn't want to disturb
you, I think."
"I understand."
Vere's face softened. Again Hermione felt a creeping jealousy at her heart. Vere had surely been annoyed
with her, but now she knew that it was Emile who had not wished to disturb the teteatete on the cliff she
did not mind. She even looked as if she were almost touched. Could the mother be wrong where the mere
friend was right? She felt, when Vere spoke and her expression changed, the secret understanding from which
she was excluded.
"What is the matter, Madre?"
"The matter! Nothing. Why?"
"You looked so odd for a minute. I thought"
But she did not express what she had thought, for Hermione interrupted her by saying:
"We must get Emile to come for a long day. I wish you would write him a note tomorrow morning, Vere.
Write for me and ask him to come on Thursday. I have a lot to do in the morning. Will you save me the
trouble?" She tried to speak, carelessly. "I've a long letter to send to Evelyn Townley," she added.
"Of course, Madre. And I'll tell Monsieur Emile all I think of him for neglecting us as he has. Ah! But I
remember; he's been working."
"Yes, he's been working; and one must forgive everything to the worker, mustn't one?"
"To such a worker as Monsieur Emile is, yes. I do wish you'd let me read his books, Madre."
For a moment Hermione hesitated, looking at her child.
"Why are you so anxious to read them all of a sudden?" she asked.
"Well, I'm growing up andand I understand things I used not to understand."
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Her eyes fell for a moment before her mother's, and there was a silence, in which the mother felt some truth
withheld. Vere looked up again.
"And I want to appreciate Monsieur Emile properlyas you do, Madre. It seems almost ridiculous to know
him so well, and not to know him really at all."
"But you do know him really."
"I'm sure he puts most of his real self into his work."
Hermione remembered her conception of Emile Artois long ago, when she only knew him through two
books; that she had believed him to be cruel, that she had thought her nature must be in opposition to his.
Vere did not know that side of "Monsieur Emile."
"Vere, it is true you are growing up," she said, speaking rather slowly, as if to give herself time for
something. "Perhaps I was wrong the other day in what I said. You may read Emile's books if you like."
"Madre!"
Vere's face flushed with eager pleasure.
"Thank you, Madre!"
She went up to bed radiant.
When she had gone Hermione stood where she was. She had just done a thing that was mean, or at least she
had done a thing from a mean, a despicable motive. She knew it as the door shut behind her child, and she
was frightened of herself. Never before had she been governed by so contemptible a feeling as that which had
just prompted her. If Emile ever knew, or even suspected what it was, she felt that she could never look into
his face again with clear, unfaltering eyes. What madness was upon her? What change was working within
her? Repulsion came, and with it the desire to combat at once, strongly, the new, the hateful self which had
frightened her.
She hastened after Vere, and in a moment was knocking at the child's door.
"Who's there? Who is it?"
"Vere!" called the mother.
As she called she tried the door, and found it locked.
"Madre! It's you!"
"Yes. May I come in?"
"One tiny moment."
The voice within sounded surely a little startled and uneven, certainly not welcoming. There was a pause.
Hermione heard the rustling of paper, then a drawer shut sharply.
Vere was hiding away her poems!
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When Hermione understood that she felt the strong, good impulse suddenly shrivel within her, and a bitter
jealousy take its place. Vere came to the door and opened it.
"Oh, come in, Madre! What is it?" she asked.
In her bright eyes there was the look of one unexpectedly disturbed. Hermione glanced quickly at the
writingtable.
"Youyou weren't writing my note to Monsieur Emile?" she said.
She stepped into the room. She wished she could force Vere to tell her about the poems, but without asking.
She felt as if she could not continue in her present condition, excluded from Vere's confidence. Yet she knew
now that she could never plead for it.
"No, Madre. I can do it tomorrow."
Vere looked and sounded surprised, and the mother felt more than ever like an intruder. Yet something
dogged kept her there.
"Are you tired, Vere?" she asked.
"Not a bit."
"Then let us have a little talk."
"Of course."
Vere shut the door. Hermione knew by the way she shut it that she wanted to be alone, to go on with her
secret occupation. She came back slowly to her mother, who was sitting on a chair by the bedside. Hermione
took her hand, and Vere pushed up the edge of the mosquito curtain and sat down on the bed.
"About those books of Emile's" Hermione began.
"Oh, Madre, you're not going to But you've promised!"
"Yes."
"Then I may?"
"Why should you wish to read such books? They will probably make you sad, andand they may even make
you afraid of Emile."
"Afraid! Why?"
"I remember long ago, before I knew him, I had a very wrong conception of him, gained from his books."
"Oh, but I know him beforehand. That makes all the difference."
"A man like Emile has many sides."
"I think we all have, Madre. Don't you?"
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Vere looked straight at her mother. Hermione felt that a moment had come in which, perhaps, she could force
the telling of that truth which already she knew.
"I suppose so, Vere; but we need not surely keep any side hidden from those we love, those who are nearest
to us."
Vere looked a little doubtfuleven, for a moment, slightly confused.
"No?" she said.
She seemed to consider something. Then she added:
"But I think it depends. If something in us might give pain to any one we love, I think we ought to try to hide
that. I am sure we ought."
Hermione felt that each of them was thinking of the same thing, even speaking of it without mentioning it.
But whereas she knew that Vere was doing so, Vere could not know that she was. So Vere was at a
disadvantage. Vere's last words had opened the mother's eyes. What she had guessed was true. This secret of
the poems was kept from her because of her own attempt to create and its failure. Abruptly she wondered if
Vere and Emile had ever talked that failure over. At the mere thought of such a conversation her whole body
tingled. She got up from her chair.
"Well, goodnight, Vere," she said.
And she left the room, leaving her child amazed.
Vere did not understand why her mother had come, nor why, having come, she abruptly went away. There
was something the matter with her mother. She had felt that for some time. She was more conscious than ever
of it now. Around her mother there was an atmosphere of uneasiness in which she felt herself involved. And
she was vaguely conscious of the new distance between them, a distance daily growing wider. Now and then,
lately, she had felt almost uncomfortable with her mother, in the sittingroom when she was saying
goodnight, and just now when she sat on the bed. Youth is terribly quick to feel hostility, however subtle.
The thought that her mother could be hostile to her had never entered Vere's head. Nevertheless, the mother's
faint and creeping hostilityfor at times Hermione's feeling was really that, thought she would doubtless
have denied it even to herselfdisagreeably affected the child.
"What can be the matter with Madre?" she thought.
She went over to the writingtable, where she had hastily shut up her poems on hearing the knock at the door,
but she did not take them out again. Instead she sat down and wrote the note to Monsieur Emile. As she wrote
the sense of mystery, of uneasiness, departed from her, chased away, perhaps, by the memory of Monsieur
Emile's kindness to her and warm encouragement, by the thought of having a long talk with him again, of
showing him certain corrections and developments carried out by her since she had seen him. The sympathy
of the big man meant a great deal to her, more even than he was aware of. It lifted up her eager young heart.
It sent the blood coursing through her veins with a new and ardent strength. Hermione's enthusiasm had been
inherited by Vere, and with it something else that gave it a peculiar vitality, a power of lastingthe secret
consciousness of talent.
Now, as she wrote her letter, she forgot all her uneasiness, and her pen flew.
At last she sighed her name"Vere."
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She was just going to put the letter into its envelope when something struck her, and she paused. The she
added:
"P.S.Just now Madre gave me leave to read your books."
CHAPTER XXV
The words of the old Oriental lingered in the mind of Artois. He was by nature more fatalistic than Hermione,
and moreover he knew what she did not. Long ago he had striven against a fate. With the help of Gaspare he
had conquered itor so he had believed till now. But now he asked himself whether he had not only delayed
its coming. If his suspicion were well founded,and since his last visit to the island he felt as if it must
be,then surely all he had done with Gaspare would be in vain at the last.
If his suspicion were well founded, then certain things are ordained. They have to happen for some reason,
known only to the hidden Intelligence that fashions each man's character, that develops it in joy or grief, that
makes it glad with feasting, or forces it to feed upon the bread of tears.
Did Gaspare know? If the truth were what Artois suspected, and Gaspare did know it, what would Gaspare
do?
That was a problem which interested Artois intensely.
The Sicilian often said of a thing "E il Destino." Yet Artois believed that for his beloved Padrona he would
fight to the death. He, Artois, would leave this fight against destiny to the Sicilian. For him the Oriental's
philosophy; for him resignation to the inevitable, whatever it might be.
He said to himself that to do more than he had already done to ward off the assaults of truth would be
impious. Perhaps he ought never to have done anything. Perhaps it would have been far better to have let the
wave sweep over Hermione long ago. Perhaps even in that fight of his there had been secret selfishness, the
desire that she should not know how by his cry from Africa her happy life had been destroyed. And perhaps
he was to be punished some day for that.
He did not know. But he felt, after all these years, that if to that hermitage of the sea Fate had really found the
way he must let things take their course. And it seemed to him as if the old Oriental had been mysteriously
appointed to come near him just at that moment, to make him feel that this was so. The Oriental had been like
a messenger sent to him out of that East which he loved, which he had studied, but from which, perhaps, he
had not learned enough.
Vere's letter came. He read it with eagerness and pleasure till he came to the postscript. But that startled him.
He knew that Vere had never read his books. He thought her far too young to read them. Till lately he had
almost a contempt for those who write with one eye on "la jeune fille." Now he could conceive writing with a
new pleasure something that Vere might read. But those books of his! Why had Hermione suddenly given
that permission? He remembered Peppina. Vere must have told her mother of the scene with Peppina, and
how her eyes had been opened to certain truths of life, how she had passed from girlhood to womanhood
through that gate of knowledge. And Hermione must have thought that it was useless to strive to keep Vere
back.
But did he wish Vere to read all that he had written?
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On Thursday he went over to the island with mingled eagerness and reluctance. That little home in the sea,
washed by blue waters, rooted by blue skies, sunkissed and starkissed by day and night, drew and repelled
him. There was the graciousness of youth there, of youth and promise; but there was tragedy there, too, in the
heart of Hermione, and in Peppina, typified by the cross upon her cheek. And does not like draw like?
For a moment he saw the little island with a great cloud above it. But when he landed and met Vere he felt
the summer, and knew that the sky was clear.
Hermione was not on the island, Vere told him. She had left many apologies, and would be home for lunch.
She had had to go in to Naples to see the dentist. A tooth had troubled her in the night. She had gone by tram.
As Vere explained Artois had a moment of surprise, a moment of suspicioneven of vexation. But it passed
when Vere said:
"I'm afraid poor Madre suffered a great deal. She looked dreadful this morning, as if she hadn't slept all
night."
"Poveretta!" said Artois.
He looked earnestly at Vere. This was the first time they had met since the revelation of Peppina. What the
Marchesino had seen Artois saw more plainly, felt more strongly than the young Neapolitan had felt. But he
looked at Vere, too, in search of something else, thinking of Ruffo, trying to probe into the depth of human
mysteries, to find the secret spring that carried child to child.
"What do you want, Monsieur Emile?"
"I want to know how the work goes," he answered, smiling.
She flushed a little.
"And I want to tell you something," he added. "My talk with you roused me up. Vere, you set me working as
I have not worked for a long while."
A lively pleasure showed in her face.
"Is that really true? But then I must be careful, or you will never come to see us any more. You will always
be shut up in the hotel writing."
They mounted the cliff together and, without question or reply, as by a mutual instinct, turned towards the
seat that faced Ischia, clear today, yet romantic with the mystery of heat. When they had sat down Vere
added:
"And besides, of course, I know that it is Madre who encourages you when you are depressed about your
work. I have heard you say so often."
"Your mother has done a great deal for me," said Artois, seriously "far more than she will ever know."
There was a sound of deep, surely of eternal feeling in his voice, which suddenly touched the girl to the
quick.
"I like to hear you say thatlike that," she said, softly. "I think Madre does a great deal for us all."
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If Hermione could have heard them her torn heart might perhaps have ceased to bleed. It had been difficult
for her to do what she had done to leave the island that morning. She had done it to discipline her nature,
as Passionists scourge themselves by night before the altar. She had left Emile alone with Vere simply
because she hated to do it.
The rising up of jealousy in her heart had frightened her. All night she had lain awake feeling this new and
terrible emanation from her soul, conscious of this monster that lifted up its head and thrust it forth out of the
darkness.
But one merit she had. She was frank with herself. She named the monster before she strove to fight it, to
beat it back into the darkness from which it was emerging.
She was jealous, doubly jealous. The monopolizing instinct of strong natured and deeply affectionate
women was fiercely alive in her. Always, no doubt, she had had it. Long ago, when first she was in Sicily
alone, she had dreamed of a love in the Southfar away from the world. When she married she had carried
her Mercury to the exquisite isolation of Monte Amato. And when that love was taken from her, and her child
came and was at the age of blossom, she had brought her child to this isle, this hermitage of the sea. Emile,
too, her one great friend, she had never wished to share him. She had never cared much to meet him in
society. Her instinct was to have him to herself, to be with him alone in unfrequented places. She was greedy
or she was timid. Which was it? Perhaps she lacked selfconfidence, belief in her own attractive power. Life
in the world is a fight. Woman fight for their lovers, fight for their friends, with other women: those many
women who are born thieves, who are never happy unless they are taking from their sisters the possessions
those sisters care for most. Hermione could never have fought with other women for the love or the
friendship of a man. Her instinct, perhaps, was to carry her treasure out of all danger into the wilderness.
Two treasures she hadVere her child, Emile her friend. And now she was jealous of each with the other.
And the enormous difference in their ages made her jealousy seem the more degrading. Nevertheless, she
could not feel that it was unnatural. By a mutual act they had excluded her from their lives, had withdrawn
from her their confidence while giving it to each other. And their reason for doing thisshe was sure of it
nowwas her own failure to do something in the world of art.
She was jealous of Vere because of that confidence given to Emile, and of Emile because of his secret advice
and help to Vereadvice and help which he had not given to the mother, because he had plainly seen that to
do so would be useless.
And when she remembered this Hermione was jealous, too, of the talent Vere must have, a talent she had
longed for, but which had been denied to her. For even if Emile . . . and then again came the most hateful
suspicion of allbut Emile could not lie about the things of art.
Had they spoken together of her failure? Again and again she asked herself the question. They must have
spoken. They had spoken. She could almost hear their wordswords of regret or of pity. "We must not hurt
her. We must keep it from her. We must temper the wind to the shorn lamb." The elderly man and the child
had read together the tragedy of her failure. To the extremes of life, youth and age, she had appeared an
object of pity.
And then she thought of her dead husband's reverence of her intellect, boyish admiration of her mental gifts;
and an agony of longing for his love swept over her again, and she felt that he was the only person who had
been able to love her really, and that now he was gone there was no one.
At that moment she forgot Gaspare. Her sense of being abandoned, and of being humiliated, swept out many
things from her memory. Only Maurice had loved her really. Only he had set her on high, where even the
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humblest woman longs to be set by some one. Only he had thought her better, braver, more worshipful, more
loveable, than any other woman. Such love, without bringing conceit to the creature loved, gives power,
creates much of what it believes in. The lack of any such love seems to withdraw the little power that there is.
Hermione, feeling in this humiliation of the imagination that she was less than nothing, clung desperately to
the memory of him who had thought her much. The dividing years were gone. With a strange, a beautiful and
terrible freshness, the days of her love came back. She saw Maurice's eyes looking at her with that simple,
almost reverent admiration which she had smiled at and adored.
And she gripped her memory. She clung to it feverishly as she had never clung to it before. She told herself
that she would live in it as in a house of shelter. For there was the desolate wind outside.
And she thought much of Ruffo, and with a strange desireto be with him, to search for the look she loved
in him. For a moment with him she had seemed to see her Mercury in the flesh. She must watch for his
return.
When the morning came she began her fight. She made her excuse, and left the morning free for Emile to be
with Vere.
Two dreary hours she spent in Naples. The buzzing city affected her like a nightmare. Coming back through
Mergellina, she eagerly looked for Ruffo. But she did not see him. Nor had she seen him in the early
morning, when she passed by the harbor where the yachts were lying in the sun.
Gaspare came with the boat to take her over from the nearest village to the island.
"Don Emilio has come?" she asked him, as she stepped into the boat.
"Si, Signora. He has been on the island a long time."
Gaspare sat down facing his Padrona and took the oars. As he rowed the boat out past the ruined "Palace of
the Spirits" he looked at Hermione, and it seemed to her that his eyes pitied her.
Could Gaspare see what she was feeling, her humiliation, her secret jealousy? She felt as if she were made of
glass. But she returned his gaze almost sternly, and said:
"What's the matter, Gaspare? Why do you look at me like that?"
"Signora!"
He seemed startled, and slightly reddened, then looked hurt and almost sulky.
"May I not look at you, Signora?" he asked, rather defiantly. "Have I the evil eye?"
"Nono, Gaspare! Onlyonly you looked at me as if something were the matter. Do I look ill?"
She asked the question with a forced lightness, with a smile. He answered, bluntly:
"Si, Signora. You look very ill."
She put up her hand to her face instinctively, as if to feel whether his words were true.
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"But I'm perfectly well," she said.
"You look very ill, Signora," he returned.
"I'm a little bit tired, perhaps."
He said no more, and rowed steadily on for a while. But presently she found him looking gravely at her again.
"Signora," he began, "the Signorina loves the island."
"Yes, Gaspare."
"Do you love it?"
The question startled her. Had he read her thoughts in the last days?
"Don't you think I love it?" she asked.
"You go away from it very often, Signora."
"But I must occasionally go in to Naples!" she protested.
"Si, Signora."
"Well, but mustn't I?"
"Non lo so, Signora. Perhaps we have been here long enough. Perhaps we had better go away from here."
He spoke slowly, and with something less than his usual firmness, as if in his mind there was uncertainty,
some indecision or some conflict of desires.
"Do you want to go away?" she said.
"It is not for me to want, Signora."
"I don't think the Signorina would like to go, Gaspare. She hates the idea of leaving the island."
"The Signorina is not every one," he returned.
Habitually blunt as Gaspare was, Hermione had never before heard him speak of Vere like this, not with the
least impertinence, but with a certain roughness. Today it did not hurt her. Nor, indeed, could it ever have
hurt her, coming from some one so proven as Gaspare. But today it even warmed her, for it made her feel
that some one was thinking exclusively of herwas putting her first. She longed for some expression of
affection from some one. She felt that she was starving for it. And this feeling made her say:
"How do you mean, Gaspare?"
"Signora, it is for you to say whether we shall go away or stay here."
"Youyou put me first, Gaspare?"
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She was ashamed of herself for saying it. But she had to say it.
"First, Signora? Of course you are first."
He looked genuinely surprised.
"Are you not the Padrona?" he added. "It is for you to command."
"Yes. But I don't quite mean that."
She stopped. But she had to go on:
"I mean, would you rather do what I wanted than what any one else wanted?"
"Si, Signoramuch rather."
There was more in his voice than in his words.
"Thank you, Gaspare," she said.
"Signora," he said, "if you think we had better leave the island, let us leave it. Let us go away."
"Well, but I have never said I wished to go. I am" she paused. "I have been very contented to be here."
"Va bene, Signora."
When they reached the island Hermione felt nervousalmost as if she were to meet strangers who were
critical, who would appraise her and be ready to despise her. She told herself that she was mad to feel like
that; but when she thought of Emile and Vere talking of her failureof their secret combined action to keep
from her the knowledge of the effort of the childthat seemed just then to her a successful rivalry
concealedshe could not dismiss the feeling.
She dreaded to meet Emile and Vere.
"I wonder where they are," she said, as she got out. "Perhaps they are on the cliff, or out in the little boat. I'll
go into the house."
"Signora, I will go to the seat and see if they are there."
"Oh, don't bother" she began.
But he ran off, springing up the steps with a strong agility, like that of a boy.
She hurried after him and went into the house. After what he had said in the boat she wished to look at herself
in the glass, to see if there was anything strange or painful, anything that might rouse surprise, in her
appearance. She gained her bedroom, and went at once to the mirror.
Hermione was not by nature at all a selfconscious woman. She knew that she was plain, and had sometimes,
very simply, regretted it. But she did not generally think about her appearance, and very seldom now
wondered what others were thinking of it. When Maurice had been with her she had often indeed secretly
compared her ugliness with his beauty. But a great love breeds many regrets as well as many joys. And that
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was long ago. It was years since she had looked at herself in the glass with any keen feminine anxiety, any
tremor of fear, or any cruel selfcriticism. But now she stood for a long time before the glass, quite still,
looking at her reflection with wide, almost with staring, eyes.
It was true what Gaspare said. She saw that she was looking ill, very different from her usual strong self.
There was not a thread of white in her thick hair, and this fact, combined with the eagerness of her
expression, the strong vivacity and intelligence that normally shone in her eyes, deceived many people as to
her age. But today her face was strained, haggard, and feverish. Under the brown tint that the sunrays had
given to her complexion there seemed to lurk a sickly white, which was most markedly suggested at the
corner of the mouth. The cheekbones seemed unusually prominent. And the eyes held surely a depth of
uneasiness, of
Hermione approached her face to the mirror till it almost touched the glass. The reflected eyes drew hers. She
gazed into them with a scrutiny into which she seemed to be pouring her whole force, both of soul and body.
She was trying to look at her nature, to see its shape, its color, its expression, so that she might judge of what
it was capablewhether for good or evil. The eyes into which she looked both helped her and frustrated her.
They told her muchtoo much. And yet they baffled her. When she would know all, they seemed to
substitute themselves for that which she saw through them, and she found herself noticing their size, their
prominence, the exact shade of their brown hue. And the quick human creature behind them was hidden from
her.
But Gaspare was right. She did look ill. Emile would notice it directly.
She washed her face with cold water, then dried it almost cruelly with a rough towel. Having done this, she
did not look again into the glass, but went at once downstairs. As she came into the drawingroom she
heard voices in the garden. She stood still and listened. They were the voices of Vere and Emile talking
tirelessly. She could not hear what they said. Had she been able to hear it she would not have listened. She
could only hear the sound made by their voices, that noise by which human beings strive to explain, or to
conceal, what they really are. They were talking seriously. She heard no sounds of laughter. Vere was saying
most. It seemed to Hermione that Vere never talked so much and so eagerly to her, with such a ceaseless
vivacity. And there was surely an intimate sound in her voice, a sound of being warmly at ease, as if she
spoke in an atmosphere of ardent sympathy.
Again the jealousy came in Hermione, acute, fierce, and travelling like a needle being moved steadily,
point downwards, through a network of quivering nerves.
"Vere!" she called out. "Vere! Emile!"
Was her voice odd, startling?
They did not hear her. Emile was speaking now. She heard the deep, booming sound of his powerful voice,
that seemed expressive of strength and will.
"Vere! Emile!"
As she called again she went towards the window. She felt passionately excited. The excitement had come
suddenly to her when they had not heard her first call.
"Emile! Emile!" she repeated. "Emile!"
"Madre!"
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"Hermione!"
Both voices sounded startled.
"What's the matter?"
Vere appeared at the window, looking frightened.
"Hermione, what is it?"
Emile was there beside her. And he, too, looked anxious, almost alarmed.
"I only wanted to let you know I had come back," said Hermione, crushing down her excitement and forcing
herself to smile.
"But why did you call like that?"
Vere spoke.
"Like what? What do you mean, figlia mia?"
"It sounded"
She stopped and looked at Artois.
"It frightened me. And you, Monsieur Emile?"
"I, too, was afraid for a moment that something unpleasant had happened."
"You nervous people! Isn't it lunchtime?"
As they looked at her she felt they had been talking about her, about her failure. And she felt, too, as if they
must be able to see in her eyes that she knew the secret Vere had wished to keep from her and thought she did
not know. Emile had given her a glance of intense scrutiny, and the eyes of her child still questioned her with
a sort of bright and searching eagerness.
"You make me feel as if I were with detectives," she said, laughing, but uneasily. "There's really nothing the
matter."
"And your tooth, Madre? Is it better?"
"Yes, quite well. I am perfectly well. Let us go in."
Hermione had said to herself that if she could see Emile and Vere together, without any third person, she
would know something that she felt she must know. When she was with them she meant to be a watcher. And
now her whole being was strung to attention. But it seemed to her that for some reason they, too, were on the
alert, and so were not quite natural. And she could not be sure of certain things unless the atmosphere was
normal. So she said to herself now, though before she had had the inimitable confidence of woman in certain
detective instincts claimed by the whole sex. At one moment the thing she feared and her whole being
recoiled from the thought of it with a shaking disgustthe thing she feared seemed to her fact. Then
something occurred to make her distrust herself. And she felt that betraying imagination of hers at work,
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obscuring all issues, tricking her, punishing her.
And when the meal was over she did not know at all. And she felt as if she had perhaps been deliberately
bafflednot, of course, by Vere, of whose attitude she was not, and never had been, doubtful, but by Emile.
When they got up from the table Vere said:
"I'm going to take the siesta."
"You look remarkably wide awake, Vere," Artois said, smiling.
"But I'm going to, because I've had you all to myself the whole morning. Now it's Madre's turn. Isn't it,
Madre?"
The girl's remark showed her sense of their complete triple intimacy, but it emphasized to Hermione her own
cruel sense of being in the wilderness. And she even felt vexed that it should be supposed she wanted Emile's
company. Nevertheless, she restrained herself from making any disclaimer. Vere went upstairs, and she and
Artois went out and sat down under the trellis. But with the removal of Vere a protection and safetyvalve
seemed to be removed, and neither Hermione nor Emile could for a moment continue the conversation. Again
a sense of humiliation, of being mindless, nothing in the eyes of Artois came to Hermione, diminishing all
her powers. She was never a conceited, but she had often been a selfreliant woman. Now she felt a
humbleness such as she knew no one should ever feela humbleness that was contemptible, that felt itself
incapable, unworthy of notice. She tried to resist it, but when she thought of this man, her friend, talking over
her failure with her child, in whom he must surely believe, she could not. She felt "Vere can talk to Emile
better than I can. She interests him more than I." And then her years seemed to gather round her and whip
her. She shrank beneath the thongs of age, which had not even brought to her those gifts of the mind with
which it often partially replaces the bodily gifts and graces it is so eager to remove.
"Hermione."
"Yes, Emile."
She turned slowly in her chair, forcing herself to face him.
"Are you sure you are not feeling ill?"
"Quite sure. Did you have a pleasant morning with Vere?"
"Yes. Oh"he sat forward in his chair"she told me something that rather surprised methat you had told
her she might read my books."
"Well?"
Hermione's voice was rather hard.
"Well, I never meant them for 'la jeune fille.' "
"You consider Vere"
"Is she not?"
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She felt he was condemning her secretly for her permission to Vere. What would he think if he knew her
underreason for giving it?
"You don't wish Vere to read your books, then?"
"No. And I ventured to tell her so."
Hermione felt hot.
"What did she say?"
"She said she would not read them."
"Oh."
She looked up and met his eyes, and was sure she read condemnation in them.
"After I had told Vere" she began.
She was about to defend herself, to tell him how she had gone to Vere's room intending to withdraw the
permission given; but suddenly she realized clearly that she, a mother, was being secretly taken to task by a
man for her conduct to her child.
That was intolerable.
And Vere had yielded to Emile's prohibition, though she had eagerly resisted her mother's attempt to retreat
from the promise made. That was more intolerable.
She sat without saying anything. Her knees were trembling under her thin summer gown. Artois felt
something of her agitation, perhaps, for he said, with a kind of hesitating diffidence, very rare in him:
"Of course, my friend, I would not interfere between you and Vere, only, as I was concerned, as they were
my own writings that were in question" He broke off. "You won't misunderstand my motives?" he
concluded.
"Oh no."
He was more conscious that she was feeling something acutely.
"I feel that I perfectly understand why you gave the permission at this particular moment," he continued,
anxious to excuse her to herself and to himself.
"Why?" Hermione said, sharply.
"Wasn't it because of Peppina?"
"Peppina?"
"Yes; didn't you"
He looked into her face and saw at once that he had made a false step, that Vere had not told her mother of
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Peppina's outburst.
"Didn't Iwhat?"
He still looked at her.
"What?" she repeated. "What has Peppina to do with it?"
"Nothing. Onlydon't you remember what you said to me about not keeping Vere in cottonwool?"
She knew that he was deceiving her. A hopeless, desperate feeling of being in the dark rushed over her. What
was friendship without sincerity? Nothingless than nothing. She felt as if her whole body stiffened with a
proud reserve to meet the reserve with which he treated her. And she felt as if her friend of years, the friend
whose life she had perhaps saved in Africa, had turned in that moment into a stranger, oreven into an
enemy. For this furtive withdrawal from their beautiful and open intimacy was like an act of hostility. She
was almost dazed for an instant. Then her brain worked with feverish activity. What had Emile meant? Her
permission to Vere was connected in his mind with Peppina. He must know something about Vere and
Peppina that she did not know. She looked at him, and her face, usually so sensitive, so receptive, so warmly
benign when it was turned to his, was hard and cold.
"Emile," she said, "what was it you meant about Peppina? I think I have a right to know. I brought her into
the house. Why should Peppina have anything to do with my giving Vere permission to read your books?"
Artois' instinct was not to tell what Vere had not told, and therefore had not wished to be known. Yet he
hated to shuffle with Hermione. He chose a middle course.
"My friend," he said quietly, but with determination, "I made a mistake. I was following foolishly a wrong
track. Let us say no more about it. But do not be angry with me about the books. I think my motive in
speaking as I did to Vere was partly a selfish one. It is not only that I wish Vere to be as she is for as long a
time as possible, but that Iwell, don't think me a great coward if I say that I almost dread her discovery of
all the cruel knowledge that is mine, and that I have, perhaps wrongly, brought to the attention of the world."
Hermione was amazed.
"You regret having written your books!" she said.
"I don't knowI don't know. But I think the happy confidence, the sweet respect of youth, makes one regret
a thousand things. Don't you, Hermione? Don't you think youth is often the most terrible tutor age can have?"
She thought of Ruffo singing, "Oh, dolce luna bianca de l' Estate" and suddenly she felt that she could not
stay any longer with Artois just then. She got up.
"I don't feel very well," she said.
Artois sprang up and came towards her with a face full of concern. But she drew back.
"I didn't sleep last nightand then going into Naples I'll go to my room and lie down. I'll keep quiet. Vere
will look after you. I'll be down at tea."
She went away before he could say or do anything. For some time he was alone. Then Vere came. Hermione
had not told her of the episode, and she had only come because she thought the pretended siesta had lasted
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long enough. When Artois told her about her mother, she wanted to run away at once, and see what was the
mattersee if she could do something. But Artois stopped her.
"I should leave her to rest," he said. "II feel sure she wishes to be alone."
Vere was looking at him while he spoke, and her face caught the gravity of his, reflected it for a moment,
then showed an uneasiness that deepened into fear. She laid her hand on his arm.
"Monsieur Emile, what is the matter with Madre?"
"Only a headache, I fancy. She did not sleep last night, and"
"No, no, the real matter, Monsieur Emile."
"What do you mean, Vere?"
The girl looked excited. Her own words had revealed to her a feeling of which till then she had only been
vaguely aware.
"Madre has seemed different lately," she said"been different. I am sure she has. What is it?"
As the girl spoke, and looked keenly at him with her bright, searching eyes, a thought came, like a flash, upon
Artoisa thought that almost frightened him. He could not tell it to Vere, and almost immediately he thrust
it away from his mind. But Vere had seen that something had come to him.
"You know what it is!" she said.
"I don't know."
"Monsieur Emile!"
Her voice was full of reproach.
"Vere, I am telling you the truth," he said, earnestly. "If there is anything seriously troubling your mother I do
not know what it is. She has sorrows, of course. You know that."
"This is something fresh," the girl said. She thrust forward her little chin decisively. "This is something new."
"It cannot be that," Artois said to himself. "It cannot be that."
To Vere he said: "Sleeplessness is terribly distressing."
"Wellbut only one night."
"Perhaps there have been others."
In reply Vere said:
"Monsieur Emile, you remember this morning, when we were in the garden, and mother called?"
"Yes."
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"Do you know, the way she called made me feel frightened?"
"We were so busy talking that the sudden sound startled us."
"No, it wasn't that."
"But when we came your mother was smilingshe was perfectly well. You let your imagination"
"No, Monsieur Emile, indeed I don't."
He did not try any more to remove her impression. He saw that to do so would be quite useless.
"I should like to speak to Gaspare," Vere said, after a moment's thought.
"Gaspare! Why?"
"Perhaps you will laugh at me! But I often think Gaspare understands Madre better than any of us, Monsieur
Emile."
"Gaspare has been with your mother a very long time."
"Yes, and in his way he is very clever. Haven't you noticed it?"
Artois did not answer this. But he said:
"Follow your instincts, Vere. I don't think they will often lead you wrong."
At teatime Hermione came from her bedroom looking calm and smiling. There was something deliberate
about her serenity, and her eyes were tired, but she said the little rest had done her good. Vere instinctively
felt that her mother did not wish to be observed, or to have any fuss made about her condition, and Artois
took Vere's cue. When tea was over, Artois said:
"Well, I suppose I ought to be going."
"Oh no," Hermione said. "We asked you for a long day. That means dinner."
The cordiality in her voice sounded determined, and therefore formal. Artois felt chilled. For a moment he
looked at her doubtfully.
"Well, but, Hermione, you aren't feeling very well."
"I am much better now. Do stay. I shall rest, and Vere will take care of you."
It struck him for the first time that she was becoming very ready to substitute Vere for herself as his
companion. He wondered if he had really offended or hurt her in any way. He even wondered for a moment
whether she was not pleased at his spending the summer in Naples whether, for some reason, she had
wished, and still wished, to be alone with Vere.
"Perhaps Vere will get sick of looking after anan old man," he said.
"You are not an old man, Monsieur Emile. Don't tout!"
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"Tout?"
"Yes, for compliments about your youth. You meant me, you meant us both, to say how young you are."
She spoke gayly, laughingly, but he felt she was cleverly and secretly trying to smooth things out, to cover up
the difficulty that had intruded itself into their generally natural and simple relations.
"And your mother says nothing," said Artois, trying to fall in with her desire, and to restore their wonted
liveliness. "Don't you look upon me as almost a boy, Hermione?"
"I think sometimes you seem wonderfully young," she said.
Her voice suggested that she wished to please him, but also that she meant what she said. Yet Artois had
never felt his age more acutely than when she finished speaking.
"I am a poor companion for Vere," he said, almost bitterly. "She ought to be with friends of her own age."
"You mean that I am a poor companion for you, Monsieur Emile. I often feel how good you are to put up
with me in the way you do."
The gayety had gone from her now, and she spoke with an earnestness that seemed to him wonderfully
gracious. He looked at her, and his eyes thanked her gently.
"Take Emile out in the boat, Vere," Hermione said, "while I read a book till dinner time."
At that moment she longed for them to be gone. Vere looked at her mother, then said:
"Come along, Monsieur Emile. I'm sorry for you, but Madre wants rest."
She led the way out of the room.
Hermione was on the sofa. Before he followed Vere, Artois went up to her and said:
"You are sure you won't come out with us, my friend? Perhaps the air on the sea would do you good."
"No, thank you, Emile; I really think I had better stay quietly here."
"Very well."
He hesitated for a moment, then he went out and left her. But she had seen a question in his eyes.
When he had gone, Hermione took up a book, and read for a little while, always listening for the sound of
oars. She was not sure Vere and Emile would go out in the boat, but she thought they would. If they came out
to the open sea beyond the island it was possible that she might hear them. Presently, as she did not hear
them, she got up. She wanted to satisfy herself that they were at sea. Going to the window she looked out.
But she saw no boat, only the great plain of the radiant waters. They made her feel alonewhy, she did not
know then. But it was really something of the same feeling which had come to her long ago during her first
visit to Sicily. In the contemplation of beauty she knew the need of love, knew it with an intimacy that was
cruel.
She came away from the window and went to the terrace. From there she could not see the boat. Finally she
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went to the small pavilion that overlooked the Saint's Pool. Leaning over the parapet, she perceived the little
white boat just starting around the cliff towards the Grotto of Virgil. Vere was rowing. Hermione saw her thin
figure, so impregnated with the narrow charm of youth, bending backward and forward to the oars, Emile's
big form leaning against the cushions as if at ease. From the dripping oars came twinkling lines of light, that
rayed out and spread like the opened sticks of a fan upon the sea. Hugging the shore, the boat slipped out of
sight.
"Suppose they had gone forevergone out of my life!"
Hermione said that to herself. She fancied she still could see the faint commotion in the water that told where
the boat had passed. Now it was turning into the Grotto of Virgil. She felt sure of that. It was entering the
shadows where she had shown to Emile not long ago the very depths of her heart.
How could she have done that? She grew hot as she thought of it. In her new and bitter reserve she hated to
think of his possession that could never be taken from him, the knowledge of her hidden despair, her hidden
need of love. And by that sensation of hatred of his knowledge she measured the gulf between them. When
had come the very first narrow fissure she scarcely knew. But she knew how today the gulf had widened.
The permission of hers to Vere to read Emile's books! And Emile's authority governing her child, substituted
surely for hers! The gulf had been made wider by her learning that episode; and the fact that secretly she felt
her permission ought never to have been given caused her the more bitterness. Vere had yielded to Emile
because he had been in the right. Instinctively her child had known which of the two with whom she had to
deal was swayed by an evil mood, and which was thinking rightly, only for her.
Could Vere see into her mother's heart?
Hermione had a moment of panic. Then she laughed at her folly.
And she thought of Peppina, of that other secret which certainly existed, but which she had never suspected
till that day.
The boat was gone, and she knew where. She went back into the house and rang the bell. Giulia came.
"Oh, Giulia," Hermione said, "will you please ask Peppina to come to my sittingroom. I want to speak to her
for a moment."
"Si, Signora."
Giulia looked at her Padrona, then added:
"Signora, I am sure I was right. I am sure that girl has the evil eye."
"Giulia, what nonsense! I have told you often that such ideas are silly. Peppina has no power to do us harm.
Poor girl, we ought to pity her."
Giulia's fat face was very grave and quite unconvinced.
"Signora, since she is here the island is not the same. The Signorina is not the same, you are not the same, the
French Signore is not the same. Even Gaspare is different. One cannot speak with him now. Trouble is with
us all, Signora."
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Hermione shook her head impatiently. But when Giulia was gone she thought of her words about Gaspare.
Words, even the simplest, spoken just before some great moment of a life, some high triumph, or deep
catastrophe, stick with resolution in the memory. Lucrezia had once said of Gaspare on the terrace before the
Casa del Prete: "One cannot speak with him today." That was on the evening of the night on which
Maurice's dead body was found. Often since then Hermione had thought that Gaspare had seemed to have a
prevision of the disaster that was approaching.
And now Giulia said of him: "One cannot speak with him now."
The same words. Was Gaspare a stormy petrel?
There came a knock at the door of the sittingroom, to which Hermione had gone to wait for the coming of
Peppina.
"Come in."
The door opened and the disfigured girl entered, looking anxious.
"Come in, Peppina. It's all right. I only want to speak to you for a moment."
Hermione spoke kindly, but Peppina still looked nervous.
"Si, Signora," she murmured.
And she remained standing near the door, looking down.
"Peppina," Hermione said, "I'm going to ask you something, and I want you to tell me the truth without being
afraid."
"Si, Signora."
"You remember, when I took you, I told you not to say anything to my daughter, the Signorina, about your
past life, your aunt, andand all you had gone through. Have you said anything?"
Peppina looked more frightened.
"Signora," she began. "Madonna! It was not my fault, it was not my fault!"
She raised her voice, and began to gesticulate.
"Hush, Peppina. Now don't be afraid of me."
"You are my preserver, Signora! My saint has forgotten me, but you"
"I will not leave you to the streets. You must trust me. And now tell mequietlywhat have you told the
Signorina?"
And presently Peppina was induced to be truthful, and Hermione knew of the outburst in the night, and that
"the foreign Signore" had known of it from the moment of its happening.
"The Signorina was so kind, Signora, that I forgot. I told her all!I told her allI told her"
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Once Peppina had begun to be truthful she could not stop. She recalled or seemed tothe very words she
had spoken to Vere, all the details of her narration.
"And the foreign Signore? Was he there, too?" Hermione asked, at the end.
"No, Signora. He went away. The Signorina told him to go away and leave us."
Hermione dismissed Peppina quietly.
"Please don't say anything about this conversation, Peppina," she said, as the agitated girl prepared to go.
"Try to obey me this time, will you?"
She spoke very kindly but very firmly.
"May the Madonna take out my tongue if I speak, Signora!" Peppina raised her hand.
As she was going out Hermione stared at the cross upon her cheek.
CHAPTER XXVI
Artois stayed to dine. The falling of night deepened Hermione's impression of the gulf which was now
between them, and which she was sure he knew of. When darkness comes to intimacy it seems to make that
intimacy more perfect. Now surely it caused reserve, restraint, to be more complete. The two secrets which
Hermione now knew, but which were still cherished as secrets by Vere and Artois, stood up between the
mother and her child and friend, inexorably dividing them.
Hermione was strung up to a sort of nervous strength that was full of determination. She had herself in hand,
like a woman of the world who faces society with the resolution to deceive it. While Vere and Artois had
been out in the boat she had schooled herself. She felt more competent to be the watcher of events. She even
felt calmer, for knowledge increased almost always brings an undercurrent of increased tranquility, because
of the sense of greater power that it produces in the mind. She looked better. She talked more easily.
When dinner was over they went as usual to the garden, and when they were there Hermione referred to the
projected meeting with the Marchesino.
"I made a promise," she said. "I must keep it."
"Of course," said Artois. "But it seems to me that I am always being entertained, and that I am
inhospitableI do nothing in return. I have a proposal to make. Monday will be the sixteenth of July, the
festa of the Madonna del CarmineSanta Maria del Carmine. It is one of the prettiest of the year, they tell
me. Why should not you and Vere come to dine at the Hotel, or in the Galleria, with me? I will ask Panacci to
join us, and we will all go on afterwards to see the illuminations, and the fireworks, and the sending up of the
fire balloons. What do you say?"
"Would you like it, Vere?"
"Immensely, Madre."
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She spoke quietly, but she looked pleased at the idea.
"Won't the crowd be very bad, though?" asked Hermione.
"I'll get tickets for the enclosure in the Piazza. We shall have seats there. And you can bring Gaspare, if you
like. Then you will have three cavaliers."
"Yes, I should like Gaspare to come," said Hermione.
There was a sound of warmth in her hitherto rather cold voice when she said that.
"How you rely on Gaspare!" Artois said, almost as if with a momentary touch of vexation.
"Indeed I do," Hermione answered.
Their eyes met, surely almost with hostility.
"Madre knows how Gaspare adores her," said Vere, gently. "If there were any danger he'd never hesitate.
He'd save Madre if he left every other human being in the world to perish miserablyincluding me."
"Vere!"
"You know quite well he would, Madre."
They talked a little more. Presently Vere seemed to be feeling restless. Artois noticed it, and watched her.
Once or twice she got up, without apparent reason. She pulled at the branches of the fig trees. She gathered
a flower. She moved away, and leaned upon the wall. Finally, when her mother and Artois had fallen into
conversation about some new book, she slipped very quietly away.
Hermione and Artois continued their conversation, though without much animation. At length, however,
some remark of Hermione led Artois to speak of the book he was writing. Very often and very openly in the
days gone by she had discussed with him his work. Now, feeling the barrier between them, he fancied that
perhaps it might be removed more easily by such another discussion. And this notion of his was not any proof
of want of subtlety on his part. Without knowing why, Hermione felt a lack of selfconfidence, a distressing,
an almost unnatural humbleness today. He partially divined the feeling. Possibly it sprang from their
difference of opinion on the propriety of Vere's reading his books. He thought it might be so. And he wanted
to oust Hermione gently from her low stool and to show her himself seated there. Filled with this idea, he
began to ask her advice about the task upon which he was engaged. He explained the progress he had made
during the days when he was absent from the island and shut perpetually in his room. She listened in perfect
silence.
They were sitting near each other, but not close together, for Vere had been between them. It was dark under
the figtrees. They could see each other's faces, but not quite clearly. There was a small breeze which made
the trees move, and the leaves rustled faintly now and then, making a tiny noise which joined the furtive noise
of the sea, not far below them.
Artois talked on. As his thoughts became more concentrated upon the book he grew warmer. Having always
had Hermione's eager, even enthusiastic sympathy and encouragement in his work, he believed himself to
have them now. And in his manner, in his tone, even sometimes in his choice of words, he plainly showed
that he assumed them. But presently, glancing across at Hermione, he was surprised by the expression on her
face. It seemed to him as if a face of stone had suddenly looked bitterly satirical. He was so astonished that
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the words stopped upon his lips.
"Go on, Emile," she said, "I am listening."
The expression which had startled him was gone. Had it ever been? Perhaps he had been deceived by the
darkness. Perhaps the moving leaves had thrown their little shadows across her features. He said to himself
that it must be sothat his friend, Hermione, could never have looked like that. Yet he was chilled. And he
remembered her passing by in the tram at Posilipo, and how he had stood for a moment and watched her, and
seen upon her face a furtive look that he had never seen there before, and that had seemed to contradict her
whole nature as he knew it.
Did he know it?
Never before had he asked himself this question. He asked it now. Was there living in Hermione some one
whom he did not know, with whom he had had no dealings, had exchanged no thoughts, had spoken no
words?
"Go on, Emile," she said again.
But he did not. For once his brain was clouded, and he felt confused. He had completely lost the thread of his
thoughts.
"I can't," he said, abruptly.
"Why not?"
"I've forgotten. I've not thoroughly worked the thing out. Another time. Besidesbesides, I'm sure I bore you
with my eternal talk about my work. You've been such a kind, such a sympathetic friend and encourager
that"
He broke off, thinking of that face. Was it possible that through all these years Hermione had been playing a
part with him, had been pretending to admire his talent, to care for what he was doing, when really she had
been bored by it? Had the whole thing been a weariness to her, endured perhaps because she liked him as a
man? The thought cut him to the very quick, seared his selfrespect, struck a blow at his pride which made it
quiver, and struck surely also a blow at something else.
His life during all these yearswhat would it have been without Hermione's friendship? Was he to learn that
now?
He looked at her. Now her face was almost as usual, only less animated than he had seen it.
"Your work could never bore me. You know it," she said.
The real Hermione sounded in her voice when she said that, for the eternal woman deep down in her had
heard the sound almost of helplessness in his voice, had felt the leaning of his nature, strong though it was, on
her, and had responded instantly, inevitably, almost passionately. But then came the thought of his secret
intercourse with Vere. She saw in the dark words: "Monsieur Emile's idea." "Monsieur Emile's suggestion."
She remembered how Artois had told her that she could never be an artist. And again the intensely bitter
feeling of satire, that had set in her face the expression which had startled him, returned, twisting, warping
her whole nature.
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"I am to encourage youyou who have told me that I can do nothing!"
That was what she had been feeling. And, as by a searchlight, she had seen surely for a moment the whole
great and undying selfishness of man, exactly as it was. And she had seen surely, also, the ministering world
of women gathered round about it, feeding it, lest it should fail and be no more. And she had seen herself
among them!
"Where can Vere have gone to?" he said.
There had been a pause. Neither knew how long it had lasted.
"I should not wonder if she is on the cliff," said Hermione. "She often goes there at this hour. She goes to
meet Ruffo."
The name switched the mind of Artois on to a new and profoundly interesting train of thought.
"Ruffo," he began slowly. "And you think it wise?"
He stopped. Tonight he no longer dared frankly to speak his mind to Hermione.
"I was at Mergellina the other day," he said. "And I saw Ruffo with his mother."
"Did you. What is she like?"
"Oh, like many middleaged women of the South, rather broad and batteredlooking, and probably much
older in appearance than in years."
"Poor woman! She has been through a great deal."
Her voice was quite genuine now. And Artois said to himself that the faint suspicion he had had was
illfounded.
"Do you know anything about her?"
"Oh yes. I had a talk with Ruffo the other night. And he told me several things."
Each time Hermione mentioned Ruffo's name it seemed to Artois that her voice softened, almost that she
gave the word a caress. He longed to ask her something, but he was afraid to.
He would try not to interfere with Fate. But he would not hasten its comingif it were coming. And he knew
nothing. Perhaps the anxious suspicion which had taken up its abode in his mind, and which, without definite
reason, seemed gradually changing into conviction was erroneous. Perhaps some day he would laugh at
himself, and say to himself, "I was mad to dream of such a thing."
"Those women often have a bad time," he said.
"Few women do not, I sometimes think."
He said nothing, and she went on rather hastily, as if wishing to cover her last words.
"Ruffo told me something that I did not know about Peppina. His step father was the man who cut that cross
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on Peppina's face."
"Perdio!" said Artois.
He used the Italian exclamation at that moment quite naturally. Suddenly he wished more than ever before
that Hermione had not taken Peppina to live on the island.
"Hermione," he said, "I wish you had not Peppina here."
"Still because of Vere?" she said.
And now she was looking at him steadily.
"I feel that she comes from another world, that she had better keep away from yours. I feel as if misfortune
attended her."
"It is odd. Even the servants say she has the evil eye. But, if she has, it is too late now. Peppina has looked
upon us all."
"Perhaps that old Eastern was right." Artois could not help saying it. "Perhaps all that is to be is ordained long
beforehand. Do you think that, Hermione?"
"I have sometimes thought it, when I have been depressed. I have sometimes said to myself, 'E il destino!' "
She remembered at that moment her feeling on the day when she returned from the expedition with Vere to
Caprithat perhaps she had returned to the island to confront some grievous fate. Had Artois such a thought,
such a prevision? Suddenly she felt frightened, like a child when, at night, it passes the open door of a room
that is dark.
She moved and got up from her chair. Like the child, when it rushes on and away, she felt in her panic the
necessity of physical activity.
Artois followed her example. He was glad to move.
"Shall we go and see what Vere is doing?" he said.
"If you like. I feel sure she is with Ruffo."
They went towards the house. Artois felt a deep curiosity, which filled his whole being, to know what
Hermione's exact feeling towards Ruffo was.
"Don't you think," he said, "that perhaps it is a little dangerous to allow Vere to be so much with a boy from
Mergellina?"
"Oh no."
In her tone there was the calm of absolute certainty.
"Well, but we don't know so very much about him."
"Do you think two instincts could be at fault?"
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"Two instincts?"
"Vere's and mine?"
"Perhaps not. Then your instinct"
He waited. He was passionately interested.
"Ruffo is all right," Hermione answered.
It seemed to him as if she had deliberately used that bluff expression to punish his almost mystical curiosity.
Was she warding him off consciously?
They passed through the house and came out on its further side, but they did not go immediately to the cliff
top. Both of them felt certain the two children must be there, and both of them, perhaps, were held back for a
moment by a mutual desire not to disturb their innocent confidences. They stood upon the bridge, therefore,
looking down into the dimness of the Pool. From the water silence seemed to float up to them, almost visibly,
like a lovely, delicate mist silence, and the tenderness of night, embracing their distresses.
The satire died out of Hermione's poor, tormented heart. And Artois for a moment forgot the terrible face half
seen in the darkness of the trees.
"There is the boat. He is here."
Hermione spoke in a low voice, pointing to the shadowy form of a boat upon the Pool.
"Yes."
Artois gazed at the boat. Was it indeed a Fate that came by night to the island softly across the sea, ferried by
the ignorant hands of men? He longed to know. And Hermione longed to know something, too: whether
Artois had ever seen the strange likeness she had seen, whether Maurice had ever seemed to gaze for a
moment at him out of the eyes of Ruffo. But tonight she could not ask him that. They were too far away
from each other. And because of the gulf between them her memory had suddenly become far more sacred,
far more necessary to her even, than it had been before.
It had been a solace, a beautiful solace. But now it was much more than thatnow it was surely her
salvation.
As she felt that, a deep longing filled her heart to look again on Ruffo's face, to search again for the
expression that sent back the years. But she wished to do that without witnesses, to be alone with the boy, as
she had been alone with him that night upon the bridge. And suddenly she was impatient of Vere's
intercourse with him. Vere could not know what the tender look meant, if it came. For she had never seen her
father's face.
"Let us go to the cliff," Hermione said, moved by this new feeling of impatience.
She meant to interrupt the children, to get rid of Vere and Emile, and have Ruffo to herself for a moment. Just
then she felt as if he were nearer, far nearer, to her than they were: they who kept things from her, who spoke
of her secretly, pitying her.
And again that evening she came into acute antagonism with her friend. For the instinct was still alive in him
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not to interrupt the children. The strange suspicion that had been born and had lived within him, gathered
strength, caused him to feel almost as if they might be upon holy ground, those two so full of youth, who
talked together in the night; as if they knew mysteriously things that were hidden from their elders, from
those wiser, yet far less full of the wisdom that is eternal, the wisdom in instinct, than themselves. There is
always something sacred about children. And he had never lost the sense of it amid the dust of his worldly
knowledge. But about these children, about them or within them, there floated, perhaps, something that was
mystic, something that was awful and must not be disturbed. Hermione did not feel it. How could she? He
himself had withheld from her for many years the only knowledge that could have made her share his present
feeling. He could tell her nothing. Yet he could not conceal his intense reluctance to go to that seat upon the
cliff.
"But it's delicious here. I love the Pool at night, don't you? Look at the Saint's light, how quietly it shines!"
She took her hands from the rail. His attempt at detention irritated her whole being. She looked at the light.
On the night of the storm she had felt as if it shone exclusively for her. That feeling was dead. San Francesco
watched, perhaps, over the fishermen. He did not watch over her.
And yet that night she, too, had made the sign of the cross when she knew that the light was shining.
She did not answer Artois' remark, and he continued, always for the children's sake, and for the sake of what
he seemed to divine secretly at work in them:
"This Pool is a place apart, I think. The Saint has given his benediction to it."
He was speaking at random to keep Hermione there. And yet his words seemed chosen by some one for him
to say.
"Surely good must come to the island over that waterway."
"You think so?"
Her stress upon the pronoun made him reply:
"Hermione, you do not think me the typical Frenchman of this century, who furiously denies over a glass of
absinthe the existence of the Creator of the world?"
"No. But I scarcely thought you believed in the efficacy of a plaster Saint."
"Not of the plasterno. But don't you think it possible that truth, emanating from certain regions and
affecting the souls of men, might move them unconsciously to embody it in symbol? What if this Pool were
blessed, and men, feeling that it was blessed, put San Francesco here with his visible benediction?"
He said to himself that he was playing with his imagination, as sometimes he played with words,
halfsensuously and half aesthetically; yet he felt tonight as if within him there was something that might
believe far more than he had ever suspected it would be possible for him to believe.
And that, too, seemed to have come to him from the hidden children who were so near.
"I don't feel at all as if the Pool were blessed," said Hermione. She sighed.
"Let us go to the cliff," she said, again, this time with a strong impatience.
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He could not, of course, resist her desire, so they moved away, and mounted to the summit of the island.
The children were there. They could just see them in the darkness, Vere seated upon the wooden bench,
Ruffo standing beside her. Their forms looked like shadows, but from the shadows voices came.
When he saw them, Artois stood still. Hermione was going on. He put his hand upon her arm to stop her. She
sent an almost sharp inquiry to him with her eyes.
"Don't you think," he said"don't you think it is a pity to disturb them?"
"Why?"
"They seem so happy together."
He glanced at her for sympathy, but she gave him none.
"Am I to have nothing?" she thought. And a passion of secret anger woke up in her. "Am I to have nothing at
all? May I not even speak to this boy, in whom I have seen Maurice for a momentbecause if I do I may
disturb some childish gossip?"
Her eyes gave to Artois a fierce rebuke.
"I beg your pardon, Hermione," he said, hastily. "Of course if you really want to talk to Ruffo"
"I don't think Vere will mind," she said.
Her lips were actually trembling, but her voice was calm.
They walked forward.
When they were close to the children they both saw there was a third figure on the cliff. Gaspare was at a
little distance. Hermione could see the red point of his cigarette gleaming.
"Gaspare's there, too," she said.
"Yes."
"Why is he there?" Artois thought.
And again there woke up in him an intense curiosity about Gaspare.
Ruffo had seen them, and now he took off his cap. And Vere turned her head and got up from the seat.
Neither the girl nor the boy gave any explanation of their being together. Evidently they did not think it
necessary to do so. Hermione was the first to speak.
"Goodevening, Ruffo," she said.
Artois noticed a peculiar kindness and gentleness in her voice when she spoke to the boy, a sound apart, that
surely did not come into her voice even when it spoke to Vere.
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"Goodevening, Signora." He stood with his cap in his hand. "I have been telling the Signorina what you
have done for my poor mamma, Signora. I did not tell her before because I thought she knew. But she did not
know."
Vere was looking at her mother with a shining of affection in her eyes.
At this moment Gaspare came up slowly, with a careless walk.
Artois watched him.
"About the little money, you mean?" said Hermione, rather hastily.
"Si, Signora. When I gave it to my poor mamma she cried again. But that was because you were so kind. And
she said to me, 'Ruffo, why should a strange lady be so kind to me? Why should a strange lady think about
me?' she said. 'Ruffino,' she said, 'it must be Santa Maddalena who has sent her here to be good to me.' My
poor mamma!"
"The Signora does not want to be bothered with all this!" It was Gaspare who had spoken, roughly, and who
now pushed in between Ruffo and those who were listening to his simple narrative.
Ruffo looked surprised, but submissive. Evidently he respected Gaspare, and the two understood each other.
And though Gaspare's words were harsh, his eyes, as they looked at Ruffo, seemed to contradict them.
Nevertheless, there was excitement, a strungup look in his face.
"Gaspare!" said Vere.
Her eyes shot fire.
"Signorina?"
"Madre does like to hear what Ruffo has to say. Don't you, Madre?"
Gaspare looked unmoved. His whole face was full of a dogged obstinacy. Yet he did not forget himself.
There was nothing rude in his manner as he said, before Hermione could reply:
"Signorina, the Signora does not know Ruffo's mother, so such things cannot interest her. Is it not so,
Signora?"
Hermione was still governed by the desire to be alone for a little while with Ruffo, and the sensation of
intense reservea reserve that seemed even partially physicalthat she felt towards Artois made her dislike
Ruffo's public exhibition of a gratitude that, expressed in private, would have been sweet to her. Instead,
therefore, of agreeing with Vere, she said, in rather an offhand way:
"It's all right, Ruffo. Thank you very much. But we must not keep Don Emilio listening to my supposed good
deeds forever. So that's enough."
Vere reddened. Evidently she felt snubbed. She said nothing, but she shot a glance of eager sympathy at
Ruffo, who stood very simply looking at Hermione with a sort of manly deference, as if all that she said, or
wished, must certainly be right. Then she moved quietly away, pressing her lips rather firmly together, and
went slowly towards the house. After a moment's hesitation, Artois followed her. Hermione remained by
Ruffo, and Gaspare stayed doggedly with his Padrona.
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Hermione wished he would go. She could not understand his exact feeling about the fisherboy's odd little
intimacy with them. Her instinct told her that secretly he was fond of Ruffo. Yet sometimes he seemed to be
hostile to him, to be suspicious of him, as of some one who might do them harm. Or, perhaps, he felt it his
duty to be on guard against all strangers who approached them. She knew well his fixed belief that she and
Vere depended entirely on him, felt always perfectly safe when he was near. And she liked to have him
nearbut not just at this moment. Yet she did not feel that she could ask him to go.
"Thank you very much for your gratitude, Ruffo," she said. "You mustn't think"
She glanced at Gaspare.
"I didn't want to stop you," she continued, trying to steer an even course. "But it's a very little thing. I hope
your mother is getting on pretty well. She must have courage."
As she said the last sentence she thought it came that night oddly from her lips.
Gaspare moved as if he felt impatient, and suddenly Hermione knew an anger akin to Vere's, an anger she
had scarcely ever felt against Gaspare.
She did not show it at first, but went on with a sort of forced calmness and deliberation, a touch even perhaps
of obstinacy that was meant for Gaspare.
"I am interested in your mother, you know, although I have not seen her. Tell me how she is."
Gaspare opened his lips to speak, but something held him silent; and as he listened to Ruffo's carefully
detailed reply, delivered with the perfect naturalness of one sure of the genuine interest taken in his concerns
by his auditors, his large eyes travelled from the face of the boy to the face of his Padrona with a deep and
restless curiosity. He seemed to inquire something of Ruffo, something of Hermione, and then, at the last,
surely something of himself. But when Ruffo had finished, he said, brusquely:
"Signora, it is getting very late. Will not Don Emilio be going? He will want to say goodnight, and I must
help him with the boat."
"Run and see if Don Emilio is in a hurry, Gaspare. If he is I'll come."
Gaspare looked at her, hesitating.
"What's the matter?" she exclaimed, her secret irritation suddenly getting the upper hand in her nature. "Are
you afraid that Ruffo will hurt me?"
"No, Signora."
As Vere had reddened, he reddened, and he looked with deep reproach at his Padrona. That look went to
Hermione's heart; she thought, "Am I going to quarrel with the one true and absolutely loyal friend I have?"
She remembered Vere's words in the garden about Gaspare's devotion to her, a devotion which she felt like a
warmth round about her life.
"I'll come with you, Gaspare," she said, with a revulsion of feeling. "Goodnight, Ruffo."
"Goodnight, Signora."
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"Perhaps we shall see you tomorrow."
She was just going to turn away when Ruffo bent down to kiss her hand. Since she had given charity to his
mother it was evident that his feeling for her had changed. The Sicilian in him rose up to honor her like a
Padrona.
"Signora," he said, letting go her hand. "Benedicite e buon riposo."
He was being a little whimsical, was showing to her and to Gaspare that he knew how to be a Sicilian. And
now he looked from one to the other to see how they took his salutation; looked gently, confidentially, with a
smile dawning in his eyes under the deference and the boyish affection and gratitude.
And again it seemed to Hermione for a moment that Maurice stood there before her in the night. Her impulse
was to catch Gaspare's arm, to say to him, "Look! Don't you see your Padrone?"
She did not do this, but she did turn impulsively to Gaspare. And as she turned she saw tears start into his
eyes. The blood rushed to his temples, his forehead. He put up his hand to his face.
"Signora," he said, "are you not coming?"
He cleared his throat violently. "I have taken a cold," he muttered.
He caught hold of his throat with his left hand, and again cleared his throat.
"Madre di Dio!"
He spoke very roughly.
But his roughness did not hurt Hermione; for suddenly she felt far less lonely and deserted. Gaspare had seen
what she had seenshe knew it.
As they went back to the house it seemed to her that she and Gaspare talked together.
And yet they spoke no words.
CHAPTER XXVII
Neither Artois nor the Marchesino visited the island during the days that elapsed before the Festa of the
Madonna del Carmine. But Artois wrote to tell Hermione that the Marchesino had accepted his invitation,
and that he hoped she and Vere would be at the Hotel des Etrangers punctually by eight o'clock on the night
of the sixteenth. He wrote cordially, but a little formally, and did not add any gossip or any remarks about his
work to the few sentences connected with the projected expedition. And Hermione replied as briefly to his
note. Usually, when she wrote to Artois, her pen flew, and eager thoughts, born of the thought of him, floated
into her mind. But this time it was not so. The energies of her mind in connection with his mind were surely
failing. As she put the note into its envelope, she had the feeling of one who had been trying to "make"
conversation with an acquaintance, and who had not been successful, and she found herself almost dreading
to talk with Emile.
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Yet for years her talks with him had been her greatest pleasure, outside of her intercourse with Vere and her
relations with Gaspare.
The change that had come over their friendship, like a mist over the sea, was subtle, yet startling in its
completeness. She wondered if he saw and felt this mist as definitely as she did, if he regretted the fair
prospect it had blotted out, if he marvelled at its coming.
He was so acute that he must be aware of the drooping of their intimacy. To what could he attribute it? And
would he care to fight against the change?
She remembered the days when she had nursed him in Kairouan. She felt again the hot dry atmosphere. She
heard the ceaseless buzzing of the flies. How pale his face had been, how weak his body! He had returned to
the weakness of a child. He had depended upon her. That fact, that he had for a time utterly depended upon
her, had forged a new link in their friendship, the strongest link of all. At least she had felt it to be so. For she
was very much of a woman, and full of a secret motherliness.
But perhaps he had forgotten all that.
In these days she often felt as if she did not understand men at all, as if their natures were hidden from her,
and perhaps, of necessity, from all women.
"We can't understand each other."
She often said that to herself, and partly to comfort herself a little. She did not want to be only one of a class
of women from whom men's natures were hidden.
And yet it was not true.
For Maurice, at least, she had understood. She had not feared his gayeties, his boyish love of pleasure, his
passion for the sun, his joy in the peasant life, his almost fierce happiness in the life of the body. She had
feared nothing in him, because she had felt that she understood him thoroughly. She had read the gay
innocence of his temperament rightly, and so she had never tried to hold him back from his pleasures, to keep
him always with her, as many women would have done.
And she clung to the memory of her understanding of Maurice as she faced the mist that had swept up softly
and silently over that sea and sky which had been clear. He had been simple. There was nothing to dread in
cleverness, in complexity. One got lost in a nature that was full of winding paths. Just then, and for the time,
she forgot her love of, even her passion for, mental things. The beauty of the straight white road appealed to
her. She saw it leading one onward to the glory of the sun.
Vere and she did not see very much of each other during these days. They met, of course, at meals, and often
for a few minutes at other times. But it seemed as if each tacitly, and almost instinctively, sought to avoid any
prolonged intercourse with the other. Hermione was a great deal in her sittingroom, reading, or pretending
to read. And Vere made several long expeditions upon the sea in the sailingboat with Gaspare and a boy
from the nearest village, who was hired as an extra hand.
Hermione had a strange feeling of desertion sometimes, when the white sail of the boat faded on the blue and
she saw the empty sea. She would watch the boat go out, standing at the window and looking through the
blinds. The sailorboy pulled at the oars. Vere was at the helm, Gaspare busy with the ropes. They passed
quite close beneath her. She saw Vere's bright and eager face looking the way they were going, anticipating
the voyage; Gaspare's brown hands moving swiftly and deftly. She saw the sail run up, the boat bend over.
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The oars were laid in their places now. The boat went faster through the water. The forms in it dwindled. Was
that Vere's head, or Gaspare's? Who was that standing up? The fisherboy? What were they now, they and
the boat that held them? Only a white sail on the blue, going towards the sun.
And how deep was the silence that fell about the house, how deep and hollow! She saw her life then like a
cavern that was empty. No waters flowed into it. No lights played in its recesses. No sounds echoed through
it.
She looked up into the blue, and remembered her thought, that Maurice had been taken by the blue. Hark!
Was there not in the air the thin sound of a reed flute playing a tarantella? She shut her eyes, and saw the gray
rocks of Sicily. But the blue was too vast. Maurice was lost in it, lost to her forever. And she gazed up into it
again, with the effort to travel through it, to go on and on and on. And it seemed as if her soul ached from that
journey.
The sail had dipped down below the horizon. She let fall the blind. She sat down in the silence.
Vere was greatly perplexed about her mother. One day in the boat she followed her instinct and spoke to
Gaspare about her. Hermione and she between them had taught Gaspare some English. He understood it
fairly well, and could speak it, though not correctly, and he was very proud of his knowledge. Because of the
fisherboy, Vere said what she had to say slowly in English. Gaspare listened with the grave look of learning
that betokened his secret sensation of being glorified by his capacities. But when he grasped the exact
meaning of his Padroncina's words, his expression changed. He shook his head vigorously.
"Not true!" he said. "Not true! No matterthere is no matter with my Padrona."
"But Gaspare"
Vere protested, explained, strong in her conviction of the change in her mother.
But Gaspare would not have it. With energetic gestures he affirmed that his Padrona was just as usual. But
Vere surprised a look in his eyes which told her he was watching her to see if he had deceived her. Then she
realized that for some reason of his own Gaspare did not wish her to know that he had seen the change,
wished also to detach her observation from her mother.
She wondered why this was.
Her busy mind could not arrive at any conclusion in the matter, but she knew her mother was secretly sad.
And she knew that she and her mother were no longer at ease with each other. This pained her, and the pain
was beginning to increase. Sometimes she felt as if her mother disliked something in her, and did not choose
to say so, and was irritated by the silence that she kept. But what could it be? She searched among her doings
carefully. Had she failed in anything? Certainly she had not been lacking in love. And her knowledge of that
seemed simply to exclude any possibility of serious shortcomings. And her mother?
Vere remembered how her mother had once longed to have a son, how she had felt certain she was going to
have a son. Could it be that? Could her mother be dogged by that disappointment? She felt chilled to the heart
at that idea. Her warm nature protested against it. The love she gave to her mother was so complete that it had
always assumed the completeness of that which it was given in return. But it might be so, Vere supposed. It
was possible. She pondered over this deeply, and when she was with her mother watched for signs that might
confirm or dispel her fears. And thus she opposed to the mother's new watchfulness the watchfulness of the
child. And Hermione noticed it, and wondered whether Vere had any suspicion of the surreptitious reading of
her poems.
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But that was scarcely possible.
Hermione had not said a word to Vere of her discovery that Peppina had done what she had been told not to
dorelated the story of her fate. Almost all delicateminded mothers and daughters find certain subjects
difficult, if not impossible of discussion, even when an apparent necessity of their discussion arrives in the
course of life. The present reserve between Hermione and Vere rendered even the idea of any plain speaking
about the revelation of Peppina quite insupportable to the mother. She could only pretend to ignore that it had
ever been made. And this she did. But now that she knew of it she felt very acutely the difference it had made
in Vere. That difference was owing to her own impulsive action. And Emile knew the whole truth. She
understood now what he had been going to say about Peppina and Vere when they had talked about the
books.
He did condemn her in his heart. He thought she was not a neglectful, but a mistaken mother. He thought her
so impulsive as to be dangerous, perhaps, even to those she loved best. Almost she divined that curious desire
of his to protect Vere against her. And yet without her impulsive nature he himself might long ago have died.
She could not help at this time dwelling secretly on one or two actions of hers, could not help saying to
herself now and then: "I have been some good in the world. I am capable of unselfishness sometimes. I did
leave my happiness for Emile's sake, because I had a great deal of friendship and was determined to live up to
it. My impulses are not always crazy and ridiculous."
She did this, she was obliged to do it, to prevent the feeling of impotence from overwhelming her. She had to
do it to give herself strength to get up out of the dust. The human creature dares not say to itself, "You are
nothing." And now Hermione, feeling the withdrawal from her of her friend, believing in the withdrawal
from her of her child, spoke to herself, pleading her own cause to her own soul against invisible detractors.
One visitor the island had at this time. Each evening, when the darkness fell, the boat of Ruffo's employer
glided into the Pool of San Francesco. And the boy always came ashore while his companions slept. Since
Hermione had been charitable to his mother, and since he had explained to her about his Patrigno and
Peppina, he evidently had something of the ready feeling that springs up in Sicilians in whom real interest has
been shownthe feeling of partly belonging to his benefactor. There is something doglike in this feeling.
And it is touching and attractive because of the animalism of its frankness and simplicity. And as the dog
who has been kindly, tenderly treated has no hesitation in claiming attention with a paw, or in laying its
muzzle upon the knee of its benefactor, so Ruffo had no hesitation in relating to Hermione all the little
intimate incidents of his daily life, in crediting her with an active interest in his concerns. There was no
conceit in this, only a very complete boyish simplicity.
Hermione found in this new attitude of Ruffo's a curious solace for the sudden loneliness of soul that had
come upon her. Originally Ruffo's chief friendship had obviously been for Vere, but now Vere, seeing her
mother's new and deep interest in the boy, gave way a little to it, yet without doing anything ostentatious, or
showing any pique. Simply she would stay in the garden, or on the terrace, later than usual, till after Ruffo
was sure to be at the island, and let her mother stroll to the cliff top. Or, if she were there with him first, she
would soon make an excuse to go away, and casually tell her mother that he was there alone or with Gaspare.
And all this was done so naturally that Hermione did not know it was deliberate, but merely fancied that
perhaps Vere's first enthusiasm for the fisherboy was wearing off, that it had been a child's sudden fancy,
and that it was lightly passing away.
Vere rather wondered at her mother's liking for Ruffo, although she herself had found him so attractive, and
had drawn her mother's attention to his handsome face and bold, yet simple bearing. She wondered, because
she felt in it something peculiar, a sort of heat and anxiety, a restlessness, a watchfulness; attributes which
sprang from the observation of that resemblance to the dead man which drew her mother to Ruffo, but of
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which her mother had never spoken to her.
Nor did Hermione speak of it again to Gaspare. He had almost angrily denied it, but since the night of Artois'
visit she knew that he had seen it, been startled, moved by it, almost as she had been.
She knew that quite well. Yet Gaspare puzzled her. He had become moody, nervous, and full of changes. She
seemed to discern sometimes a latent excitement in him. His temper was uneven. Giulia had said that one
could not speak with him. Since that day she had grumbled about him again, but discreetly, with a certain
vagueness. For all the servants thoroughly appreciated his special position in the household as the "cameriere
di confidenza" of the Padrona. One thing which drew Hermione's special attention was his extraordinary
watchfulness of her. When they were together she frequently surprised him looking at her with a sort of
penetrating and almost severe scrutiny which startled her. Once or twice, indeed, she showed that she was
startled.
"What's the matter, Gaspare?" she said, one day. "Do I look ill again?"
For she had remembered his looking at her in the boat.
"No, Signora," he answered, this time, quickly. "You are not looking ill today."
And he moved off, as if anxious to avoid further questioning.
Another time she thought that there was something wrong with her dress, or her hair, and said so.
"Is there anything wrong with me?" she exclaimed. "What is it?" And she instinctively glanced down at her
gown, and put up her hands to her head.
And this time he had turned it off with a laugh, and had said:
"Signora, you are like the Signorina! Once she told me I wasI was" he shook his head"I forget the
word. But I am sure it was something that a man could never be. Per dio!"
And then he had gone off into a rambling conversation that had led Hermione's attention far away from the
startingpoint of their talk.
Vere, too, noticed the variations of his demeanor.
"Gaspare was very 'jumpy' today in the boat," she said, one evening, after returning from a sail; "I wonder
what's the matter with him. Do you think he can be in love, Madre?"
"I don't know. But he is fidanzato, Vere, with a girl in Marechiaro, you remember?"
"Yes, but that lasts forever. When I speak of it he always says: 'There is plenty of time, Signorina. If one
marries in a hurry, one makes two faces ugly!' I should think the girl must be sick of waiting."
Hermione was sure that there was some very definite reason for Gaspare's curious behavior, but she could not
imagine what it was. That it was not anything to do with his health she had speedily ascertained. Any small
discipline of Providence in the guise of a cold in the head, or a pain in the stomach, despatched him promptly
to the depths. But he had told her that he was perfectly well and "made of iron," when she had questioned him
on the subject.
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She supposed time would elucidate the mystery, and meanwhile she knew it was no use troubling about it.
Years had taught her that when Gaspare chose to be silent not heaven nor earth could make him speak.
Although Vere could not know why Ruffo attracted her mother, Hermione knew that Gaspare must
understand, at any rate partially, why she cared so much to be with him. During the days between the last
visit of Artois and the Festa of the Madonna del Carmine her acquaintance with the boy had progressed so
rapidly that sometimes she found herself wondering what the days had been like before she knew him, the
evenings before his boat slipped into the Saint's Pool, and his light feet ran up from the water's edge to the
cliff top. Possibly, had Ruffo come into her life when she was comparatively happy and at ease, she would
never have drawn so closely to him, despite the resemblance that stirred her to the heart. But he came when
she was feeling specially lonely and sad; and when he, too, was in trouble. Both wanted sympathy. Hermione
gave Ruffo hers in full measure. She could not ask for his. But giving had always been her pleasure. It was
her pleasure now. And she drew happiness from the obvious and growing affection of the boy. Perfectly
natural at all times, he kept back little from the kind lady of the island. He told her the smallest details of his
daily life, his simple hopes and fears, his friendships and quarrels, his relations with the other fishermen of
Mergellina, his intentions in the present, his ambitions for the future. Some day he hoped to be the Padrone of
a boat of his own. That seemed to be the ultimate aim of his life. Hermione smiled as she heard it, and saw
his eyes shining with the excitement of anticipation. When he spoke the word "Padrone," his little form
seemed to expand with authority and conscious pride. He squared his shoulders. He looked almost a man.
The pleasures of command dressed all his person, as flags dress a ship on a festival day. He stood before
Hermione a boy exuberant.
And she thought of Maurice bounding down the mountainside to the fishing, and rousing the night with his
"Ciao, Ciao, Ciao, Morettina bellaCiao!"
But Ruffo was sometimes reserved. Hermione could not make him speak of his father. All she knew of him
was that he was dead. Sometimes she gave Ruffo good advice. She divined the dangers of Naples for a lad
with the blood bounding in his veins, and she dwelt upon the pride of man's strength, and how he should be
careful to preserve it, and not dissipate it before it came to maturity. She did not speak very plainly, but Ruffo
understood, and answered her with the unconscious frankness that is characteristic of the people of the South.
And at the end of his remarks he added:
"Don Gaspare has talked to me about that. Don Gaspare knows much, Signora."
He spoke with deep respect. Hermione was surprised by this little revelation. Was Gaspare secretly watching
over the boy? Did he concern himself seriously with Ruffo's fate? She longed to question Gaspare. But she
knew that to do so would be useless. Even with her Gaspare would only speak freely of things when he
chose. At other times he was calmly mute. He wrapped himself in a cloud. She wondered whether he had
ever given Ruffo any hints or instructions as to suitable conduct when with her.
Although Ruffo was so frank and garrulous about most things, she noticed that if she began to speak of his
mother or his Patrigno, his manner changed, and he became uncommunicative. Was this owing to Gaspare's
rather rough rebuke upon the cliff before Artois and Vere? Or had Gaspare emphasized that by further
directions when alone with Ruffo? She tried deftly to find out, but the boy baffled her. But perhaps he was
delicate about money, unlike Neapolitans, and feared that if he talked too much of his mother the lady of the
island would think he was "making misery," was hoping for another twenty francs. As to his Patrigno, the
fact that Peppina was living on the island made that subject rather a difficult one. Nevertheless, Hermione
could not help suspecting that Gaspare had told the boy not to bother her with any family troubles.
She had not offered him money again. The giving of the twenty francs had been a sudden impulse to help a
suffering woman, less because she was probably in poverty than because she was undoubtedly made unhappy
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by her husband. Since she had suffered at the hands of death, Hermione felt very pitiful for women. She
would gladly have gone to see Ruffo's mother, have striven to help her more, both materially and morally.
But as to a visitPeppina seemed to bar the way. And as to more money helpshe remembered Gaspare's
warning. Perhaps he knew something of the mother that she did not know. Perhaps the mother was an
objectionable, or even a wicked woman.
But when she looked at Ruffo she could not believe that. And then several times he had spoken with great
affection of his mother.
She left things as they were, taking her cue from the boy in despite of her desire. And here, as in some other
directions, she was secretly governed by Gaspare.
Only sometimes did she see in Ruffo's face the look that had drawn her to him. The resemblance to Maurice
was startling, but it was nearly always fleeting. She could not tell when it was coming, nor retain it when it
came. But she noticed that it was generally when Ruffo was moved by affection, by a sudden sympathy, by a
warm and deferent impulse that the look came in him. And again she thought of the beautiful obedience that
springs directly from love, of Mercury poised for flight to the gods, his mission happily accomplished.
She wondered if Artois had ever thought of it when he was with Ruffo. But she felt now that she could never
ask him.
And, indeed, she cherished her knowledge, her recognition, as something almost sacred, silently shared with
Gaspare.
To no one could that look mean what it meant to her. To no other heart could it make the same appeal.
And so in those few days between Hermione and the fisherboy a firm friendship was established.
And to Hermione this friendship came like a small ray of brightly golden light, falling gently in a place that
was very dark.
CHAPTER XXVIII
When the Marchesino received the invitation of Artois to dine with him and the ladies from the island on the
night of the Festa of the Madonna del Carmine he was again ill in bed with fever. But nevertheless he
returned an immediate acceptance. Then he called in the family doctor, and violently demanded to be made
well, "perfectly well," by the evening of the sixteenth. The doctor, who guessed at once that some amorous
adventure was on foot, promised to do his best, and so ingeniously plied his patient with drugs and potions
that on the sixteenth Doro was out of bed, and busily doing gymnastics to test his strength for the coming
campaign.
Artois' invitation had surprised him. He had lost all faith in his friend, and at first almost suspected an
ambush. Emilio had not invited him out of lovethat was certain. But perhaps the ladies of the island had
desired his presence, his escort. He was a Neapolitan. He knew the ways of the city. That was probably the
truth. They wanted him, and Emilio had been obliged to ask him.
He saw his opportunity. His fever, coming at such a time, had almost maddened him, and during the days of
forced inaction the Panacci temper had been vigorously displayed in the home circle. As he lay in bed his
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imagination ran riot. The day and the night were filled with thoughts and dreams of Vere. And always Emilio
was near her, presiding over her doings with a false imitation of the paternal manner.
But now at the last the Marchesino saw his opportunity to strike a blow at Emilio. Every year of his life since
he was a child he had been to the festa in honor of the Madonna del Carmine. He knew the crowd that
assembled under the prison walls and beneath Nuvolo's tall belfry, the crowds that overflowed into the gaunt
Square of the Mercato and streamed down the avenues of fire into the narrow side streets. In those crowds it
would be easy to get lost. Emilio, when he heard his friend's voice singing, had hidden with the Signorina in
the darkness of a cave. He might be alone with the Signorina when he would. The English ladies trusted his
white hairs. Or the English ladies did not care for the convenances. Since he had found Peppina in the Casa
del Mare, the Marchesino did not know what to think of its Padrona. And now he was too reckless to care. He
only knew that he was in love, and that circumstances so far had fought against him. He only knew that he
had been tricked, and that he meant to trick Emilio in return. His anxiety to revenge himself on Emilio was
quite as keen as his desire to be alone with Vere. The natural devilry of his temperament, a boy's devilry, not
really wicked, but compounded of sensuality, vanity, the passion for conquest, and the determination to hold
his own against other males and to shine in his world's esteem, was augmented by the abstinence from his
usual life. The few days in the house seemed to him a lifetime already wasted. He meant to make up for it,
and he did not care at whose expense, so long as some of the debt was paid by Emilio.
On the sixteenth he issued forth into life again in a mood that was dangerous. The fever that had abandoned
his body was raging in his mind. He was in the temper which had governed his papa on the day of the
slapping of Signora Merani's face in the Chiaia.
The Marchesino always thought a great deal about his personal appearance, but his toilet on the night of the
sixteenth was unusually prolonged. On several matters connected with it he was undecided. Should he wear a
waistcoat of white pique or one of black silk? Should he put on a white tie, or a black? And what about rings?
He loved jewelry, as do most Neapolitans, both male and female, and had quantities of gaudy rings, studs,
sleeve links, and waistcoat buttons. In his present mood he was inclined to adorn himself with as many of
them as possible. But he was not sure whether the English liked diamonds and rubies on a man. He hesitated
long, made many changes, and looked many times in the glass. At last he decided on a black tie, a white
waistcoat with pearl buttons, a pearl shirtstud surrounded with diamonds, pearl and diamond sleevelinks,
and only three ringsa gold snake, a seal ring, and a ring set with turquoises. This was a modest toilet,
suited, surely to the taste to the English, which he remembered to have heard of as sober.
He stood long before the mirror when he was ready, and had poured over his handkerchief a libation of "Rose
d'amour."
Certainly he was a finelooking fellowhis natural sincerity obliged him to acknowledge it. Possibly his
nose stuck out too much to balance perfectly the low forehead and the rather square chin. Possibly his
cheekbones were too prominent. But what of that? Women always looked at a man's figure, his eyes, his
teeth, his mustaches. And he had a splendid figure, enormous gray eyes, large and perfectly even white teeth
between lips that were very full and very red, and blond mustaches whose turnedup points were like a cry of
victory.
He drew himself up from the hips, enlarged his eyes by opening them exaggeratedly, stretched his lips till his
teeth were well exposed, and vehemently twisted the ends of his mustaches.
Yes, he was a very handsome fellow, and boyishlooking, toobut not too boyish.
It really was absurd of Emilio to think of cutting him out with a girl Emilio, an old man, all beard and
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brains! As if any living woman really cared for brains! Impertinence, gayety, agility, musclethat was what
women loved in men. And he had all they wanted.
He filled his case with cigarettes, slipped on a very smart fawn colored coat, cocked a smallbrimmed black
bowler hat over his left ear, picked up a pair of white gloves and a cane surmounted by a bunch of golden
grapes, and hurried downstairs, humming "Lili Kangy," the "canzonetta birichina" that was then the rage in
Naples.
The dinner was to be at the Hotel des Etrangers. On consideration, Artois had decided against the Galleria.
He had thought of those who wander there, of Peppina's aunt, of certain others. And then he had thought of
Vere. And his decision was quickly taken. When the Marchesino arrived, Artois was alone in his
sittingroom. The two men looked into each other's eyes as they met, and Artois saw at once that Doro was in
a state of suppressed excitement and not in a gentle mood. Although Doro generally seemed full of
goodhumor, and readiness to please and to be pleased, he could look very cruel. And when, in rare
moments, he did so, his face seemed almost to change its shape: the cheekbones to become more salient, the
nose sharper, the eyes catlike, the large but wellshaped mouth venomous instead of passionate. He looked
older and also commoner directly his insouciance departed from him, and one could divine a great deal of
primitive savagery beneath his lively grace and boyish charm.
But tonight, directly he spoke to Artois, his natural humor seemed to return. He explained his illness, which
accounted for his not having come as usual to see his friend, and drew a humorous picture of a Panacci in a
bed surrounded by terrorstricken nurses.
"And you, Emilio, what have you been doing?" he concluded.
"Working," said Artois.
He pointed to the writingtable, on which lay a pile of manuscript.
The Marchesino glanced at it carelessly, but the two vertical lines suddenly appeared in his forehead just
above the inside corners of his eyes.
"Work! work!" he said. "You make me feel quite guilty, amico mio. I live for happiness, for love, but
youyou live for duty."
He put his arm through his friend's with a laugh, and drew him towards the balcony.
"Nevertheless," he added, "even you have your moments of pleasure, haven't you?"
He pressed Artois' arm gently, but in the touch of his fingers there was something that seemed to hint a
longing to close them violently and cause a shudder of pain.
"Even you have moments when the brain goes to sleep andand the body wakes up. Eh, Emilio? Isn't it
true?"
"My dear Doro, when have I claimed to be unlike other men?"
"No, no! But you workers inspire reverence, you know. We, who do not work, we see your pale faces, your
earnest eyes, and we thinkmon Dieu, Emilio!we think you are saints. And then, if, by chance, one
evening we go to the Galleria, and find it is not so, that you are like ourselves, we are glad."
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He began to laugh.
"We are glad; we feel no longer at a disadvantage."
Again he pressed Artois' arm gently.
"But, amico mio, you are deceptive, you workers," he said. "You take us all in. We are children beside you,
we who say all we feel, who show when we hate and when we love. We are babies. If I ever want to become
really birbante, I shall become a worker."
He spoke always lightly, laughingly; but Artois understood the malice at his heart, and hesitated for a
moment whether to challenge it quietly and firmly, or whether laughingly, to accept the sly imputations of
secrecy, of hypocrisy, in a "notworthwhile" temper. If things developedand Artois felt that they must
with such a protagonist as the Marchesinoa situation might arise in which Doro's enmity must come out
into the open and be dealt with drastically. Till then was it not best to ignore it, to fall in with his apparent
frivolity? Before Artois could decidefor his natural temper and an undersense of prudence and contempt
pulled different waysthe Marchesino suddenly released his arm, leaned over the balcony rail, and looked
eagerly down the road. A carriage had just rattled up from the harbor of Santa Lucia only a few yards away.
"Ecco!" he exclaimed. "Ecco! Butbut who is with them?"
"Only Gaspare," replied Artois.
"Gaspare! That servant who came to the Guiseppone? Oh, no doubt he has rowed the ladies over and will
return to the boat?"
"No, I think not. I think the Signora will bring him to the Carmine."
"Why?" said the Marchesino, sharply.
"Why not? He is a strong fellow, and might be useful in a crowd."
"Are we not strong? Are we not useful?"
"My dear Doro, what's the matter?"
"Nienteniente!"
He tugged at his mustaches.
"Only I think the Signora might trust to us."
"Tell her so, if you like. Here she is."
At this moment the door opened and Hermione came in, followed by Vere.
As Artois went to welcome them he was aware of a strange mixture of sensations, which made these two dear
and close friends, these intimates of his life, seem almost new. He was acutely conscious of the mist of which
Hermione had thought. He wondered about her, as she about him. He saw again that face in the night under
the trellis. He heard the voice that had called to him and Vere in the garden. And he knew that enmity,
mysterious yet definite, might arise even between Hermione and him; that even they twoinexorably under
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the law that has made all human beings separate entities, and incapable of perfect fusionmight be victims
of misunderstanding, of ignorance of the absolute truth of personality. Even now he was companioned by the
sudden and horrible doubt which had attacked him in the garden: that perhaps she had been always playing a
part when she had seemed to be deeply interested in his work, that perhaps there was within her some one
whom he did not know, had never even caught a glimpse of until lately, once when she was in the tram going
to the Scoglio di Frisio, and once the last time they had met. And yet this was the woman who had nursed
him in Africaand this was the woman against whose impulsive actions he had had the instinct to protect
Verethe Hermione Delarey whom he had known for so many years.
Never before had he looked at Hermione quite as he looked at her tonight. His sense of her strangeness
woke up in him something that was ill at ease, doubtful, almost even suspicious, but also something that was
quivering with interest.
For years this woman had been to him "dear Hermione," "ma pauvre amie," comrade, sympathizer, nurse,
mother of Vere.
Nowwhat else was she? A human creature with a heart and brain capable of mystery; a soul with room in it
for secret things; a temple whose outside he had seen, but whose god, perhaps, he had never seen.
And Vere was involved in her mother's strangeness, and had her own strangeness too. Of that he had been
conscious before tonight. For Vere was being formed. The plastic fingers were at work about her, moulding
her into what she must be as a woman.
But Hermione! She had been a woman so long.
Perhaps, too, she was standing on the brink of a precipice. That suspicion, that fear, not to be banished by
action, added to the curiosity, as about an unknown land, that she aroused.
And the new and vital sense of Hermione's strangeness which was alive in Artois was met by a feeling in her
that was akin to it, only of the feminine sex.
Their eyes encountered like eyes that say, "What are you?"
After swift greeting they went downstairs to dine in the public room. As there were but few people in the
house, the large diningroom was not in use, and their table was laid in the small restaurant that looks out on
the Marina, and was placed close to the window.
"At last we are repeating our partie carree of the Guiseppone," said Artois, as they sat down.
He felt that as host he must release himself from subtleties and underfeelings, must stamp down his
consciousness of secret inquiries and of desires or hatreds halfconcealed. He spoke cheerfully, even
conventionally.
"Yes, but without the storm," said Hermione, in the same tone. "There is no feeling of electricity in the air
tonight."
Even while she spoke she felt as if she were telling a lie which was obvious to them all. And she could not
help glancing hastily round. She met the large round eyes of the Marchesino, eyes without subtlety though
often expressive.
"No, Signora," he said, smiling at her, rather obviously to captivate her by the sudden vision of his superb
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teeth"La Bruna is safe tonight."
"La Bruna?"
"The Madonna del Carmine."
They talked of the coming festa.
Vere was rather quiet, much less vehement in appearance and lively in manner than she had been at the
Marchesino's dinner. Artois thought she looked definitely older than she had then, though even then she had
played quite well the part of a little woman of the world. There was something subdued in her eyes tonight
which touched him, because it made him imagine Vere sad. He wondered if she were still troubled about her
mother, if she had fulfilled her intention and asked Gaspare what he thought. And he longed to ask her, to
know what Gaspare had said. The remembrance of Gaspare made him say to Hermione:
"I gave orders that Gaspare was to have a meal here. Did they tell you?"
"Yes. He has gone to the servants' room."
The Marchesino's face changed.
"Your Gaspare seems indispensable, Signora," he said to Hermione in his lightest, most boyish mannera
manner that the determination in his eyes contradicted rather crudely. "Do you take him everywhere, like a
little dog?"
"I often take him,but not like a little dog, Marchese," Hermione said, quietly.
"Signora, I did not mean Here in Naples, we use that expression for anything, or any one, we like to have
always with us."
"I see. Well, call Gaspare a watchdog if you like," she answered, with a smile; "he watches over me
carefully."
"A watchdog, Signora! But do you like to be watched? Is it not unpleasant?"
He was speaking now to get rid of the impression his first remark had evidently made upon her.
"I think it depends how," she replied. "If Gaspare watches me it is only to protect meI am sure of that."
"But, Signora, do you not trust Don Emilio, do you not trust me, to be your watchdogs tonight at the
festa?"
There was a little pressure in his voice, but he still preserved his light and boyish manner. And now he turned
to Vere.
"Speak for us, Signorina! Tell the Signora that we will take care of her tonight, that there is no need of the
faithful Gaspare."
Vere looked at him gravely. She had wondered a little why her mother had brought Gaspare, why, at least,
she had not left him free till they returned to the boat at Santa Lucia. But her mother wanted him to come
with them, and that was enough for her. She opened her lips, and Artois thought she was going to snub her
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companion. But perhaps she suddenly changed her mind, for she only said:
"Who would trust you, Marchese?"
She met his eyes with a sort of child's impertinence. She had abruptly become the Vere of the Scoglio di
Frisio.
"Who would take you for a watchdog?"
"MaSignorina!"
"As a sealyes, you are all very well! But"
The young man was immediately in the seventh Heaven. The Signorina remembered his feats in the water.
All his selfconfidence returned, all his former certainty that the Signorina was secretly devoted to him. His
days of doubt and fury were forgotten. His jealousy of Emilio vanished in a cloud of happy contempt for the
disabilities of age, and he began to talk to Vere with a vivacity that was truly Neapolitan. When the
Marchesino was joyous he had charm, the charm that emanates from the bounding life that flows in the veins
of youth. Even the Puritan feels, and fears, the grace that is Pagan. The Marchesino had a Pagan grace. And
now it returned to him and fell about him like a garment, clothing body and soul. And Vere seemed to
respond to it. She began to chatter, too. She talked lightly, flicking him with little whips of sarcasm that did
not hurt, but only urged him on. The humor of a festa might begin to flow from these two.
And again, instead of infecting Artois, it seemed to set him apart, to rebuke silently his gifts, his fameto
tell him that they were useless, that they could do nothing for him.
The Marchesino was not troubled with an intellect. Yet with what ease he found words to play with the words
of Vere! His Latin vivacity seemed a perfect substitute for thought, for imagination, for every subtlety. He
bubbled like champagne. And when champagne winks and foams at the edge of the shining glass, do the
young think of, or care for, the sober gravity, the lingering bouquet of claret, even if it be Chateau Margaux?
As Artois half listened to the young people, while he talked quietly with Hermione, playing the host with
discretion, he felt the peculiar cruelty which ordains that the weapons of youth, even if taken up and used by
age with vigor and competence, shall be only reeds in those hands whose lines tell of the life behind.
Yet how Vere and he had laughed together on the day of his return from Paris! One gust of such mutual
laughter is worth how many days of earnest talk!
Vere was gleaming with fun tonight.
The waiters, as they went softly about the table, looked at her with kind eyes. Secretly they were enjoying her
gayety because it was so pretty. Her merriment was as airy as the flight of a bird.
The Marchesino was entranced. Did she care for that?
Artois wondered secretly, and was not sure. He had a theory that all women like to feel their power over men.
Few men have not this theory. But there was in Vere something immensely independent, that seemed without
sex, and that hinted at a reserve not vestal, but very pure too pure, perhaps, to desire an empire which is
founded certainly upon desire.
And the Marchesino was essentially and completely the young animal; not the heavy, sleek, and
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selfcontented young animal that the northern countries breed, but the frolicsome, playful, fiery young
animal that has been many times warmed by the sun.
Hermione felt that Artois' mood tonight echoed his mood at Frisio's, and suddenly she thought once more of
the visitors' book and of what he had written there, surely in a moment of almost heated impulse. And as she
thought of it she was moved to speak of her thought. She had so many secret reserves from Emile now that
this one she could dispense with.
"You remember that night when I met you on the sea?" she said to him.
He looked away from Vere and answered:
"Yes. What about it?"
"When I was at the Scoglio di Frisio I looked again over that wonderful visitors' book."
"Did you?"
"Yes. And I saw what you had written."
Their eyes met. She wondered if by the expression in hers he divined why she had made that expedition,
moved by what expectation, by what curiosity. She could tell nothing by his face, which was calm and
inscrutable.
After an instant's pause he said:
"Do you know from whom those words come?"
"No. Are they your own?"
"Victor Hugo's. Do you like them?"
But her eyes were asking him a question, and he saw it.
"What is it?" he said.
"Why did you write them?" she said.
"I had to write something. You made me."
"Vere suggested it first."
He looked again at Vere, but only for a moment. She was laughing at something the Marchesino was saying.
"Did she?Oh! Take some of that salade a la Russe. I gave the chef the recipe for it.Did she?"
"Don't you remember?"
"Those words were in my head. I put them down."
"Are you fond of them?"
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Her restless curiosity was still quite unsatisfied.
"I don't know. But one has puzzled about conscience. Hasn't one?"
He glanced at the Marchesino, who was bending forward to Vere, and illustrating something he was telling
her by curious undulating gestures with both hands that suggested a flight.
"At least some of us have," he continued. "And some never have, and never will."
Hermione understood the comment on their fellowguest.
"Do you think that saying explains it satisfactorily?" she said.
"I believe sometimes we know a great deal more than we know we know," he answered. "That sounds like
some nonsense game with words, but it's the best way to put it. Conscience seems to speak out of the silence.
But there may be some one in the prompter's boxour secret knowledge."
"But is it knowledge of ourselves, or of others?"
"Which do you think?"
"Of ourselves, I suppose. I think we generally know far less of others than we believe ourselves to know."
She expressed his thought of her earlier in the evening.
"Probably. And nevertheless we may know things of them that we are not aware we knowtill after we have
instinctively acted on our knowledge."
Their eyes met again. Hermione felt in that moment as if he knew why she had given Vere the permission to
read his books.
But still she did not know whether he had written that sentence in the book at Frisio's carelessly, or prompted
by some violent impulse to express a secret thought or feeling of the moment.
"Things good or evil?" she said, slowly.
"Perhaps both."
The Marchesino burst into a laugh. He leaned back in his chair, shaking his head, and holding the table with
his two hands. His white teeth gleamed.
"What is the joke?" asked Artois.
Vere turned her head.
"Oh, nothing. It's too silly. I can't imagine why the Marchesino is so much amused by it."
Artois felt shut out. But when Vere and he had laughed over the tea table in a blessed community of happy
foolishness, who could have understood their mirth? He remembered how he had pitied the imagined
outsider.
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He turned again to Hermione, but such conversation as theirs, and indeed all serious conversation, now
seemed to him heavy, portentous, almost ludicrous. The young alone knew how to deal with life, chasing it as
a child chases a colored airball, and when it would sink, and fall and be inert, sending it with a gay blow
soaring once more towards the blue.
Perhaps Hermione had a similar thought, or perhaps she knew of it in him. At any rate, for a moment she had
nothing to say. Nor had he. And so, tacitly excluded, as it seemed, from the merriment of the young ones, the
two elders remained looking towards each other in silence, sunk in a joint exile.
Presently Artois began to fidget with his bread. He pulled out some of the crumb from his roll, and pressed it
softly between his large fingers, and scattered the tiny fragments mechanically over the table cloth near his
plate. Hermione watched his moving hand. The Marchesino was talking now. He was telling Vere about a
paperchase at Capodimonte, which had started from the Royal Palace. His vivacity, his excitement made a
paperchase seem one of the most brilliant and remarkable events in a brilliant and remarkable world. He had
been the hare. And such a hare! Since hares were first created and placed in the Garden of Eden there had
been none like unto him. He told of his cunning exploits.
The fingers of Artois moved faster. Hermione glanced at his face. Its massiveness looked heavy. The large
eyes were fixed upon the table cloth. His hand just then was more expressive. And as she glanced at it again
something very pitiful awoke in her, something pitiful for him and for herself. She felt that very often lately
she had misunderstood himshe had been confused about him. But now, in this moment, she understood
him perfectly.
He pulled some more crumb out of his roll.
She was fascinated by his hand. Much as it had written, it had never written more clearly on paper than it was
writing now.
But suddenly she felt as if she could not look at it any more, as if it was intolerable to look at it. And she
turned towards the open window.
"What is it?" Artois asked her. "Is there too much air for you?"
"Oh no. It isn't that. I was only thinking what a quantity of people pass by, and wondering where they were
all going, and what they were all thinking and hoping. I don't know why they should have come into my head
just then. I suppose it will soon be time for us to start for the festa."
"Yes. We'll have coffee in my sittingroomwhen they are ready." He looked again at Vere and the
Marchesino.
"Have we all finished? I thought we would go and have coffee up stairs. What do you say, Vere?"
He spoke cheerfully.
"Yes; do let us."
They all got up. As Hermione and Vere moved towards the door Artois leaned out of the window for a
moment.
"You needn't be afraid. There will be no storm tonight, Emilio!" said the Marchesino, gaylyalmost
satirically.
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"Noit's quite fine."
Artois drew in. "We ought to have a perfect evening," he added, quietly.
CHAPTER XXIX
"How are we going to drive to the Carmine?" said Artois to Hermione, when she had taken her cloak and was
ready to go down.
"We must have two carriages."
"Yes."
"Vere and I will go in one, with Gaspare on the box, and you and the Marchese can follow in the other."
"Signora," said the Marchesino, drawing on his white gloves, "you still do not trust us? You are still
determined to take the watchdog? It is cruel of you. It shows a great want of faith in Emilio and in me."
"Gaspare must come."
The Marchesino said no more, only shrugged his shoulders with an air of humorous resignation which hid a
real chagrin. He knew how watchful a Sicilian can be, how unyielding in attention to his mistresses, if he
thinks they need protection.
But perhaps this Gaspare was to be bribed.
Instinctively the Marchesino put his hand into his waistcoat pocket, and began to feel the money there.
Yes, there was a gold piece.
"Come, Panacci!"
Emilio's hand touched his shoulder, and he followed the ladies out of the room.
Emilio had called him "Panacci." That sounded almost like a declaration of war. Well, he was ready. At
dinner his had been the triumph, and Emilio knew it. He meant his triumph to be a greater one before the
evening was over. The reappearance of the gay child in Vere, grafted upon the comprehending woman whom
he had seen looking out of her eyes on the day of his last visit to the island, had put the finishing touch to the
amorous madness of the Marchesino. He dreamed Vere an accomplished coquette. He believed that her
cruelty on the night of his serenade, that her coldness and avoidance of him on the day of the lunch, were
means devised to increase his ardor. She had been using Emilio merely as an instrument. He had been a
weapon in her girlish hands. That was the suitable fate of the oldusefulness.
The Marchesino was in a fever of anticipation. Possibly Vere would play into his hands when they got to the
festa. If not, he must manage things for himself. The Signora, of course, would make Emilio her escort. Vere
would naturally fall to him, the Marchesino.
But there was the fifththis Gaspare.
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When they came out to the pavement the Marchesino cast a searching glance at the Sicilian, who was taking
the cloaks, while the two carriages which had been summoned by the hotel porter were rattling up from the
opposite side of the way. Gaspare had saluted him, but did not look at him again. When Hermione and Vere
were in the first carriage, Gaspare sprang on to the box as a matter of course. The Marchesino went to tell the
coachman which way to drive to the Carmine. When he had finished he looked at Gaspare and said:
"There will be a big crowd. Take care the Signora does not get hurt in it."
He laid a slight emphasis on the word "Signora," and put his hand significantly into his waistcoatpocket.
Gaspare regarded him calmly.
"Va bene, Signor Marchese," he replied. "I will take care of the Signora and the Signorina."
The Marchesino turned away and jumped into the second carriage with Emilio, realizing angrily that his gold
piece would avail him nothing.
As they drove off Artois drew out some small square bits of paper.
"Here's your ticket for the enclosure," he said, giving one to the Marchesino.
"Grazie. But we must walk about. We must show the ladies the fun in the Mercato. It is very dull to stay all
the evening in the enclosure."
"We will do whatever they like, of course."
"Keep close to the other carriage! Do you hear?" roared the Marchesino to the coachman.
The man jerked his head, cracked his whip, pulled at his horse's mouth. They shot forward at a tremendous
pace, keeping close by the sea at first, then turning to the left up the hill towards the Piazza del Plebiscito.
The Marchesino crossed his legs, folded his arms, and instinctively assumed the devilmaycare look
characteristic of the young Neapolitan when driving through his city.
"Emilio," he said, after a moment, looking at Artois out of the corners of his eyes without moving his head,
"when I was at the island the other day, do you know whom I saw in the house?"
"No."
"A girl of the town. A bad girl. You understand?"
"Do you mean a girl with a wounded cheek?"
"Yes. How can the Signora have her there?"
"The Signora knows all about her," said Artois, dryly.
"She thinks so!"
"What do you mean?"
"If the Signora really knew, could she take such a girl to live with the Signorina?"
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The conversation was rapidly becoming insupportable to Artois.
"This is not our affair," he said.
"I do not say it is. But still, as I am a Neapolitan, I think it a pity that some one does not explain to the
Signora how impossible"
"Caro mio!" Artois exclaimed, unable to endure his companion's obvious inclination to pose as a protector of
Vere's innocence. "English ladies do not care to be governed. They are not like your charming women. They
are independent and do as they choose. You had much better not bother your head about what happens on the
island. Very soon the Signora may be leaving it and going away from Naples."
"Davvero?"
The Marchesino turned right round in the little carriage, forgetting his pose.
"Davvero? No. I don't believe it. You play with me. You wish to frighten me."
"To frighten you! I don't understand what you mean. What can it matter to you? You scarcely know these
ladies."
The Marchesino pursed his lips together. But he only said, "Si, si." He did not mean to quarrel with Emilio
yet. To do so might complicate matters with the ladies.
As they entered the Via del Popolo, and drew near to the Piazza di Masaniello, his excitement increased,
stirred by the sight of the crowds of people, who were all streaming in the same direction past the iron rails of
the port, beyond which, above the long and ghostly sheds that skirt the sea, rose the tapering masts of vessels
lying at anchor. Plans buzzed in his head. He called upon all his shrewdness, all his trickiness of the South.
He had little doubt of his capacity to outmanoeuvre Emilio and the Signora. And if the Signorina were
favorable to him, he believed that he might even get the better of Gaspare, in whom he divined a watchful
hostility. But would the Signorina help him? He could not tell. How can one ever tell what a girl will do at a
given moment?
With a jerk the carriage drew up beneath the walls of the prison that frowns upon the Piazza di Masaniello,
and the Marchesino roused himself to the battle and sprang out. The hum of the great crowd already
assembled, the brilliance of the illuminations that lit up the houses, Nuvolo's tower, the façade of the Church
of the Carmine, and the adjoining monastery, the loud music of the band that was stationed in the Kiosk
before the enclosure, stirred his young blood. As he went quickly to help Hermione and Vere, he shot a
glance almost of contempt at the gray hairs of Emilio, who was getting out of the carriage slowly. Artois saw
the glance and understood it. For a moment he stood still. Then he paid the coachman and moved on,
encompassed by the masses of people who were struggling gayly towards the centre of the square, intent
upon seeing the big doll that was enthroned there dressed as Masaniello.
"We had better go into the enclosure. Don't you think so?" he said to Hermione.
"If you like. I am ready for anything."
"We can walk about afterwards. Perhaps the crush will be less when the fireballoon has gone up."
The Marchesino said nothing, and they gained the enclosure, where rows of little chairs stood on the short
grass that edges the side of the prison that looks upon the Piazza. Gaspare, who on such occasions was full of
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energy and singularly adroit, found them good places in a moment.
"Ecco, Signora! Ecco, Signorina!"
"Madre, may I stand on my chair?"
"Of course, Signorina. Look! Others are standing!"
Gaspare helped his Padroncina up, then took his place beside her, and stood like a sentinel. Artois had never
liked him better than at that moment. Hermione, who looked rather tired, sat down on her chair. The loud
music of the band, the lines of fire that brought the discolored houses into sharp relief, and that showed her
with a distinctness that was fanciful and lurid the moving faces of hundreds of strangers, the dull roar of
voices, and the heat that flowed from the human bodies, seemed to mingle, to become concrete, to lie upon
her spirit like a weight. Artois stood by her, leaning on his stick and watching the crowd with his steady eyes.
The Marchesino was looking up at Vere, standing in a position that seemed to indicate a longing that she
should rest her hand upon his shoulder.
"You will fall, Signorina!" he said. "Be careful. Let me"
"I am quite safe."
But she dropped one hand to the shoulder of Gaspare.
The Marchesino moved, almost as if he were about to go away. Then he lit a cigarette and spoke to
Hermione.
"You look tired, Signora. You feel the heat. It is much fresher outside, when one is walking. Here, under the
prison walls, it is always like a furnace in summer. It is unwholesome. It puts one into a fever."
Hermione looked at him, and saw a red spot burning on each side of his face near his cheekbones.
"Perhaps it would be better to walk," she said, doubtfully.
Her inclination was for movement, for her fatigue was combined with a sensation of great restlessness.
"What do you say, Vere?" she added.
"Oh, I should love to go among the people and see everything," she answered, eagerly.
The Marchesino's brow cleared.
"Let us go, Emilio! You hear what the Signorina says."
"Very well," said Artois.
His voice was reluctant, even cold. Vere glanced at him quickly.
"Would you rather stay here, Monsieur Emile?" she said.
"No, Vere, no. Let us go and see the fun."
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He smiled at her.
"We must keep close together," he added, looking at the Marchesino. "The crowd is tremendous."
"But they are all in good humor," he answered, carelessly. "We Neapolitans, we are very gay, that is true, but
we do not forget our manners when we have a festa. There is nothing to fear. This is the best way out. We
must cross the Mercato. The illuminations of the streets beyond are always magnificent. The Signorina shall
walk down paths of fire, but she shall not be burned."
He led the way with Vere, going in front to disarm the suspicion which he saw plainly lurking in Emilio's
eyes. Artois followed with Hermione, and Gaspare came last. The exit from the enclosure was difficult, as
many people were pouring in through the narrow opening, and others, massed together outside the wooden
barrier, were gazing at the seated women within; but at length they reached the end of the Piazza, and caught
a glimpse of the Masaniello doll, which faced a portrait of the Madonna del Carmine framed in fire. Beyond,
to the right, above the heads of the excited multitude, rose the palepink globe of the fireballoon, and as for
a moment they stood still to look at it the band struck up a sonorous march, the balloon moved sideways,
swayed, heeled over slightly like a sailingyacht catching the breeze beyond the harbor bar, recovered itself,
and lifted the blazing car above the gesticulating arms of the people. A long murmur followed it as it glided
gently away, skirting the prodigious belfry with the apparent precaution of a living thing that longed for, and
sought, the dim freedom of the sky. The children instinctively stretched out their arms to it. All faces were
lifted towards the stars, as if a common aspiration at that moment infected the throng, a universal, though
passing desire to be free of the earth, to mount, to travel, to be lost in the great spaces that encircle terrestrial
things. At the doors of the trattorie the people, who had forsaken their snails, stood to gaze, many of them
holding glasses of white wine in their hands. The spighe arrosto, the watermelons, were for a moment
forgotten on the stalls of their vendors, who ceased from shouting to the passersby. There was a silence in
which was almost audible the human wish for wings. Presently the balloon, caught by some vagrant current
of air, began to travel abruptly, and more swiftly, sideways, passing over the city towards its centre. At once
the crowd moved in the same direction. Aspiration was gone. A violence of children took its place, and the
instinct to follow where the blazing toy led. The silence was broken. People called and gesticulated, laughed
and chattered. Then the balloon caught fire from the brazier beneath it. A mass of flames shot up. A roar
broke from the crowd and it pressed more fiercely onward, each unit of it longing to see where the wreck
would fall. Already the flames were sinking towards the city.
"Where are Vere and the Marchesino?"
Hermione had spoken. Artois, whose imagination had been fascinated by the instincts of the crowd, and
whose intellect had been chained to watchfulness during its strange excitement, looked sharply round.
"Vereisn't she here?"
He saw at once that she was gone. But he saw, too, that Gaspare was no longer with them. The watchdog
had been more faithful than he.
"They must be close by," he added. "The sudden movement separated us, no doubt."
"Yes. Gaspare has vanished too!"
"With them," Artois said.
He spoke with an emphasis that was almost violent.
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"Butyou didn't see" began Hermione.
"Don't you know Gaspare yet?" he asked.
Their eyes met. She was startled by the expression in his.
"You don't think" she began.
She broke off.
"I think Gaspare knows his Southerner," Artois replied. "We must look for them. They are certain to have
gone with the crowd."
They followed the people into the Mercato. The burning balloon dropped down and disappeared.
"It has fallen into the Rettifilo!" cried a young man close to them.
"Macche!" exclaimed his companion.
"I will bet you five lire"
He gesticulated furiously.
"We shall never find them," Hermione said.
"We will try to find them."
His voice startled her now, as his eyes had startled her. A man in the crowd pressed against her roughly.
Instinctively she caught hold of Artois' arm.
"Yes, you had better take it," he said.
"Oh, it was only"
"No, take it."
And he drew her hand under his arm.
The number of people in the Mercato was immense, but it was possible to walk on steadily, though slowly.
Now that the balloon had vanished the crowd had forgotten it, and was devoting itself eagerly to the pleasures
of the bar. In the tall and barracklike houses candles gleamed in honor of Masaniello. The streets that led
away towards the city's heart were decorated with arches of little lamps, with columns and chains of lights,
and the pedestrians passing through them looked strangely black in this great frame of fire. From the Piazza
before the Carmine the first rocket rose, and, exploding, showered its golden rain upon the picture of the
Virgin.
"Perhaps they have gone back into the Piazza."
Hermione spoke after a long silence, during which they had searched in vain. Artois stood still and looked
down at her. His face was very stern.
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"We sha'n't find them," he said.
"In this crowd, of course, it is difficult, but"
"We sha'n't find them."
"At any rate, Gaspare is with them."
"How do you know that?"
The expression in his face frightened her.
"But you said you were sure"
"Panacci was too clever for us; he may have been too clever for Gaspare."
Hermione was silent for a moment. Then she said:
"You surely don't think the Marchese is wicked?"
"He is young, he is Neapolitan, and tonight he is mad. Vere has made him mad."
"But Vere was only gay at dinner as any child"
"Don't think I am blaming Vere. If she has fascination, she cannot help it."
"What shall we do?"
"Will you let me put you into a cab? Will you wait in my room at the hotel until I come back with Vere? I can
search for her better alone. I will find herif she is here."
Their eyes met steadily as he finished speaking, and he saw, or thought he saw, in hers a creeping menace, as
if she had the intention to attack or to defy him.
"I am Vere's mother," she said.
"Let me take you to a cab, Hermione."
He spoke coldly, inexorably. This moment of enforced inactivity was a very difficult one for him. And the
violence that was blazing within him made him fear that if Hermione did not yield to his wish he might lose
his selfcontrol.
"You can do nothing," he added.
Her eyes left his, her lips quivered. Then she said:
"Take me, then."
She did not look at him again until she was in a cab and Artois had told the driver to go to the Hotel Royal.
Then she glanced at him with a strange expression of acute selfconsciousness which he had never before
seen on her face.
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"You don't believe thatthat there is any danger to Vere?" she said, in a low voice. "You cannot believe
that."
"I don't know."
She leaned forward, and her face changed.
"Go and bring her back to me."
The cabman drove off, and Artois was lost in the crowd.
He never knew how long his search lasted, how long he heard the swish and the bang of rockets, the
vehement music of the band, the cries and laughter of the people, the sound of footsteps as if a world were
starting on some pilgrimage; how long he saw the dazzling avenues of fire stretching away into the city's
heart; how long he looked at the faces of strangers, seeking Vere's face. He was excessively conscious of
almost everything except of time. It might have been two hours later, or much less, when he felt a hand upon
his arm, turned round, and saw Gaspare beside him.
"Where is the Signora?"
"Gone to the hotel? And the Signorina?"
Gaspare looked at Artois with a sort of heavy gloom, then looked down to the ground.
"You have lost her?"
"Si."
There was a dulness of fatalism in his voice.
Artois did not reproach him.
"Did you lose them when the balloon went up?" he asked.
"Macche! It was not the balloon!" Gaspare said, fiercely.
"What was it?"
Artois felt suddenly that Gaspare had some perfect excuse for his inattention.
"Some one spoke to me. When Iwhen I had finished the Signorina and that Signore were gone."
"Some one spoke to you. Who was it?"
"It was Ruffo."
Artois stared at Gaspare.
"Ruffo! Was he alone?"
"No, Signore."
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"Who was with him?"
"His mother was with him."
"His mother. Did you speak to her?"
"Si, Signore."
There was a silence between them. It was broken by a sound of bells.
"Signore, it is midnight."
Artois drew out his watch quickly. The hands pointed to twelve o'clock. The crowd was growing thinner, was
surely melting away.
"We had better go to the hotel," Artois said. "Perhaps they are there. If they are not there"
He did not finish the sentence. They found a cab and drove swiftly towards the Marina. All the time the little
carriage rattled over the stony streets Artois expected Gaspare to speak to him, to tell him more, to tell him
something tremendous. He felt as if the Sicilian were beset by an imperious need to break a long reserve. But,
if it were so, this reserve was too strong for its enemy. Gaspare's lips were closed. He did not say a word till
the cabman drew up before the hotel.
As Artois got out he knew that he was terribly excited. The hall was almost dark, and the night concierge
came from his little room on the right of the door to turn on the light and accompany Artois to the lift.
"There is a lady waiting in your room, Signore," he said.
Artois, who was walking quickly towards the lift, stopped. He looked at Gaspare.
"A lady!" he said.
"Shall I go back to the Piazza, Signore?"
He half turned towards the swing door.
"Wait a minute. Come upstairs first and see the Signora."
The lift ascended. As Artois opened the door of his sittingroom he heard a woman's dress rustle, and
Hermione stood before them.
"Vere?" she said.
She laid her hand on his arm.
"Gaspare!"
There was a sound of reproach in her voice. She took her hand away from Artois.
"Gaspare?" she repeated, interrogatively.
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"Signora!" he answered, doggedly.
He did not lift his eyes to hers.
"You have lost the Signorina?"
"Si, Signora."
He attempted no excuse, he expressed no regret.
"Gaspare!" Hermione said.
Suddenly Artois put his hand on Gaspare's shoulder. He said nothing, but his touch told the Sicilian
muchtold him how he was understood, how he was respected, by this man who had shared his silence.
"We thought they might be here," Artois said.
"They are not here."
Her voice was almost hard, almost rebuking. She was still standing in the doorspace.
"I will go back and look again, Signora."
"Si," she said.
She turned back into the room. Artois held out his hand to Gaspare:
"Signore?"
Gaspare looked surprised, hesitating, then moved. He took the out stretched hand, grasped it violently, and
went away.
Artois shut the sittingroom door and went towards Hermione.
"You are staying?" she said.
By her intonation he could not tell whether she was glad or almost angrily astonished.
"They may come here immediately," he said. "I wish to see Panacci when he comes."
She looked at him quickly.
"It must be an accident," she said. "I can'tI won't believe thatno one could hurt Vere."
He said nothing.
"No one could hurt Vere," she repeated.
He went out on to the balcony and stood there for two or three minutes, looking down at the sea and at the
empty road. She did not follow him, but sat down upon the sofa near the writingtable. Presently he turned
round.
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"Gaspare has gone."
"It would have been better if he had never come!"
"Hermione," he said, "has it come to this, that I must defend Gaspare to you?"
"I think Gaspare might have kept with Vere, ought to have kept with Vere."
Artois felt a burning desire to make Hermione understand the Sicilian, but he only said, gently:
"Some day, perhaps, you will know Gaspare's character better, you will understand all this."
"I can't understand it now. Butoh, if Vere No, that's impossible, impossible!"
She spoke with intense vehemence.
"Some things cannot happen," she exclaimed, with a force that seemed to be commanding destiny.
Artois said nothing. And his apparent calm seemed to punish her, almost as if he struck her with a whip.
"Why don't you speak?" she said.
She felt almost confused by his silence.
He went out again to the balcony, leaned on the railing and looked over. She felt that he was listening with
his whole nature for the sound of wheels. She felt that she heard him listening, that she heard him demanding
the sound. And as she looked at his dark figure, beyond which she saw the vagueness of night and some stars,
she was conscious of the life in him as she had never been conscious of it before, she was conscious of all his
manhood terribly awake.
That was for Vere.
A quarter of an hour went by. Artois remained always on the balcony, and scarcely moved. Hermione
watched him, and tried to learn a lesson; tried to realize without bitterness and horror that in the heart of man
everything has been planted, and that therefore nothing which grows there should cause too great amazement,
too great condemnation, or the absolute withdrawal of pity; tried to face something which must completely
change her life, sweeping away more than mere illusions, sweeping away a long reverence which had been
well founded, and which she had kept very secret in her heart, replacing its vital substance with a pale
shadow of compassion.
She watched him, and she listened for the sound of wheels, until at last she could bear it no longer.
"Emile, what are we to do? What can we do?" she said, desperately.
"Hush!" he said.
He held up his hand. They both listened and heard far off the noise of a carriage rapidly approaching. He
looked over the road. The carriage rattled up. She heard it stop, and saw him bend down. Then suddenly he
drew himself up, turned, and came into the room.
"They have come," he said.
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He went to the door and opened it, and stood by it.
And his face was terrible.
CHAPTER XXX
Two minutes later there was the sound of steps coming quickly down the uncarpeted corridor, and Vere
entered, followed, but not closely, by the Marchesino. Vere went up at once to her mother, without even
glancing at Artois.
"I am so sorry, Madre," she said, quietly. "Butbut it was not my fault."
The Marchesino had paused near the door, as if doubtful of Vere's intentions. Now he approached Hermione,
pulling off his white gloves.
"Signora," he said, in a hard and steady voice, but smiling boyishly, "I fear I am the guilty one. When the
balloon went up we were separated from you by the crowd, and could not find you immediately. The
Signorina wished to go back to the enclosure. Unfortunately I had lost the tickets, so that we should not have
been readmitted. Under these circumstances I thought the best thing was to show the Signorina the
illuminations, and then to come straight back to the hotel. I hope you have not been distressed. The Signorina
was of course perfectly safe with me."
"Thank you, Marchese," said Hermione, coldly. "Emile, what are we to do about Gaspare?"
"Gaspare?" asked Vere.
"He has gone back to the Piazza to search for you again."
"Oh!"
She flushed, turned away, and went up to the window. Then she hesitated, and finally stepped out on to the
balcony.
"You had better spend the night in the hotel," said Artois.
"But we have nothing!"
"The housemaid can find you what is necessary in the morning."
"As to our clothesthat doesn't matter. Perhaps it will be the best plan."
Artois rang the bell. They waited in silence till the night porter came.
"Can you give these two ladies rooms for the night?" said Artois. "It is too late for them to go home by boat,
and their servant has not come back yet."
"Yes, sir. The ladies can have two very good rooms."
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"Goodnight, Emile," said Hermione. "Goodnight, Marchese. Vere!"
Vere came in from the balcony.
"We are going to sleep here, Vere. Come!"
She went out.
"Goodnight, Monsieur Emile," Vere said to Artois, without looking at him.
She followed her mother without saying another word.
Artois looked after them as they went down the corridor, watched Vere's thin and girlish figure until she
turned the corner near the staircase, walking slowly and, he thought, as if she were tired and depressed.
During this moment he was trying to get hold of his own violence, to make sure of his selfcontrol. When the
sound of the footsteps had died completely away he drew back into the room and shut the door.
The Marchesino was standing near the window. When he saw the face of Artois he sat down in an armchair
and put his hat on the floor.
"You don't mind if I stay for a few minutes, Emilio?" he said. "Have you anything to drink? I am thirsty after
all this walking in the crowd."
Artois brought him some Nocera and lemons.
"Do you want brandy, whiskey?"
"No, no. Grazie."
He poured out the Nocera gently, and began carefully to squeeze some lemonjuice into it, holding the fruit
lightly in his strong fingers, and watching the drops fall with a quiet attention.
"Where have you been tonight?"
The Marchesino looked up.
"In the Piazza di Masaniello."
"Where have you been?"
"I tell youthe Piazza, the Mercato, down one or two streets to see the illuminations. What's the matter, caro
mio? Are you angry because we lost you in the crowd?"
"You intended to lose us in the crowd before we left the hotel tonight."
"Not at all, amico mio. Not at all."
His voice hardened again, the furrows appeared on his forehead.
"Now you are lying," said Artois.
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The Marchesino got up and stood in front of Artois. The ugly, catlike look had come into his face, changing
it from its usual boyish impudence to a hardness that suggested age. At that moment he looked much older
than he was.
"Be careful, Emilio!" he said. "I am Neapolitan, and I do not allow myself to be insulted."
His gray eyes contracted.
"You did not mean to get lost with the Signorina?" said Artois.
"One leaves such things to destiny."
"Destiny! Well, tonight it is your destiny to go out of the Signorina's life forever."
"How dare you command me? How dare you speak for these ladies?"
Suddenly Artois went quite white, and laid his hand on the Marchesino's arm.
"Where have you been? What have you been doing all this time?" he said.
Questions blazed in his eyes. His hand closed more firmly on the Marchesino.
"Where did you take that child? What did you say to her? What did you dare to say?"
"I! And you?" said the Marchesino, sharply.
He threw out his hand towards the face of Artois. "And youyou!" he repeated.
"I?"
"Yesyou! What have you said to her? Where have you taken her? I at least am young. My blood speaks to
me. I am natural, I am passionate. I know what I am, what I want; I know it; I say it; I am sincere. II am
ready to go naked into the sun before the whole world, and say, 'There! There! This is Isidoro Panacci; and he
is thisand thisand this! Like it or hate itthat does not matter! It is not his fault. He is like that. He is
made like that. He is meant to be like that, and he is thathe is that!' Do you hear? That is what I am ready
to do. But youyou! Ah, Madonna! Ah, Madre benedetta!"
He threw up both his hands suddenly, looked at the ceiling and shook his head sharply from side to side.
Then he slapped his hands gently and repeatedly against his knees, and a grim and almost venerable look
came into his mobile face.
"The great worker! The man of intellect! The man who is above the follies of that little Isidoro Panacci, who
loves a beautiful girl, and who is proud of loving her, and who knows that he loves her, that he wants her, that
he wishes to take her! Stand still!"he suddenly hissed out the words. "The man with the white hairs who
might have had many children of his own, but who prefers to play papacaro papa, Babbo bello!to the
child of another on a certain little island. Ah, buon Dio! The wonderful writer, respected and admired by all;
by whose side the little Isidoro seems only a small boy from college, about whom nobody need bother! How
he is loved, and how he is trusted on the island! Nobody must come there but he and those whom he wishes.
He is to order, to arrange all. The little Isidorohe must not come there. He must not know the ladies. He is
nothing; but he is wicked. He loves pleasure. He loves beautiful girls! Wicked, wicked Isidoro! Keep him
out! Keep him away! But the great writerwith the white hairs everything is allowed to him because he is
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Caro Papa. He may teach the Signorina. He may be alone with her. He may take her out at night in the
boat."His cheeks were stained with red and his eyes glittered. "And when the voice of that wicked little
Isidoro is heard Quick! Quick! To the cave! Let us escape! Let us hide where it is dark, and he will never
find us! Let us make him think we are at Nisida! Hush! the boat is passing. He is deceived! He will search all
night till he is tired! Ahahah! That is good! And now back to the islandquick! before he finds
out!"He thrust out his arm towards Artois."And that is my friend!" he exclaimed. "He who calls himself
the friend of the little wicked Isidoro. P!"He turned his head and spat on to the balcony."Gran Dio!
And this whitehaired Babbo! He steals into the Galleria at night to meet Maria Fortunata! He puts a girl of
the town to live with the Signorina upon the island, to teach her"
"Stop!" said Artois.
"I will not stop!" said the Marchesino, furiously. "To teach the Signorina all the"
Artois lifted his hand.
"Do you want me to strike you on the mouth?" he said.
"Strike me!"
Artois looked at him with a steadiness that seemed to pierce.
"Thentake care, Panacci. You are losing your head."
"And you have lost yours!" cried the Marchesino. "You, with your white hairs, you are mad. You are mad
about the 'child.' You play papa, and all the time you are mad, and you think nobody sees it. But every one
sees it, every one knows it. Every one knows that you are madly in love with the Signorina."
Artois had stepped back.
"Iin love!" he said.
His voice was contemptuous, but his face had become flushed, and his hands suddenly clinched themselves.
"What! you play the hypocrite even with yourself! Ah, we Neapolitans, we may be shocking; but at least we
are sincere! You do not know! then I will tell you. You love the Signorina madly, and you hate me because
you are jealous of mebecause I am young and you are old. I know it; the Signora knows it; that
SicilianGasparehe knows it! And now youyou know it!"
He suddenly flung himself down on the sofa that was behind him. Perspiration was running down his face,
and even his hands were wet with it.
Artois said nothing, but stood where he was, looking at the Marchesino, as if he were waiting for something
more which must inevitably come. The Marchesino took out his handkerchief, passed it several times quickly
over his lips, then rolled it up into a ball and shut it up in his left hand.
"I am young and you are old," he said. "And that is all the matter. You hate me, not because you think I am
wicked and might do the Signorina harm, but because I am young. You try to keep the Signorina from me
because I am young. You do not dare to let her know what youth is, really, really to know, really, really to
feel. Because, if once she did know, if once she did feel, if she touched the fire"he struck his hand down on
his breast"she would be carried away, she would be gone from you forever. You think, 'Now she looks up
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to me! She reverences me! She admires me! She worships me as a great man!' And if once, only once she
touched the fireah!"he flung out both his arms with a wide gesture, opened his mouth, then shut it,
showing his teeth like an animal."Away would go everythingeverything. She would forget your talent,
she would forget your fame, she would forget your thoughts, your books, she would forget you, do you
hear?all, all of you. She would remember only that you are old and she is young, and that, because of that,
she is not for you. And then"his voice dropped, became cold and serious and deadly, like the voice of one
proclaiming a stark truth"and then, if she understood you, what you feel, and what you wish, and how you
think of hershe would hate you! How she would hate you!"
He stopped abruptly, staring at Artois, who said nothing.
"Is it not true?" he said.
He got up, taking his hat and stick from the floor.
"You do not know! Wellthink! And you will know that it is true. A rivederci, Emilio!"
His manner had suddenly become almost calm. He turned away and went towards the door. When he reached
it he added:
"Tomorrow I shall ask the Signora to allow me to marry the Signorina."
Then he went out.
The gilt clock on the marble table beneath the mirror struck the half hour after one. Artois looked at it and at
his watch, comparing them. The action was mechanical, and unaccompanied by any thought connected with
it. When he put his watch back into his pocket he did not know whether its hands pointed to halfpast one or
not. He carried a light chair on to the balcony, and sat down there, crossing his legs, and leaning one arm on
the rail.
"If she touched the fire." Those words of the Marchesino remained in the mind of Artoiswhy, he did not
know. He saw before him a vision of a girl and of a flame. The flame aspired towards the girl, but the girl
hesitated, drew backthen waited.
What had happened during the hours of the Festa? Artois did not know. The Marchesino had told him
nothing, except that heArtoiswas madly in love with Vere. Monstrous absurdity! What trivial nonsense
men talked in moments of anger, when they desired to wound!
And tomorrow the Marchesino would ask Vere to marry him. Of course Vere would refuse. She had no
feeling for him. She would tell him so. He would be obliged to understand that for once he could not have his
own way. He would go out of Vere's life, abruptly, as he had come into it.
He would go. That was certain. But others would come into Vere's life. Fire would spring up round about her,
the fire of love of men for a girl who has fire within her, the fire of the love of youth for youth.
Youth! Artois was not by nature a sentimentalistand he was not a fool. He knew how to accept the
inevitable things life cruelly brings to men, without futile struggling, without contemptible pretence. Quite
calmly, quite serenely, he had accepted the snows of middle age. He had not secretly groaned or cursed,
railed against destiny, striven to defy it by travesty, as do many men. He had thought himself to be "above"
all thatuntil lately. But now, as he thought of the fire, he was conscious of an immense sadness that had in
it something of passion, or a regret that was, for a moment, desperate, bitter, that seared, that tortured, that
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was scarcely to be endured. It is terrible to realize that one is at a permanent disadvantage, which time can
only increase. And just then Artois felt that there was nothing, that there could never be anything, to
compensate any human being for the loss of youth.
He began to wonder about the people of the island. The Marchesino had spoken with a strange assurance. He
had dared to say:
"You love the Signorina. I know it; the Signora knows it; Gasparehe knows it. And now youyou know
it."
Was it possible that his deep interest in Vere, his paternal delight in her talent, in her growing charm, in her
grace and sweetness, could have been mistaken for something else, for the desire of man for woman? Vere
had certainly never for a moment misunderstood him. That he knew as surely as he knew that he was alive.
But Gaspare and Hermione? He fell into deep thought, and presently he was shaken by an emotion that was
partly disgust and partly anxiety. He got up from his chair and looked out into the night. The weather was
exquisitely still, the sky absolutely clear. The sea was like the calm that dwells surely in the breast of God.
Naples was sleeping in the silence. But he was terribly awake, and it began to seem to him as if he had,
perhaps, slept lately, slept too long. He was a lover of truth, and believed himself to be a discerner of it. The
Marchesino was but a thoughtless, passionate boy, headstrong, Pagan, careless of intellect, and immensely
physical. Yet it was possible that he had been enabled to see a truth which Artois had neither seen nor
suspected. Artois began to believe it possible, as he remembered many details of the conduct of Hermione
and of Gaspare in these last summer days. There had been something of condemnation sometimes in the
Sicilian's eyes as they looked into his. He had wondered what it meant. Had it meant that? And that night
in the garden with Hermione
With all the force and fixity of purpose he fastened his mind upon Hermione, letting Gaspare go.
If what the Marchesino had asserted were truenot thatbut if Hermione had believed it to be true, much
in her conduct that had puzzled Artois was made plain. Could she have thought that? Had she thought it? And
if she had? Always he was looking out to the stars, and to the ineffable calm of the sea. But now their
piercing brightness, and its large repose, only threw into a sort of blatant relief in his mind its consciousness
of the tumult of humanity. He saw Hermione involved in that tumult, and he saw himself. And Vere?
Was it possible that in certain circumstances Vere might hate him? It was strange that tonight Artois found
himself for the first time considering the Marchesino seriously, not as a boy, but as a man who perhaps knew
something of the world and of character better than he did. The Marchesino had said:
"If she understood youhow she would hate you."
But surely Vere and he understood each other very well.
He looked out over the sea steadily, as he wished, as he meant, to look now at himself, into his own heart and
nature, into his own life. Upon the sea, to the right and far off, a light was moving near the blackness of the
breakwater. It was the torch of a fishermanone of those eyes of the South of which Artois had thought. His
eyes became fascinated by it, and he watched it with intensity. Sometimes it was still. Then it travelled gently
onward, coming towards him. Then it stopped again. Firethe fire of youth. He thought of the torch as that;
as youth with its hot strength, its beautiful eagerness, its intense desires, its sparklike hopes, moving without
fear amid the dark mysteries of the world and of life; seeking treasure in the blackness, the treasure of an
answering soul, of a completing nature, of the desired and desirous heart, seeking its complement of
lovethe other fire.
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He looked far over the sea. But there was no other fire upon it.
And still the light came on.
And now he thought of it as Vere.
She was almost a child, but already her fire was being sought, longed for. And she knew it, and must be
searching, too, perhaps without definite consciousness of what she was doing, instinctively. She was
searching there in the blackness, and in her quest she was approaching him. But where he stood it was all
dark. There was no flame lifting itself up that could draw her flame to it. The fire that was approaching would
pass before him, would go on, exploring the night, would vanish away from his eyes. Elsewhere it would
seek the fire it needed, the fire it would surely find at last.
And so it was. The torch came on, passed softly by, slipped from his sight beneath the bridge of Castel dell'
Uovo.
When it had gone Artois felt strangely deserted and alone, strangely unreconciled with life. And he
remembered his conversation with Hermione in Virgil's Grotto; how he had spoken like one who scarcely
needed love, having ambition and having work to do, and being no longer young.
Tonight he felt that every one needs love firstthat all the other human needs come after that great
necessity. He had thought himself a man full of selfknowledge, full of knowledge of others. But he had not
known himself. Perhaps even now the real man was hiding somewhere, far down, shrinking away for fear of
being known, for fear of being dragged up into the light.
He sought for this man, almost with violence.
A weariness lay beneath his violence tonight, a physical fatigue such as he sometimes felt after work. It had
been produced, no doubt, by the secret anger he had so long controlled, the secret but intense curiosity which
was not yet satisfied, and which still haunted him and tortured him. This curiosity he now strove to expel
from his mind, telling himself that he had no right to it. He had wished to preserve Vere just as she was, to
keep her from all outside influences. And now he asked the real man why he had wished it? Had it been
merely the desire of the literary godfather to cherish a pretty and promising talent? Or had something of the
jealous spirit so brutally proclaimed to him that night by the Marchesino really entered into the desire? This
torturing curiosity to know what had happened at the Festa surely betrayed the existence of some such spirit.
He must get rid of it.
He began to walk slowly up and down the little balcony, turning every instant like a beast in a cage. It seemed
to him that the real man had indeed lain in hiding, but that he was coming forth reluctantly into the light.
Possibly he had been drifting without knowing it towards some nameless folly. He was not sure. Tonight he
felt uncertain of himself and of everything, almost like an ignorant child facing the world. And he felt almost
afraid of himself. Was it possible that he, holding within him so much of the knowledge, so much of pride,
could ever draw near to a crazy absurdity, a thing that the whole world would laugh at and despise? Had he
drawn near to it. Was he near it now?
He thought of all his recent intercourse with Vere, going back mentally to the day in spring when he arrived
in Naples. He followed the record day by day until he reached that afternoon when he had returned from
Paris, when he came to the island to find Vere alone, when she read to him her poems. Very pitilessly, despite
the excitement still raging within him, he examined that day, that night, recalling every incident, recalling
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every feeling the incidents of those hours had elicited from his heart. He remembered how vexed he had been
when Hermione told him of the engagement for the evening. He remembered the moments after the dinner,
his sensation of loneliness when he listened to the gay conversation of Vere and the Marchesino, his almost
irritable anxiety when she had left the restaurant and gone out to the terrace in the darkness. He had felt angry
with Panacci then. Had he not always felt angry with Panacci for intruding into the island life?
He followed the record of his intercourse with Vere until he reached the Festa of that night, until he reached
the moment in which he was pacing the tiny balcony while the night wore on towards dawn.
That was the record of himself with Vere.
He began to think of Hermione. How had all this that he had just been telling over in his mind affected her?
What had she been thinking of itfeeling about it? And Gaspare?
Even now Artois did not understand himself, did not know whither his steps might have tended had not the
brutality of the Marchesino roused him abruptly to this selfexamination, this selfconsideration. He did not
fully understand himself, and he wondered very much how Hermione and the Sicilian had understood
himjudged him.
Artois had a firm belief in the right instincts of sensitive but untutored natures, especially when linked with
strong hearts capable of deep love and long fidelity. He did not think that Gaspare would easily misread the
character or the desires of one whom he knew well. Hermione might. She was tremendously emotional and
impulsive, and might be carried away into error. But there was a steadiness in Gaspare which was impressive,
which could not be ignored.
Artois wondered very much what Gaspare had thought.
There was a tap at the door, and Gaspare came in, holding his soft hat in his hand, and looking tragic and very
hot and tired.
"Oh, Gaspare!" said Artois, coming in from the balcony, "they have come back."
"Lo so, Signore."
"And they are sleeping here for the night."
"Si, Signore."
Gaspare looked at him as if inquiring something of him.
"Sit down a minute," said Artois, "and have something to drink. You must spend the night here, too. The
porter will give you a bed."
"Grazie, Signore."
Gaspare sat down by the table, and Artois gave him some Nocera and lemonjuice. He would not have
brandy or whiskey, though he would not have refused wine had it been offered to him.
"Where have you been?" Artois asked him.
"Signore, I have been all over the Piazza di Masaniello and the Mercato. I have been through all the streets
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near by. I have been down by the harbor. And the Signorina?"
He stared at Artois searchingly above his glass. His face was covered with perspiration.
"I only saw her for a moment. She went to bed almost immediately."
"And that Signore?"
"He has gone home."
Gaspare was silent for a minute. Then he said:
"If I had met that Signore" He lifted his right hand, which was lying on the table, and moved it towards his
belt.
He sighed, and again looked hard at Artois.
"It is better that I did not meet him," he said, with naïve conviction. "It is much better. The Signorina is not
for him."
Artois was sitting opposite to him, with the table between them.
"The Signorina is not for him," repeated Gaspare, with a dogged emphasis.
His large eyes were full of a sort of cloudy rebuke and watchfulness. And as he met them Artois felt that he
knew what Gaspare had thought. He longed to say, "You are wrong. It is not so. It was never so." But he only
said:
"The Signore Marchese will know that tomorrow."
And as he spoke the words he was conscious of an immense sensation of relief which startled him. He was
too glad when he thought of the final dismissal of the Marchesino.
Gaspare nodded his head and put his glass to his lips. When he set it down again it was empty. He moved to
get up, but Artois detained him.
"And so you met Ruffo tonight?" he said.
Gaspare's expression completely changed. Instead of the almost cruel watcher, he became the one who felt
that he was watched.
"Si, Signore."
"Just when the balloon went up?"
"Si, Signore. They were beside me in the crowd."
"Was he alone with his mother?"
"Si, Signore. Quite alone."
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"Gaspare, I have seen Ruffo's mother."
Gaspare looked startled.
"Truly, Signore?"
"Yes. I saw her with him one day at the Mergellina. She was crying."
"Perhaps she is unhappy. Her husband is in prison."
"Because of Peppina."
"Si."
"And tonight you spoke to her for the first time?"
Artois laid a strong emphasis on the final words.
"Signore, I have never met her with Ruffo before."
The two men looked steadily at each other. A question that could not be evaded, a question that would break
like a hammer upon a mutual silence of years, was almost upon Artois' lips. Perhaps Gaspare saw it, for he
got up with determination.
"I am going to bed now, Signore. I am tired. Buona notte, Signore."
He took up his hat and went out.
Artois had not asked his question. But he felt that it was answered.
Gaspare knew. And he knew.
And Hermionedid Fate intend that she should know?
CHAPTER XXXI
It was nearly dawn when Artois fell asleep. He did not wake till past ten o'clock. The servant who brought his
breakfast handed him a note, and told him that the ladies of the island had just left the hotel with Gaspare. As
Artois took the note he was conscious of a mingled feeling of relief and disappointment. This swift, almost
hurried departure left him lonely, yet he could not have met Hermione and Vere happily in the light of
morning. Today he felt a selfconsciousness that was unusual in him, and that the keen eyes of women
could not surely fail to observe. He wanted a little time. He wanted to think quietly, calmly, to reach a
decision that he had not reached at night.
Hermione and Vere had a very silent voyage. Gaspare's tragic humor cast a cloud about his mistresses. He
had met them in the morning with a look of heavy, almost sullen scrutiny in his great eyes, which seemed to
develop into a definite demand for information. But he asked nothing. He made no allusion to the night
before. To Vere his manner was almost cold. When they were getting into the boat at Santa Lucia she said,
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with none of her usual simplicity and selfpossession, but like one making an effort which was repugnant:
"I'm very sorry about last night, Gaspare."
"It doesn't matter, Signorina."
"Did you get back very late?"
"I don't know, Signora. I did not look at the hour."
She looked away from him and out to sea.
"I am very sorry," she repeated.
And he again said:
"It doesn't matter, Signorina."
It was nearly noon when they drew near to the island. The weather was heavily hot, languidly hot even upon
the water. There was a haze hanging over the world in which distant objects appeared like unsubstantial
clouds, or dream things impregnated with a mystery that was mournful. The voice of a fisherman singing not
far off came to them like the voice of Fate, issuing from the ocean to tell them of the sadness that was the
doom of men. Behind them Naples sank away into the vaporous distance. Vesuvius was almost blotted out,
Capri an ethereal silhouette. And their little island, even when they approached it, did not look like the solid
land on which they had made a home, but like the vague shell of some substance that had been destroyed,
leaving its former abidingplace untenanted.
As they passed San Francesco Vere glanced at him, and Hermione saw a faint flush of red go over her face.
Directly the boat touched the rock she stepped ashore, and without waiting for her mother ran up the steps
and disappeared towards the house. Gaspare looked after her, then stared at his Padrona.
"Is the Signorina ill?" he asked.
"No, Gaspare. But I think she is tired today and a little upset. We had better take no notice of it."
"Va bene, Signora."
He busied himself in making fast the boat, while Hermione followed Vere.
In the afternoon about five, when Hermione was sitting alone in her room writing some letters, Gaspare
appeared with an angry and suspicious face.
"Signora," he said, "that Signore is here."
"What Signore? The Marchese!"
"Si, Signora."
Gaspare was watching his Padrona's face, and suddenly his own face changed, lightened, as he saw the look
that had come into her eyes.
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"I did not know whether you wished to see him"
"Yes, Gaspare, I will see him. You can let him in. Wait a moment. Where is the Signorina?"
"Up in her room, Signora."
"You can tell her who is here, and ask her whether she wishes to have tea in her room or not."
"Si, Signora."
Gaspare went out almost cheerfully. He felt that now he understood what his Padrona was feeling and what
she meant to do. She meant to do in her way what he wanted to do in his. He ran down the steps to the water
with vivacity, and his eyes were shining as he came to the Marchesino, who was standing at the edge of the
sea looking almost feverishly excited, but determined.
"The Signora will see you, Signor Marchese."
The words hit the Marchesino like a blow. He stared at Gaspare for a moment almost stupidly, and hesitated.
He felt as if this servant had told him something else.
"The Signora will see you," repeated Gaspare.
"Va bene," said the Marchesino.
He followed Gaspare slowly up the steps and into the drawingroom. It was empty. Gaspare placed a chair
for the Marchesino. And again the latter felt as if he had received a blow. He glanced round him and sat
down, while Gaspare went away. For about five minutes he waited.
When he had arrived at the island he had been greatly excited. He had felt full of an energy that was feverish.
Now, in this silence, in this pause during which patience was forced upon him, his excitement grew, became
fierce, dominant. He knew from Gaspare's way of speaking, from his action, from his whole manner, that his
fate had been secretly determined in that house, and that it was being rejoiced over. At first he sat looking at
the floor. Then he got up, went to the window, came back, stood in the middle of the room and glanced about
it. How pretty it was, with a prettiness that he was quite unaccustomed to. In his father's villa at Capodimonte
there was little real comfort. And he knew nothing of the cosiness of English houses. As he looked at this
room he felt, or thought he felt, Vere in it. He even made an effort scarcely natural to him, and tried to
imagine a home with Vere as its mistress.
Then he began to listen. Perhaps Emilio was in the house. Perhaps Emilio was talking now to the Signora,
was telling her what to do.
But he heard no sound of voices speaking.
No doubt Emilio had seen the Signora that morning in the hotel. No doubt there had been a consultation. And
probably at this consultation histhe Marchesino'sfate had been decided.
By Emilio?
At that moment the Marchesino actively, even furiously, hated his former friend.
There was a little noise at the door; the Marchesino turned swiftly, and saw Hermione coming in. He looked
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eagerly behind her. But the door shut. She was alone. She did not give her hand to him. He bowed, trying to
look calm.
"Goodafternoon, Signora."
Hermione sat down. He followed her example.
"I don't know why you wish to see me, after yesterday, Marchese," she said, quietly, looking at him with
steady eyes.
"Signora, pardon me, but I should have thought that you would know."
"What is it?"
"Signora, I am here to ask the great honor of your daughter the Signorina's hand in marriage. My father, to
whom"
But Hermione interrupted him.
"You will never marry my daughter, Marchese," she said.
A sudden red burned in her cheeks, and she leaned forward slightly, but very quickly, almost as if an impulse
had come to her to push the Marchesino away from her.
"But, Signora, I assure you that my family"
"It is quite useless to talk about it."
"But why, Signora?"
"My child is not for a man like you," Hermione said, emphasizing the first word.
A dogged expression came into the Marchesino's face, a fighting look that was ugly and brutal, but that
showed a certain force.
"I do not understand, Signora. I am like other men. What is the matter with me?"
He turned a little in his chair so that he faced her more fully.
"What is the matter with me, Signora?" he repeated, slightly raising his voice.
"I don't think you would be able to understand if I tried to tell you."
"Why not? You think me stupid, then?"
An angry fire shone in his eyes.
"Oh no, you are not stupid."
"Then I shall understand."
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Hermione hesitated. There was within her a hot impulse towards speech, towards the telling to this
selfsatisfied young Pagan her exact opinion of him. Yet was it worth while? He was going out of their lives.
They would see no more of him.
"I don't think it is necessary for me to tell you," she said.
"Perhaps there is nothing to tell because there is nothing the matter with me."
His tone stung her.
"I beg your pardon, Marchese. I think there is a good deal to tell."
"All I say is, Signora, that I am like other men."
He thrust forward his strong under jaw, showing his big, white teeth.
"There I don't agree with you. I am thankful to say I know many men who would not behave as you behaved
last night."
"But I have come to ask for the Signorina's hand!" he exclaimed.
"And you thinkyou dare to think that excuses your conduct!"
She spoke with a sudden and intense heat.
"Understand this, please, Marchese. If I gave my consent to your request, and sent for my daughter"
"Si! Si!" he said, eagerly, leaning forward in his chair.
"Do you suppose she would come near you?"
"Certainly."
"You think she would come near a man she will not even speak of?"
"What!"
"She won't speak of you. She has told me nothing about last night. That is why I know so much."
"She has notthe Signorina hasnot?"
He stopped. A smile went over his face. It was sufficiently obvious that he understood Vere's silence as
merely a form of deceit, a coquettish girl's cold secret from her mother.
"Signora, give me permission to speak to your daughter, and you will see whether it is youor Iwho
understands her best."
"Very well, Marchese."
Hermione rang the bell. It was answered by Gaspare.
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"Gaspare," said Hermione, "please go to the Signorina, tell her the Signor Marchese is here, and wishes very
much to see her before he goes."
Gaspare's face grew dark, and he hesitated by the door.
"Go, Gaspare, please."
He looked into his Padrona's face, and went out as if reassured. Hermione and the Marchese sat in silence
waiting for him to return. In a moment the door was reopened.
"Signora, I have told the Signorina."
"What did she say?"
Gaspare looked at the Marchese as he answered.
"Signora, the Signorina said to me, 'Please tell Madre that I cannot come to see the Signor Marchese.' "
"You can go, Gaspare."
He looked at the angry flush on the Marchesino's cheeks, and went out.
"Goodbye, Marchese."
Hermione got up. The Marchesino followed her example. But he did not go. He stood still for a moment in
silence. Then he lifted his head up with a jerk.
"Signora," he said, in a hard, uneven voice that betrayed the intensity of his excitement, "I see how it is. I
understand perfectly what is happening here. You think me bad. Well, I am like other men, and I am not
ashamed of itnot a bit. I am natural. I live according to my nature, and I do not come from your north, but
from Naplesfrom Naples." He threw out his arm, pointing at a window that looked towards the city. "If it
is bad to have the blood hot in one's veins and the fire hot in one's head and in one's heartvery well! I am
bad. And I do not care. I do not care a bit! But you think me a stupid boy. And I am not that. And I will show
you." He drew his fingers together, and bent towards her, slightly lowering his voice. "From the first, from
the very first moment, I have seen, I have understood all that is happening here. From the first I have
understood all that was against me"
"Marchese!"
"Signora, pardon me! You have spoken, the Signorina has spoken, and now it is for me to speak. It is my
right. I come here with an honorable proposal, and therefore I say I have a right"
He put his fingers inside his shirt collar and pulled it fiercely out from his throat.
"E il vecchio!" he exclaimed, with sudden passion. "E il maledetto vecchio!"
Hermione's face changed. There had been in it a firm look, a calmness of strength. But now, at his last words,
the strength seemed to shrink. It dwindled, it faded out of her, leaving her not collapsed, but cowering, like a
woman who crouches down in a corner to avoid a blow.
"It is he! It is he! He will not allow it, and he is master here."
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"Marchese"
"I say he is masterhe is masterhe has always been master here!"
He came a step towards Hermione, moving as a man sometimes moves instinctively when he is determined to
make something absolutely clear to one who does not wish to understand.
"And you know it, and every one knows itevery one. When I was in the sea, when I saw the Signorina for
the first time, I did not know who she was, where she lived; I did not know anything about her. I went to tell
my friend about hermy friend, you understand, whom I trusted, to whom I told everything!I went to
him. I described the Signora, the Signorina, the boat to him. He knew who the ladies were; he knew directly. I
saw it in his face, in his manner. But what did he say? That he did not know, that he knew nothing. I was not
to come to the island. No one was to come to the island but he. So he meant. But II was sharper than he, I
who am so stupid! I took him to fish by night. I brought him to the island. I made him introduce me to you, to
the Signorina. That night I made him. You remember? Well, thenever since that night all is changed
between us. Ever since that night he is my enemy. Ever since that night he suspects me, he watches me, he
hides from me, he hates me. Oh, he tries to conceal it. He is a hypocrite. But I, stupid as I am, I see it all. I see
what he is, what he wants, I see allall that is in his mind and heart. For this noble old man, so respected,
with the white hairs and the great brain, what is he, what does he do? He goes at night to the Galleria. He
consults with Maria Fortunata, she who is known to all Naples, she who is the aunt of that girlthat girl of
the town and of the bad life, whom you have taken to be your servant here. You have taken her because
hehe has told you to take her. He has put her here"
"Marchese!"
"I say he has put her here that the Signorina"
"Marchese, I forbid you to say that! It is not true."
"It is true! It is true! Perhaps you are blind, perhaps you see nothing. I do not know. But I know that I am not
blind. I love, and I see. I see, I have always seen that heEmilioloves the Signorina, that he loves her
madly, that he wishes, that he means to keep her for himself. Did he not hide with her in the cave, in the
Grotto of Virgil, that night when I came to serenade her on the sea? Yes, he took her, and he hid her, because
he loves her. He loves her, he an old man! And he thinksand he means"
"Marchese"
"He loves her; I say he loves her!"
"Marchese, I must ask you to go!"
"I say"
"Marchese, I insist upon your going."
She opened the door. She was very pale, but she looked calm. The crouching woman had vanished. She was
mistress of herself.
"Gaspare!" she called, in a loud, sharp voice that betrayed the inner excitement her appearance did not show.
"Signora," vociferated the Marchesino, "I say and I repeat"
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"Gaspare! Come here!"
"Signora!" cried a voice from below.
Gaspare came running.
"The Signore Marchese is going, Gaspare. Go down with him to the boat, please."
The Marchesino grew scarlet. The hot blood rushed over his face, up to his forehead, to his hair. Even his
hands became red in that moment.
"Goodbye, Marchese."
She went out, and left him standing with Gaspare.
"Signore Marchese, shall I take you to the boat?"
Gaspare's voice was quite respectful. The Marchesino made no answer, but stepped out into the passage and
looked up to the staircase that led to the top floor of the house. He listened. He heard nothing.
"Is the French Signore here?" he said to Gaspare. "Do you hear me? Is he in this house?"
"No, Signore!"
The Marchesino again looked towards the staircase and hesitated. Then he turned and saw Gaspare standing
in a watchful attitude, almost like one about to spring.
"Stay here!" he said, loudly, making a violent threatening gesture with his arm.
Gaspare stood where he was with a smile upon his face.
A moment later he heard the splash of oars in the sea, and knew that the Marchesino's boat was leaving the
island.
He drew his lips together like one about to whistle.
The sound of the oars died away.
Then he began to whistle softly "La Ciocciara."
CHAPTER XXXII
The ghostly day sank into a ghostly night that laid pale hands upon the island, holding it closely, softly, in a
hypnotic grasp, bidding it surely rest, it and those who dwelled there with all the dreaming hours. A mist
hung over the sea, and the heat did not go with day, but stayed to greet the darkness and the strange,
enormous silence that lay upon the waters. In the Casa del Mare the atmosphere was almost suffocating,
although every window was wide open. The servants went about their duties leadenfooted, drooping, their
Latin vivacity quenched as by a spell. Vere was mute. It seemed, since the episode of the Carmine, as if her
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normal spirit had been withdrawn, as if a dumb, evasive personality replaced it. The impression made upon
Hermione was that the real Vere had sunk far down in her child, out of sight and hearing, out of reach,
beyond pursuit, to a depth where none could follow, where the soul enjoyed the safety of utter isolation.
Hermione did not wish to pursue this anchorite. She did not wish to draw near to Vere that evening. To do so
would have been impossible to her, even had Vere been willing to come to her. Since the brutal outburst of
the Marchesino, she, too, had felt the desire, the necessity, of a desert place, where she could sit alone and
realize the bareness of her world.
In that outburst of passion the Marchesino had gathered together and hurled at her beliefs that had surely been
her own, but that she had striven to avoid, that she had beaten back as spectres and unreal, that she had even
denied, tricking, or trying to trick, her terrible sense of truth. His brutality had made the delicacy in her
crouch and sicken. It had been almost intolerable to her, to see her friend, Emile, thus driven out into the
open, like one naked, to be laughed at, condemned, held up, that the wild folly, the almost insane absurdity of
his secret self might be seen and understood even by the blind, the determined in stupidity.
She had always had a great reverence for her friend, which had been mingled with her love for him, giving it
its character. Was this reverence to be torn utterly away? Had it already been cast to the winds?
Poor Emile!
In the first moments after the departure of the Marchesino she pitied Emile intensely with all her heart of
woman. If this thing were true, how he must have suffered, how he must still be sufferingnot only in his
heart, but in his mind! His sense of pride, his selfrespect, his passion for complete independence, his
meticulous consciousness of the fitness of things, of what could be and what was impossibleall must by
lying in the dust. She could almost have wept for him then.
But another feeling succeeded this sense of pity, a sensation of outrage that grew within her and became
almost ungovernable. She had her independence too, her pride, her selfrespect. And now she saw them in
dust that Emile had surely heaped about them. A storm of almost hard anger shook her. She tasted an acrid
bitterness that seemed to impregnate her, to turn the mainspring of her life to gall. She heard the violent voice
of the young Neapolitan saying: "He is master, he is master, he has always been master here!" And she tried
to look back over her life, and to see how things had been. And, shaken still by this storm of anger, she felt as
if it were true, as if she had allowed Artois to take her life in his hands and to shape it according to his will, as
if he had been governing her although she had not known it. He had been the dominant personality in their
mutual friendship. His had been the calling voice, hers the obedient voice that answered. Only once had she
risen to a strong act, an act that brought great change with it, and that he had been hostile to. That was when
she had married Maurice.
And she had left Maurice for Artois. From Africa had come the calling, dominant voice. And even in her
Garden of Paradise she had heard it. And even from her Garden of Paradise she had obeyed it. For the first
time she saw that act of renunciation as the average man or woman would probably see it; as an
extraordinary, quixotic act, to be wondered at blankly, or, perhaps, to be almost angrily condemned. She
stood away from her own impulsive, enthusiastic nature, and stared at it criticallyas even her friends had
often staredand realized that it was unusual, perhaps extravagant, perhaps sometimes preposterous. This
readiness to sacrificewas it not rather slavish than regally loyal? This forgetfulness of personal joy, this
burntoffering of personalitywas it not contemptible? Could such actions bring into being the respect of
others, the respect of any man? Had Emile respected her for rushing to Africa? Or had he, perhaps, then and
through all these years, simply wondered how she could have done such a thing?
And MauriceMaurice? Oh, what had he thought? How had he looked upon that action?
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Often and often in lonely hours she had longed to go down into the grave, or to go up into the blue, to drag
the body, the soul, the heart she loved back to her. She had been rent by a desire that had made her limbs
shudder, or that had flushed her whole body with red, and set her temples beating. The longing of heart and
flesh had been so vehement that it had seemed to her as if they must compel, or cease to be. Now, again, she
desired to compel Maurice to come to her from his far, distant place, but in order that she might make him
understand what he had perhaps died misunderstanding; why she had left him to go to Artois, exactly how
she had felt, how desperately sad to abandon the Garden of Paradise, how torn by fear lest the perfect days
were forever at an end, how intensely desirous to take him with her. Perhaps he had felt cruelly jealous!
Perhaps that was why he had not offered to go with her at once. Yes, she believed that now. She saw her
action, she saw her preceding decision as others had seen it, as no doubt Maurice had seen it, as perhaps even
Artois had seen it. Why had she instinctively felt that because her nature was as it was, and because she was
bravely following it, every one must understand her? Oh, to be completely understood! If she could call
Maurice back for one moment, and just make him see her as she had been then; loyal to her friend, and
through and through passionately loyal to him! If she could! If she could!
She had left Maurice, the one being who had utterly belonged to her, to go to Artois. She had lost the few
remaining days in which she could have been supremely happy. She had come back to have a few short hours
devoid of calm, chilled sometimes by the strangeness that had intruded itself between her and Maurice, to
have one kiss in which surely at last misunderstanding was lost and perfect love was found. And thenthat
"something" in the water! And thenthe gulf.
In that gulf she had not been quite alone. The friend whom she had carried away from Africa and death had
been with her. He had been closely in her life ever since. And now
She heard the Marchesino's voice: "I see what he is, what he wants, I see it allall that is in his mind and
heart. I see, I have always seen, that he loves the Signorina, that he loves her madly."
Vere!
Hermione sickened. Emile and Vere in that relation!
The storm of anger was not spent yet. Would it ever be spent? Something within her, the something, perhaps,
that felt rejected, strove to reject in its turn, did surely reject. Pride burned in her like a fire that cruelly
illumines night, shining upon the destruction it is compassing.
The terrible sense of outrage that gripped her soul and bodyher body because Vere was bone of her bone,
flesh of her fleshseemed to be forcibly changing her nature, as cruel hands, prompted by murder in a heart,
change form, change beauty in the effort to destroy.
That evening Hermione felt herself being literally defaced by this sensation of outrage within her, a sensation
which she was powerless to expel.
She found herself praying to God that Artois might not come to the island that night. And yet, while she
prayed, she felt that he was coming.
She dined with Vere, in almost complete silencetrying to love this dear child as she had always loved her,
even in certain evil moments of an irresistible jealousy. But she felt immensely far from Vere, distant from
her as one who does not love from one who loves; yet hideously near, too, like one caught in the tangle of an
enforced intimacy rooted in a past which the present denies and rejects. Directly dinner was over they parted,
driven by the mutual desire to be alone.
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And then Hermione waited for that against which she had prayed.
Artois would come to the island that night. Useless to pray! He was coming. She felt that he was on the sea,
environed by this strange mist that hung tonight over the waters. She felt that he was coming to Vere. She
had gone to Africa to save himin order that he might fall in love with her then unborn child.
Monstrosities, the monstrosities that are in life, deny them, beat them back, close our eyes to them as we will,
rose up around her in the hot stillness. She felt haunted, terrified. She was forcibly changed, and now all the
world was changing about her.
She must have relief. She could not sit there among spectres waiting for the sound of oars that would tell her
Vere's lover had come to the island. How could she detach herself for a moment from this horror?
She thought of Ruffo.
As the thought came to her she got up and went out of the house.
Only when she was outofdoors did she fully realize the strangeness of the night. The heat of it was flaccid.
The island seemed to swim in a fatigued and breathless atmosphere. The mist that hung about it was like the
mist in a vaporbath.
Below the vague sea lay a thing exhausted, motionless, perhaps fainting in the dark. And in this heat and
stillness there was no presage, no thrill, however subtle, of a coming change, of storm. Rather there was the
deadness of eternity, as if this swoon would last forever, neither developing into life, nor deepening into
death.
Hermione had left the house feverishly, yearning to escape from her company of spectres, yearning to escape
from the sensation of ruthless hands defacing her. As she passed the doorsill it was only with difficulty that
she suppressed a cry of "Ruffo!" a cry for help. But when the night took her she no longer had any wish to
disturb it by a sound. She was penetrated at once by an atmosphere of fatality. Her pace changed. She moved
on slowly, almost furtively. She felt inclined to creep.
Would Ruffo be at the island tonight? Would Artois really come? It seemed unlikely, almost impossible.
But if Ruffo were there, if Artois came, it would be fatality. That she was there was fatality.
She walked always slowly, always furtively, to the crest of the cliff.
She stood there. She listened.
Silence.
She felt as if she were quite alone on the island. She could scarcely believe that Vere, that Gaspare, that the
servants were thereamong them Peppina with her cross.
They said Peppina had the evil eye. Had she perhaps cast a spell tonight?
Hermione did not smile at such an imagination as she dismissed it.
She waited and listened, but not actively, for she did not feel as if Ruffo could ever stand with her in the
embrace of such a night, he, a boy, with bright hopes and eager longings, he the happy singer of the song of
Mergellina.
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And yet, when in a moment she found him standing by her side, she accepted his presence as a thing
inevitable.
It had been meant, perhaps for centuries, that they two should stand together that night, speak together as now
they were about to speak.
"Signora, buona sera."
"Buona sera, Ruffo."
"The Signorina is not here tonight?"
"I think she is in the house. I think she is tired tonight."
"The Signorina is tired after the Festa, Signora."
"You knew we were at the Festa, Ruffo?"
"Ma si, Signora."
"Did we tell you we were going? I had forgotten."
"It was not that, Signora. But I saw the Signorina at the Festa. Did not Don Gaspare tell you?"
"Gaspare said nothing. Did he see you?"
She spoke languidly. Quickness had died out of her under the influence of the night. But already she felt a
slight yet decided sense of relief, almost of peace. She drew that from Ruffo. And, standing very close to him,
she watched his eager face, hoping to see presently in it the expression that she loved.
"Did he see you, Ruffo?"
"Ma si, Signora. I was with my poor mamma."
"Your mother! I wish I had met her!"
"Si, Signora. I was with my mamma in the Piazza of Masaniello. We had been eating snails, Signora, and
afterwards watermelon, and we had each had a glass of white wine. And I was feeling very happy, because
my poor mamma had heard good news."
"What was that?"
"Tomorrow my Patrigno is to be let out of prison."
"So soon! But I thought he had not been tried."
"No, Signora. But he is to be let out now. Perhaps he will be put back again. But now he is let out
because"he hesitated"becausewell, Signora, he has such friends, he has friends who are powerful for
him. And so he is let out just now."
"I understand."
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"Well, Signora, and after the white wine we were feeling happy, and we were going to see everything: the
Madonna, and Masaniello, and the fireworks, and the fireballoon. Did you see the fireballoon, Signora?"
"Yes, Ruffo. It was very pretty."
His simple talk soothed her. He was so young, so happy, so free from the hideous complexities of life; no
child of tragedy, but the son surely of a love that had been gay and utterly contented.
"Si, Signora! Per dio, Signora, it was wonderful! It was just before the fireballoon went up, Signora, that I
saw the Signorina with the Neapolitan Signorino. And close behind them was Don Gaspare. I said to my
mamma, 'Mamma, ecco the beautiful Signorina of the island!' My mamma was excited, Signora. She held on
to my arm, and she said: 'Ruffino,' she said, 'show her to me. Where is she?' my mamma said, Signora. 'And
is the Signora Madre with her?' Just then, Signora, the people moved, and all of a sudden there we were, my
mamma and I, right in front of Don Gaspare."
Ruffo stopped, and Hermione saw a change, a gravity, come into his bright face.
"Well, Ruffo?" she said, wondering what was coming.
"I said to my mamma, Signora, 'Mamma, this is Don Gaspare of the island.' Signora, my mamma looked at
Don Gaspare for a minute. Her face was quite funny. She looked white, Signora, my mamma looked white,
almost like the man at the circus who comes in with the dog to make us laugh. And Don Gaspare, too, he
looked"Ruffo paused, then used a word beloved of Sicilians who wish to be impressive"he looked
mysterious, Signora. Don Gaspare looked mysterious."
"Mysterious? Gaspare?"
"Si, Signora, he did. And he looked almost white, too, but not like my mamma. And then my mamma said,
'Gaspare!' just like that, Signora, and put out her handso. And Don Gaspare's face got red and hot. And
then for a minute they spoke together, Signora, and I could not hear what they said. For Don Gaspare stood
with his back so that I should not hear. And then the balloon went sideways and the people ran, and I did not
see Don Gaspare any more. And after that, Signora, my mamma was crying all the time. And she would not
tell me anything. I only heard her say: 'To think of its being Gaspare! To think of its being Gaspare on the
island!' And when we got home she said to me, 'Ruffo,' she said, 'has Gaspare ever said you were like
somebody?' What is it, Signora?"
"Nothing, Ruffo. Go on."
"But"
"Go on, Ruffo."
" 'Has Gaspare ever said you were like somebody?' my mamma said."
"And youwhat did you say?"
"I said, 'No,' Signora. And that is true. Don Gaspare has never said I was like somebody."
The boy had evidently finished what he had to say. He stood quietly by Hermione, waiting for her to speak in
her turn. For a moment she said nothing. Then she put her hand on Ruffo's arm.
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"Whom do you think your mother meant when she said 'somebody,' Ruffo?"
"Signora, I do not know."
"But surelydidn't you ask whom she meant?"
"No, Signora. I told my mamma Don Gaspare had never said that. She was crying. And so I did not say
anything more."
Hermione still held his arm for a moment. Then her hand dropped down.
Ruffo was looking at her steadily with his bright and searching eyes.
"Signora, do you know what she meant?"
"I! How can I tell, Ruffo? I have never seen your mother. How can I know what she meant?"
"No, Signora."
Again there was a silence. Then Hermione said:
"I should like to see your mother, Ruffo."
"Si, Signora."
"I must see her."
Hermione said the last words in a low and withdrawn voice, like one speaking to herself. As she spoke she
was gazing at the boy beside her, and in her eyes there was a mystery almost like that of the night.
"Ruffo," she added, in a moment, "I want you to promise me something."
"Si, Signora."
"Don't speak to any one about the little talk we have had tonight. Don't say anything, even to Gaspare."
"No, Signora."
For a short time they remained together talking of other things. Hermione spoke only enough to encourage
Ruffo. And always she was watching him. But tonight she did not see the look she longed for, the look that
made Maurice stand before her. Only she discerned, or believed she discerned, a definite physical
resemblance in the boy to the dead man, a certain resemblance of outline, a likeness surely in the poise of the
head upon the strong, bravelooking neck, and in a trait that suggested ardor about the full yet delicate lips.
Why had she never noticed these things before? Had she been quite blind? Or was she now imaginative? Was
she deceiving herself?
"Goodnight, Ruffo," she said, at last.
He took off his cap and stood bareheaded.
"Goodnight, Signora."
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He put the cap on his dark hair with a free and graceful gesture.
Was not that, too, Maurice?
"A rivederci, Signora."
He was gone.
Hermione stood alone in the fatal night. She had forgotten Vere. She had forgotten Artois. The words of
Ruffo had led her on another step in the journey it was ordained that she should make. She felt the
underthings. It seemed to her that she heard in the night the dull murmuring of the undercurrents that carry
through wayward, or terrible, channels the winddriven bark of life. What could it mean, this encounter just
described to her: this pain, this emotion of a woman, her strange question to her son? And Gaspare's
agitation, his pallor, his "mysterious" face, the colloquy that Ruffo was not allowed to hear!
What did it mean? That woman's questionthat question!
"What is it? What am I near?" Ruffo's mother knew Gaspare, must have known him intimately in the past.
When? Surely long ago in Sicily; for Ruffo was sixteen, and Hermione felt sureknew, in factthat till
they came to the island Gaspare had never seen Ruffo.
That woman's question!
Hermione went slowly to the bench and sat down by the edge of the cliff.
What could it possibly mean?
Could it mean that this woman, Ruffo's mother, had once known Maurice, known him well enough to see in
her son the resemblance to him?
But then
Hermione, as sometimes happened, having reached truth instinctively and with a sure swiftness, turned to
retreat from it. She had lost confidence in herself. She feared her own impulses. Now, abruptly, she told
herself that this idea was wholly extravagant. Ruffo probably resembled some one else whom his mother and
Gaspare knew. That was far more likely. That must be the truth.
But again she seemed to hear in the night the dull murmurings of those undercurrents. And many, many times
she recurred mentally to that weeping woman's question to her sonthat question about Gaspare.
Gasparehe had been strange, disturbed lately. Hermione had noticed it; so had the servants. There had been
in the Casa del Mare an oppressive atmosphere created by the mentality of some of its inhabitants.
Even she, on that day when she had returned from Capri, had felt a sensation of returning to meet some
grievous tale.
She remembered Artois now, recalling his letter which she had found that day.
Gaspare and Artoisdid they both suspect, or both know, something which they had been concealing from
her?
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Suddenly she began to feel frightened. Yet she did not form in her mind any definite conception of what such
a mutual secret might be. She simply began to feel frightened, almost like a child.
She said to herself that this brooding night, with its dumbness, its heat, its vaporous mystery, was affecting
her spirit. And she got up from the bench, and began to walk very slowly towards the house.
When she did this she suddenly felt sure that while she had been on the crest of the cliff Artois had arrived at
the island, that he was now with Vere in the house. She knew that it was so.
And again there rushed upon her that sensation of outrage, of being defaced, and of approaching a dwelling in
which things monstrous had taken up their abode.
She came to the bridge and paused by the rail. She felt a sort of horror of the Casa del Mare in which Artois
was surely sittingalone or with Vere? With Vere. For otherwise he would have come up to the cliff.
She leaned over the rail. She looked into the Pool. One boat was there just below her, the boat to which Ruffo
belonged. Was there another? She glanced to the right. Yes; there lay by the rock a pleasureboat from
Naples.
Artois had come in that.
She looked again at the other boat, searching the shadowy blackness for the form of Ruffo. She longed that he
might be awake. She longed that he might sing, in his happy voice, of the happy summer nights, of the sweet
white moons that light the Southern summer nights, of the bright eyes of Rosa, of the sea of Mergellina. But
from the boat there rose no voice, and the mist hung heavily over the silent Pool.
Then Hermione lifted her eyes and looked across the Pool, seeking the little light of San Francesco. Only the
darkness and the mist confronted her. She saw no lightand she trembled like one to whom the omens are
hostile.
She trembled and hid her face for a moment. Then she turned and went up into the house.
CHAPTER XXXIII
When Hermione reached the door of the Casa del Mare she did not go in immediately, but waited on the step.
The door was open. There was a dim lamp burning in the little hall, which was scarcely more than a passage.
She looked up and saw a light shining from the window of her sittingroom. She listened; there was no sound
of voices.
They were not in there.
She was trying to crush down her sense of outrage, to feel calm before she entered the house.
Perhaps they had gone into the garden. The night was terribly hot. They would prefer to be outofdoors.
Vere loved the garden. Or they might be on the terrace.
She stepped into the hall and went to the servants' staircase. Now she herd voices, a laugh.
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"Giulia!" she called.
The voices stopped talking, but it was Gaspare who came in answer to her call. She looked down to him.
"Don't come up, Gaspare. Where is the Signorina?"
"The Signorina is on the terrace, Signorawith Don Emilio."
He looked up at her very seriously in the gloom. She thought of the meeting at the Festa, and longed to wring
from Gaspare his secret.
"Don Emilio is here?"
"Si, Signora."
"How long ago did he come?"
"About half an hour, I think, Signora."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"Don Emilio told me not to bother you, Signorathat he would just sit and wait."
"I see. And the Signorina?"
"I did not tell her, either. She was in the garden alone, but I have heard her talking on the terrace with the
Signore. Are you ill, Signora?"
"No. All right, Gaspare!"
She moved away. His large, staring eyes followed her till she disappeared in the passage. The passage was
not long, but it seemed to Hermione as if a multitude of impressions, of thoughts, of fears, of determinations
rushed through her heart and brain while she walked down it and into the room that opened to the terrace.
This room was dark.
As she entered it she expected to hear the voices from outside. But she heard nothing.
They were not on the terrace, then!
She again stood still. Her heart was beating violently, and she felt violent all over, thrilling with violence like
one on the edge of some outburst.
She looked towards the French window. Through its high space she saw the wan night outside, a sort of thin
paleness resting against the blackness in which she was hidden. And as her eyes became accustomed to their
environment she perceived that the pallor without was impinged upon by two shadowy darknesses. Very faint
they were, scarcely relieved against the night, very still and dumbtwo shadowy darknesses, Emile and
Vere sitting together in silence.
When Hermione understood this she remained where she was, trying to subdue even her breathing. Why were
they not talking? What did this mutual silence, this mutual immobility mean? She was only a few feet from
them. Yet she could not hear a human sound, even the slightest. There was something unnatural, but also
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tremendously impressive to her in their silence. She felt as if it signified something unusual, something of
high vitality. She felt as if it had succeeded some speech that was exceptional, and that had laid its spell, of
joy or sorrow, upon both their spirits.
And she felt much more afraid, and also much more alone, than she would have felt had she found them
talking.
Presently, as the silence continued, she moved softly back into the passage. She went down it a little way,
then returned, walking briskly and loudly. In this action her secret violence was at play. When she came to
the room she grasped the doorhandle with a force that hurt her hand. She went in, shut the door sharply
behind her, and without any pause came out upon the terrace.
"Emile!"
"Yes," he said, getting up from his gardenchair quickly.
"Gaspare told me you were here."
"I have been here about half an hour."
She had not given him her hand. She did not give it.
"I didn't hear you talking to Vere, so I wonderedI almost thought"
"That I had gone without seeing you? Oh no. It isn't very late. You don't want to get rid of me at once?"
"Of course not."
His manneror so it seemed to herwas strangely uneasy and formal, and she thought his face looked
drawn, almost tortured. But the light was very dim. She could not be sure of that.
Vere had said nothing, had not moved from her seat.
There was a third chair. As Hermione took it and drew it slightly forward, she looked towards Vere, and
thought that she was sitting in a very strange position. In the darkness it seemed to the mother as if her child's
body were almost crouching in its chair, as if the head were drooping, as if
"Vere! Is anything the matter with you?"
Suddenly, as if struck sharply, Vere sprang up and passed into the darkness of the house, leaving a sound that
was like a mingled exclamation and a sob behind her.
"Emile!"
*****
"Emile!"
"Hermione?"
"What is the matter with Vere? What have you been doing to Vere?"
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"I!"
"Yes, you! No one else is here."
Hermione's violent, almost furious agitation was audible in her voice.
"I should never wish to hurt Vereyou know that."
His voice sounded as if he were deeply moved.
"I must Vere! Vere!"
She moved towards the house. But Artois stepped forward swiftly, laid a hand on her arm, and stopped her.
"No, leave Vere alone tonight."
"Why?"
"She wishes to be alone tonight."
"But I find her here with you."
There was a harsh bitterness of suspicion, of doubt, in her tone that he ought surely to have resented. But he
did not resent it.
"I was sitting on the terrace," he said, gently. "Vere came in from the garden. Naturally she stayed to entertain
me till you were here."
"And directly I come she rushes away into the house!"
"Perhaps there wassomething may have occurred to upset her."
"What was it?"
Her voice was imperious.
"You must tell me what it was!" she said, as he was silent.
"Hermione, my friend, let us sit down. Let us at any rate be with each other as we always have beentill
now."
He was almost pleading with her, but she did not feel her hardness melting. Nevertheless she sat down.
"Now tell me what it was."
"I don't think I can do that, Hermione."
"I am her mother. I have a right to know. I have a right to know everything about my child's life."
In those words, and in the way they were spoken, Hermione's bitter jealousy about the two secrets kept from
her, but shared by Artois, rushed out into the light.
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"I am sure there is nothing in Vere's life that might not be told to the whole world without shame; and yet
there may be many things that an innocent girl would not care to tell to any one."
"But if things are told they should be told to the mother. The mother comes first."
He said nothing.
"The mother comes first!" she repeated, almost fiercely. "And you ought to know it. You do know it!"
"You do come first with Vere."
"If I did, Vere would confide in me rather than in any one else."
As Hermione said this, all the longcontained bitterness caused by Vere's exclusion of her from the
knowledge that had been freely given to Artois brimmed up suddenly in her heart, overflowed boundaries,
seemed to inundate her whole being.
"I do not come first," she said.
Her voice trembled, almost broke.
"You know that I do not come first. You have just told me a lie."
"Hermione!"
His voice was startled.
"You know it perfectly well. You have known it for a long time."
Hot tears were in her eyes, were about to fall. With a crude gesture, almost like that of a man, she put up her
hands to brush them away.
"You have known it, you have known it, but you try to keep me in the dark."
Suddenly she was horribly conscious of the darkness of the night in which they were together, of the darkness
of the world.
"You love to keep me in the dark, in prison. It is cruel, it is wicked of you."
"But Hermione"
"Take care, Emile, take careor I shall hate you for keeping me in the dark."
Her passionate words applied only to the later events in which Vere was concerned. But his mind rushed back
to Sicily, and suddenly there came to his memory some words he had once read, he did not know when, or
where:
"The spirit that resteth upon a lie is a spirit in prison."
As he remembered them he felt guilty, guilty before Hermione. He saw her as a spirit confined for years in a
prison to which his action had condemned her. Yes, she was in the dark. She was in an airless place. She was
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deprived of the true liberty, that great freedom which is the accurate knowledge of the essential truths of our
own individual lives. From his mind in that moment the cause of Hermione's outburst, Vere and her childish
secrets, were driven out by a greater thing that came upon it like a strong and mighty windthe memory of
that lie, in which he had enclosed his friend's life for years, that lie on which her spirit had rested, on which it
was resting still. And his sense of truth did not permit him to try to refute her accusation. Indeed, he was
filled with a desire that nearly conquered himthere and then, brutally, clearly, nakedly, to pour forth to his
friend all the truth, to say to her:
"You have a strong, a fiery spirit, a spirit that hates the dark, that hates imprisonment, a spirit that can surely
endure, like the eagle, to gaze steadfastly into the terrible glory of the sun. Then come out of the darkness,
come out of your prison. I put you therelet me bring you forth. This is the truthlisten! hear it!it is
thisit is thisandthis!"
This desire nearly conquered him. Perhaps it would have conquered him but for an occurrence that, simple
though it was, changed the atmosphere in which their souls were immersed, brought in upon them another
world with the feeling of other lives than their own.
The boat to which Ruffo belonged, going out of the Pool to the fishing, passed at this moment slowly upon
the sea beneath the terrace, and from the misty darkness his happy voice came up to them in the song of
Mergellina which he loved:
"Oh, dolce luna bianca de l' Estate
Mi fugge il sonno accanto a la marina:
Mi destan le dolcissime serate
Gli occhi di Rosa e il mar di Mergellina."
Dark was the night, moonless, shrouded in the mist. But his boy's heart defied it, laughed at the sorrowful
truths of life, set the sweet white moon in the sky, covered the sea with her silver. Artois turned towards the
song and stood still. But Hermione, as if physically compelled towards it, moved away down the terrace,
following in the direction in which the boat was going.
As she passed Artois saw tears running down her cheeks. And he said to himself:
"No, I cannot tell her; I can never tell her. If she is to be told, let Ruffo tell her. Let Ruffo make her
understand. Let Ruffo lift her up from the lie on which I have made her rest, and lead her out of prison."
As this thought came to him a deep tenderness towards Hermione flooded his heart. He stood where he was.
Far off he still heard Ruffo's voice drifting away in the mist out to the great sea. And he saw the vague form
of Hermione leaning down over the terrace wall, towards the sea, the song, and Ruffo.
How intensely strange, how mysterious, how subtle was the influence housed within the body of that singing
boy, that fisherboy, which, like an issuing fluid, or escaping vapor, or perfume, had stirred and attracted the
childish heart of Vere, had summoned and now held fast the deep heart of Hermione.
Just then Artois felt as if in the night he was walking with the Eternities, as if that song, now fading away
across the sea, came even from them. We do not die. For in that song to which Hermione bent down the
dead man lived when that boy's voice sang it. In that boat, now vanishing upon the sea, the dead man held an
oar. In that warm young heart of Ruffo the dead man moved, and spokespoke to his child, Vere, whom he
had never seen, spoke to his wife, Hermione, whom he had deceived, yet whom he had loved.
Then let himlet the dead man himselfspeak out of that temple which he had created in a moment of
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lawless passion, out of that son whom he had made to live by the action which had brought upon him death.
Ruffoall was in the hands of Ruffo, to whom Hermione, weeping, bent for consolation.
The song died away. Yet Hermione did not move, but still leaned over the sea. She scarcely knew where she
was. The soul of her, the suffering soul, was voyaging through the mist with Ruffo, was voyaging through the
mist and through the night withher Sicilian and all the perfect past. It seemed to her at that moment that
she had lost Vere in the dark, that she had lost Emile in the dark, that even Gaspare was drifting from her in a
mist of secrecy which he did not intend that she should penetrate.
There was only Ruffo left.
He had no secrets. He threw no darkness round him and those who loved him. In his happy, innocent song
was his happy, innocent soul.
She listened, she leaned down, almost she stretched out her arms towards the sea. And in that moment she
knew in her mind and she felt in her heart that Ruffo was very near to her, that he meant very much to her,
even that she loved him.
CHAPTER XXXIV
Artois left the island that night without speaking to Hermione. He waited a long time. But she did not move
to come to him. And he did not dare to go to her. He did not dare! In all their long friendship never before
had his spirit bent before, or retreated as if in fear from Hermione's. Tonight he was conscious that in her
fierce anger, and afterwards in her tears, she had emancipated herself from him. He was conscious of her
force as he had never been conscious of it before. Something within him almost abdicated to her intensity.
And at last he turned and went softly away from the terrace. He descended to the sea. He left the island.
Were they no longer friends?
As the boat gave itself to the mist he wondered. It had come to this, thenthat he did not know whether
Hermione and he were any longer friends. Almost imperceptibly, with movement so minute that it had
seemed like immobility, they had been drifting apart through these days and nights of the summer. And now
abruptly the gulf appeared between them.
He felt just then that they could never more be friends, that their old happy camaraderie could never be
reestablished.
That they could ever be enemies was unthinkable. Even in Hermione's bitterness and anger Artois felt her
deep affection. In her cry, "Take care, Emile, or I shall hate you for keeping me in the dark!" he heard only
the hatred that is the other side of love.
But could they ever be comrades again? And if they could not, what could they be?
As the boat slipped on, under the Saint's light, which was burning although the mist had hidden it from
Hermione's searching eyes, and out to the open sea, Artois heard again her fierce exclamation. It blended with
Vere's sob. He looked up and saw the faint lights of the Casa del Mare fading from him in the night. And an
immense sadness, mingled with an immense, but chaotic, longing invaded him. He felt horribly lonely, and
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he felt a strange, new desire for the nearness to him of life. He yearned to feel life close to him, pulsing with a
rhythm to which the rhythm of his being answered. He yearned for that strange and exquisite satisfaction,
compounded of mystery and wonder, and thrilling with something akin to pain, that is called forth in the
human being who feels another human being centring all its highest faculties, its strongest powers, its deepest
hopes in him. He desired intensely, as he had never desired before, true communion with another, that
mingling of bodies, hearts, and spirits, that is the greatest proof of God to man.
The lights of the Casa del Mare were lost to his eyes in the night. He looked for them still. He strained his
eyes to see them. But the powerful night would not yield up its prey.
And now, in the darkness and with Hermione's last words ringing in his ears, he felt almost overwhelmed by
the solitariness of his life in the world of lives.
That day, before he came to the island, he had met himself face to face like a man meeting his double. He had
stripped himself bare. He had searched himself for the truth. Remembering all the Marchesino had said, he
had demanded of his heart the truth, uncertain whether it would save or slay him. It had not slain him. When
the colloquy was over he was still upright.
But he had realized as never before the delicate poise of human nature, set, without wings, on a peak with
gulfs about it. Had he not looked in time, and with clear, steadfast eyes, might he not have fallen?
His affection for Vere was perfectly pure, was the love of a man without desire for a gracious and charming
child. It still was that. He knew it for that by the wave of disgust that went over him when his imagination,
prompted by the Marchesino's brutality, set pictures before him of himself in other relations with Vere. The
real man in him recoiled so swiftly, so uncontrollably, that he was reassured as to his own condition. And yet
he found much to condemn, something to be contemptuous of, something almost to weep overthat desire
to establish a monopolythat almost sickly regret for his vanished youth, that bitterness against the
community to which all young things instinctively belong, whatever their differences of intellect,
temperament, and feeling.
Could he have fallen?
Even now he did not absolutely know whether such a decadence might have been possible to him or not. But
that now it would not be possible he felt that he did know.
Age could never complete youth, and Vere must be complete. He had desired to make her gift for song
complete. He could never desire to mutilate her life. Had he not said to himself one day, as his boat glided
past the sloping gardens of Posilipo, "Vere must be happy."
Yet that evening he had made her unhappy.
He had come to the island from his selfexamination strong in the determination to be really himself, no
longer half selfdeceived and so deceiving. He had gone out upon the terrace, and waited there. But when
Vere had come to join him, he had not been able to be natural. In his desire to rehabilitate himself thoroughly
and swiftly in his own opinion he must have been almost harsh to the child. She had approached him a little
doubtfully. She had needed specially just then to be met with even more than the usual friendship. Artois had
seen in her face, in her expressive eyes, a plea not for forgivenessthere was no need for that, but for
compassion, an appeal to him to ignore and yet to sympathise, that was exquisitely young and winning. But,
because of his selfexamination, and because he was feeling acutely, he had been abrupt, cold, changed in his
manner. They had sat down together in the dark, and after some uneasy conversation, Vere, perhaps eager to
make things easier between herself and "Monsieur Emile," had brought up the subject of her poems with a
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sort of anxious simplicity, and a touch of timidity that yet was confidential. And Artois, still recoiling secretly
from that which might possibly have become a folly but could never have been anything more, had told Vere
plainly and almost sternly that she must go to her literary path unaided, unadvised by him.
"I was glad to advise you at the beginning, Vere," he had said, finally; "but now I must leave you to yourself
to work out your own salvation. You have talent. Trust it. Trust yourself. Do no lean on any one, least of all
on me."
"No, Monsieur Emile," she had answered.
Those were the last words exchanged between them before Hermione came and questioned Vere. And only
when Vere slipped into the house, leaving that sound of pain behind her, did Artois realize how cruel he must
have seemed in his desire quickly to set things right.
He realized that; but, subtle though he was, he did not understand the inmost and rootcause of Vere's loss of
selfcontrol.
Vere was feeling bitterly ashamed, had been bending under this sense of undeserved shame, ever since the
Marchesino's stratagem on the preceding night. Although she was gay and fearless, she was exquisitely
sensitive. Peppina's confession had roused her maidenhood to a theoretical knowledge of certain things in
life, of certain cruel phases of man's selfishness and lust which, till then, she had never envisaged. The
Marchesino's madness had carried her one step further. She had not actually looked into the abyss. But she
had felt herself near to something that she hated even more than she feared it. And she had returned to the
hotel full of a shrinking delicacy, not to be explained, intense as snow, which had made the meeting with her
mother and Artois a torture to her, which had sealed her lips to silence that night, which had made her half
apology to Gaspare in the morning a secret agony, which had even set a flush on her face when she looked at
San Francesco. The abrupt change in Monsieur Emile's demeanor towards her made her feel as if she were
despised by him because she had been the victim of the Marchesino's trick. Or perhaps Monsieur Emile
completely misunderstood her; perhaps he thoughtperhaps he dared to think, that she had helped the
Marchesino in his manoeuvre.
Vere felt almost crucified, but was too proud to speak of the pain and bitterness within her. Only when her
mother came out upon the terrace did she suddenly feel that she could bear no more.
That night, directly she was in her room, she locked her door. She was afraid that her mother might follow
her, to ask what was the matter.
But Hermione did not come. She, too, wished to be alone that night. She, too, felt that she could not be
looked at by searching eyes that night.
She did not know when Artois left the terrace. Long after Ruffo's song had died away she still leaned over the
sea, following his boat with her desirous heart. Artois, too, was on the sea. She did not know it. She was,
almost desperately, seeking a refuge in the past. The present failed her. That was her feeling. Then she would
cling to the past. And in that song, prompted now by her always eager imagination, she seemed to hear it. For
she was almost fiercely, feverishly, beginning to find resemblances in Ruffo to Maurice. At first she had
noticed none, although she had been strangely attracted by the boy. Then she had seen that look, fleeting but
vivid, that seemed for a moment to bring Maurice before her. Then, on the cliff, she had discerned a likeness
of line, a definite similarity of features.
And nowwas not that voice like Maurice's? Had it not his wonderful thrill of youth in it, that sound of the
love of life which wakes all the pulses of the body and stirs all the depths of the heart?
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"Oh, dolce luna bianca de l' estate"
The voice upon the sea was singing always the song of Mergellina. But to Hermione it began to seem that the
song was changing to another song, and that the voice that was dying away across the shrouded water was
sinking into the shadows of a ravine upon a mountainside.
"Ciao, Ciao, Ciao,
Morettina bella, ciao"
Maurice was going to the fishing under the sweet white moon of Sicily. And sheshe was no longer leaning
down from the terrace of the Casa del Mare, but from the terrace of the House of the Priest.
"Prima di partire
Un bacio ti voglio da!"
That kiss, which he had given her before he had gone away from her forever! She seemed to feel it on her lips
again, and she shut her eyes, giving herself up to a passion of the imagination.
When she opened them again she felt exhausted and terribly alone. Maurice had gone down into the ravine.
He was never coming back. Ruffo was taken by the mists and by the night. She lifted herself up from the
balustrade and looked round, remembering suddenly that she had left Artois upon the terrace. He had
disappeared silently, without a word of goodbye.
And now, seeing the deserted terrace, she recollected her fierce attack upon Artois, she remembered how she
had stood in the black room watching the two darknesses outside, listening to their silence. And she
remembered her conversation with Ruffo.
Actualities rushed back upon her memory. She felt as if she heard them coming like an army to the assault.
Her brain was crowded with jostling thoughts, her heart with jostling feelings and fears. She was like one
trying to find a safe path through a black troop of threatening secrets. What had happened that night between
Vere and Emile? Why had Vere fled? Why had she wept? And the previous night with the
MarchesinoVere had not spoken of it to her mother. Hermione had found it impossible to ask her child for
any details. There was a secret too. And there were the two secrets, which now she knew, but which Vere and
Artois thought were unknown to her still. And then that mystery of which Ruffo had innocently spoken
that night.
As Hermione, moving in imagination through the black and threatening troop, came to that last secret, she
was again assailed by a curious, and horrible, sensation of apprehension. She again felt very little and very
helpless, like a child.
She moved away from the balustrade and turned towards the house. Above, in her sittingroom, the light still
shone. The other windows on this side of the Casa del Mare were dark. She felt that she must go to that light
quickly, and she hastened in, went cautiouslythough now almost panicstrickenthrough the black room
with the French windows, and came into the dimly lighted passage that led to the front door.
Gaspare was there locking up. She came to him.
"Goodnight, Gaspare," she said, stopping.
"Goodnight, Signora," he answered, slightly turning his head, but not looking into her face.
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Hermione turned to go upstairs. She went up two or three steps. She heard a bolt shot into its place below
her, and she stopped again. Tonight she felt for the first time almost afraid of Gaspare. She trusted him as
she had always trusted himcompletely. Yet that trust was mingled with this new and dreadful sensation of
fear bred of her conviction that he held some secret from her in his breast. Indeed, it was her trust in Gaspare
which made her fear so keen. As she stood on the staircase she knew that. If Gaspare kept things, kept
anything from her that at all concerned her life, it must be because he was faithfully trying to save her from
some pain or misery.
But perhaps she was led astray by her depression of tonight. Perhaps this mystery was her own creation, and
he would be quite willing to explain, to clear it away with a word.
"Gaspare," she said, "have you finished locking up?"
"Not quite, Signora. I have the front of the house to do."
"Of course. Well, when you have finished come up to my room for a minute, will you?"
"Va bene, Signora."
Was there reluctance in his voice? She thought there was. She went up stairs and waited in her sittingroom.
It seemed to her that Gaspare was a very long time locking up. She leaned out of the window that overlooked
the terrace to hear if he was shutting the French windows. When she did so she saw him faintly below,
standing by the balustrade. She watched him, wondering what he was doing, till at last she could not be
patient any longer.
"Gaspare!" she called out.
He started violently.
"I am coming, Signora."
"I am waiting for you."
"A moment, Signora!"
Yes, his voice was reluctant; but he went at once towards the house and disappeared. Directly afterwards she
heard the windows being shut and barred, then a step coming rather slowly up the staircase.
"Che vuole, Signora?"
How many times she had heard that phrase from Gaspare's lips? How many times in reply she had expressed
some simple desire! Tonight she found a difficulty in answering that blunt question. There was so much that
she wished, wantedwide and terrible want filled her heart.
"Che vuole?" he repeated.
As she heard it a second time, suddenly Hermione knew that for the moment she was entirely dominated by
Ruffo and that, which concerned, which was connected with him. The fisherboy had assumed an abrupt and
vast importance in her life.
"Gaspare," she said, "you know me pretty well by this time, don't you?"
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"Know you, Signora! Of course I know you!" He gazed at her, then added, "Who should know you, Signora,
if I do not?"
"That is just what I mean, Gaspare. I wonderI wonder" She broke off. "Do you understand, Gaspare,
how important you are to me, how necessary you are to me?"
An expressive look that was full of gentleness dawned in his big eyes.
"Si, Signora, I understand."
"And I think you ought to understand my character by this time." She looked at him earnestly. "But I
sometimes wonderI mean latelyI sometimes wonder whether you do quite understand me."
"Why, Signora?"
"Do you know what I like best from the people who are near me, who live with me?"
"Si, Signora."
"What?"
"Affection, Signora. You like to be cared for, Signora."
She felt tears rising again in her eyes.
"Yes, I love affection. Butthere's something else, too. I love to be trusted. I'm not curious. I hate to pry into
people's affairs. But I love to feel that I am trusted, that those I trust and care for would never keep me in the
dark"
She thought again of Emile and of the night and her outburst.
"The dark, Signora?"
"Don't you understand what I mean? When you are in the dark you can't see anything. You can't see the
things you ought to see."
"You are not in the dark, Signora."
He spoke rather stupidly, and looked towards the lamp, as if he misunderstood her explanation. But she knew
his quickness of mind too well to be deceived.
"Gaspare," she said, "I don't know whether you are going to be frank with me, but I am going to be frank with
you. Sit down for a minute, andplease shut the door first."
He looked at her, looked down, hesitated, then went slowly to the door, and shut it softly. Hermione was
sitting on the sofa when he turned. He came back and stood beside her.
"Si, Signora?"
"I'd rather you sat too, Gaspare."
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He took a seat on a hard chair. His face had changed. Generally it was what is called "an open face." Now it
looked the opposite to that. When she glanced at him, almost furtively, Hermione was once more assailed by
fear. She began to speak quickly, with determination, to combat her fear.
"Gaspare, I may be wrong, but for some time I have felt now and then as if you and I were not quite as we
used to be together, as ifwell, now and then it seems to me as if there was a wall, and I was on one side of
the wall and you were on the other. I don't like that feeling, after having you with me so long. I don't like it,
and I want to get rid of it."
She paused.
"Si, Signora," he said, in a low voice.
He was now looking at the floor. His arms were resting on his knees, and his hands hung down touching each
other.
"It seems to me thatI never noticed the thing between us until until Ruffo came to the island."
"Ruffo?"
"Yes, Gaspare, Ruffo."
She spoke with increasing energy and determination, still combating her still formless fear. And because of
this interior combat her manner and voice were not quite natural, though she strove to keep them so, knowing
well how swiftly a Sicilian will catch the infection of a strange mood, will be puzzled by it, be made
obstinate, even dogged by it.
"I am sure that all thisI mean that this has something to do with Ruffo."
Gaspare said nothing.
"I know you like Ruffo, Gaspare. I believe you like him very much. Don't you?"
"Signora, Ruffo has never done me any harm."
"Ruffo is very fond of you."
She saw Gaspare redden.
"He respects and admires you more than other people. I have noticed that."
Gaspare cleared his throat but did not look up or make any remark.
"Both the Signorina and I like Ruffo, too. We feelat least I feelI feel as if he had become one of the
family."
Gaspare looked up quickly and his eyes were surely fierce.
"One of the family!" he exclaimed.
Hermione wondered if he were jealous.
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"I don't mean that I put him with you, Gaspare. Nobut he seems to me quite a friend. Tell medo you
know anything against Ruffo?"
"Non, Signora."
It came very slowly from his lips.
"Absolutely nothing?"
"Signora, I don't know anything bad of Ruffo."
"I felt sure not. Don't you like his coming to the island?"
Gaspare's face was still flushed.
"Signora, it is nothing to do with me."
A sort of dull anger seemed to be creeping into his voice, an accent of defiance that he was trying to control.
Hermione noticed it, and it brought her to a resolve that, till now, she had avoided. Her secret fear had
prompted her to delay, to a gradual method of arriving at the truth. Now she sat forward, clasping her hands
together hard, and speaking quickly:
"Gaspare, I feel sure that you noticed long ago something very strange in Ruffo. Perhaps you noticed it
almost at once. I believe you did. It is this. Ruffo has an extraordinary look in his face sometimes, a look
ofof your dead Padrone. I didn't see it for some time, but I think you saw it directly. Did you? Did you,
Gaspare?"
There was no answer. Gaspare only cleared his throat again more violently. Hermione waited for a minute.
Then, understanding that he was not going to answer, she went on:
"You have seen itwe have both noticed it. Now I want to tell you somethingsomething that happened
tonight."
Gaspare started, looked up quickly, darted at his Padrona a searching glance of inquiry.
"What is it?" she said.
"Niente!"
He kept his eyes on her, staring with a tremendous directness that was essentially southern. And she returned
his gaze.
"I was with Ruffo this evening. We talked, and he told me that he met you at the Festa last night. He told me,
too, that he was with his mother."
She waited to give him a chance of speaking, of forestalling any question. But he only stared at her with
dilated eyes.
"He told me that you knew his mother, and that his mother knew you."
"Why not?"
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"Of course, there is no reason. What surprised me rather"she was speaking more slowly now, and more
unevenly"was this"
"Si?"
Gaspare's voice was loud. He lifted up his hands and laid them heavily on his knees.
"Si?" he repeated.
"After you had spoken with her, she cried, Ruffo's mother cried, Gaspare. And she said, 'To think of its being
Gaspare on the island!'"
"Is that all?"
"No."
A look that was surely a look of fear came into his face, rendering it new to Hermione. Never before had she
seen such an expressionor had she oncelong agoone night in Sicily?
"That isn't all. Ruffo took his mother home, and when they got home she said to him this, 'Has Gaspare ever
said you were like somebody?' "
Gaspare said nothing.
"Did you hear, Gaspare?"
"Si, Signora."
"Gaspare, it seems to me"Hermione was speaking now very slowly, like one shaping a thought in her mind
while she spoke"it seems to me strange that you and Ruffo's mother should have known each other so well
long before Ruffo was born, and that she should cry because she met you at the Festa, and
thatafterwardsshe should ask Ruffo that."
"Strange?"
The fear that had been formless was increasing now in Hermione, and surely it was beginning at last to take a
form, but as yet only a form that was vague and shadowy.
"Yes. I think it very strange. Did you"an intense curiosity was alive in her now"did you know Ruffo's
mother in Sicily?"
"Signora, it does not matter where I knew her."
"Why should she say that?"
"What?"
"Has Gaspare ever said you were like somebody?"
"I have never said Ruffo was like anybody!" Gaspare exclaimed, with sudden and intense violence. "May the
Madonna let me diemay I die" he held up his arms"may I die tomorrow if I have ever said Ruffo
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was like anybody!"
He got up from his chair. His face was red in patches, like the face of a man stricken with fever.
"Gaspare, I know that, but what could this woman have meant?"
"Madonna! How should I know? Signora, how can I tell what a woman like that means? Such women have
no sense, they talk, they gossipah, ah, ah, ah!"he imitated the voice of a woman of the people"they
are always on the doorstep, their tongues are always going. Dio mio! Who is to say what they mean, or what
nonsense goes through their heads?"
Hermione got up and laid her hand heavily on his arm.
"I believe you know of whom Ruffo's mother spoke, Gaspare. Tell me thisdid Ruffo's mother ever know
your Padrone?"
She looked straight into his eyes. It seemed to her as if, for the first time, there came from them to her a look
that had something in it of dislike. This look struck her to a terrible melancholy, yet she met it firmly, almost
fiercely, with a glance that fought it, that strove to beat it back. And with a steady voice she repeated the
question he had not answered.
"Did Ruffo's mother ever know your Padrone?"
Gaspare moved his lips, passing his tongue over them. His eyes fell. He moved his arm, trying to shift it from
his Padrona's hand. Her fingers closed on it more tenaciously.
"Gaspare, I order you to tell me."
"Signora," he said, "such things are not in my service. I am here to work, not to answer questions."
He spoke quietly now, heavily, and moved his feet on the carpet.
"You disobey me?"
"Signora, I shall always obey all your orders as a servant."
"And as a friend, Gaspare, as a friend! You are my friend, aren't you?"
Her voice had suddenly changed, and in answer to it his face changed. He looked into her face, and his eyes
were full of a lustrous softness that was like a gentle and warm caress.
"Signora, you know what I am for you. Then leave me alone, Signora." He spoke solemnly. "You ought to
trust me, Signora, you ought to trust me."
"I do trust you. But youdo you trust me?"
"Si, Signora."
"In everything?"
"Signora, I trust you; I have always trusted you."
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"And my couragedo you trust that?"
He did not answer.
"I don't think you do, Gaspare."
Suddenly she felt that he was right not to trust it. Again she felt beset by fear, and as if she had nothing within
her that was strong enough to stand up in further combat against the assaults of the world and of destiny. The
desire to know all, to probe this mystery, abruptly left her, was replaced by an almost frantic wish to be
always ignorant, if only that ignorance saved her from any fresh sorrow or terror.
"Never mind," she said. "You needn't answer. I don't want What does it all matter? It'sit's all so long
ago."
Having got hold of that phrase, she clung to it as if for comfort.
"It's all so long ago," she repeated. "Years and years ago. We've forgotten it. We've forgotten Sicily, Gaspare.
Why should we think of it or trouble about it any more? Goodnight, Gaspare."
She smiled at him, but her face was drawn and looked old.
"Buona notte, Signora."
He did not smile, but gazed at her with earnest gentleness, and still with that lustrous look in his eyes, full of
tenderness and protection.
"Buon riposo, Signora."
He went away, surely relieved to go. At the door he said again:
"Buon riposo."
The door was shut.
"Buon riposo!"
Hermione repeated the words to herself.
"Riposo!"
The very thought of repose was like the most bitter irony. She walked up and down the room. Tonight there
was no stability in her. She was shaken, lacerated mentally, by sharply changing moods that rushed through
her, one chasing another. Scarcely had Gaspare gone before she longed to call him back, to force him to
speak, to explain everything to her. The fear that cringed was suddenly replaced by the fear that rushes
forward blindly, intent only on getting rid of uncertainty even at the cost of death. Soldiers know that fear. It
has given men to bayonet points.
Now it increased rapidly within Hermione. She was devoured by a terror that was acutely nervous, that
gnawed her body as well as her soul.
Gaspare had known Ruffo's mother in Sicily. And Mauricehe had known Ruffo's mother. He must have
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known her. But when? How had he got to know her?
Hermione stood still.
"It must have been when I was in Africa!"
A hundred details of her husband's conduct, from the moment of his return from the fair till the last kiss he
had given her before he went away down the side of Monte Amato, flashed through her mind. And each one
seemed to burn her mind as a spark, touching flesh, burns the flesh.
"It was when I was in Africa!"
She went to the window and leaned out into the night over the misty sea. Her lips moved. She was repeating
to herself again and again:
"Tomorrow I'll go to Mergellina! Tomorrow I'll go to Mergellina!"
CHAPTER XXXV
Hermione did not sleep at all that night. When the dawn came she got up and looked out over the sea. The
mist had vanished with the darkness. The vaporous heat was replaced by a delicate freshness that embraced
the South as dew embraces a rose. On the as yet pale waters, full of varying shades of gray, slate color,
ethereal mauve, very faint pink and white, were dotted many fishingboats. Hermione looked at them with
her tired eyes. Ruffo's boat was no doubt among them. There was one only a few hundred yards beyond the
rocks from which Vere sometimes bathed. Perhaps that was his.
Ruffo's boat! Ruffo!
She put her elbows on the sill of the window and rested her face in her hands.
Her eyes felt very dry, like sand she thought, and her mind felt dry too, as if insomnia was withering it up.
She opened her lips to breathe in the salt freshness of the morning.
Upon Anacapri a woolly white cloud lay lightly. The distant coast, where dreams Sorrento, was becoming
clearer every moment.
Often and often in the summertime had Hermione been invaded by the radiant cheerfulness of the Bay of
Naples. She knew no sea that had its special gift of magical gayety and stirring hopefulness, its laughing
Pagan appeal to all the light things of the soul. It woke even the weary heart to holiday when, in the summer,
it glittered and danced in the sun, whispering or calling with a tender or bold vivacity along its lovely coast.
Out of this morning beauty, refined and exquisitely gentle, would rise presently that livelier Pagan spirit. It
was not hers. She was no Pagan. But she had loved it, and she had, or thought she had, been able to
understand it.
All that was long ago.
Now, as she leaned out, her soul felt old and haggard, and the contact with the youth and freshness of the
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morning emphasized its inability to be influenced any more by youthful wonders, by the graciousness and
inspiration that are the gifts of dawn.
Was that Ruffo's boat?
Her mind was dwelling on Ruffo, but mechanically, heavily, like a thing with feet of lead, unable to lift itself
once it had dropped down upon a surface.
All the night her brain had been busy. Now it did not slumber, but it brooded, like the mist that had so lately
left the sea. It brooded upon the thought of Ruffo.
The light grew. Over the mountains the sky spread scarlet banners. The sea took, with a quiet readiness that
was happily submissive, its burnished gift of gold. The gray was lost in gold.
And Hermione watched, and drank in the delicate air, but caught nothing of the delicate spirit of the dawn.
Presently the boat that lay not far beyond the rocks moved. A little black figure stood up in it, swayed to and
fro, plying tiny oars. The boat diminished. It was leaving the fishingground. It was going towards
Mergellina.
"Today I am going to Mergellina."
Hermione said that to herself as she watched the boat till it disappeared in the shining gold that was making a
rapture of the sea. She said it, but the words seemed to have little meaning, the fact which they conveyed to
be unimportant to her.
And she leaned out of the window, with a weary and inexpressive face, while the gold spread ever more
widely over the sea, and the Pagan spirit surely stirred from its brief repose to greet the brilliant day.
Presently she became aware of a boat approaching the island from the direction of Mergellina. She saw it first
when it was a long distance off, and watched it idly as it drew near. It looked black against the gold, till it was
off the Villa Pantano. But then, or soon after, she saw that it was white. It was making straight for the island,
propelled by vigorous arms.
Now she thought it looked like one of the island boats. Could Vere have got up and gone out so early with
Gaspare?
She drew back, lifted her face from her hands, and stood straight up against the curtain of the window. In a
moment she heard the sound of oars in the water, and saw that the boat was from the island, and that Gaspare
was in it alone. He looked up, saw her, and raised his cap, but with a rather reluctant gesture that scarcely
indicated satisfaction or a happy readiness to greet her. She hesitated, then called out to him.
"Goodmorning, Gaspare."
"Goodmorning, Signora."
"How early you are up!"
"And you, too, Signora."
"Couldn't you sleep?"
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"Signora, I never want much sleep."
"Where have you been?"
"I have been for a row, Signora."
He lifted his cap again and began to row in. The boat disappeared into the Saint's Pool.
"He has been to Mergellina."
The mind of Hermione was awake again. The sight of Gaspare had lifted those feet of lead. Once more she
was in flight.
Arabs can often read the thoughts of those whom they know. In many Sicilians there is some Arab blood, and
sometimes Hermione had felt that Gaspare knew well intentions of hers which she had never hinted to him.
Now she was sure that in the night he had divined her determination to go to Mergellina, to see the mother of
Ruffo, to ask her for the truth which Gaspare had refused to tell. He had divined this, and he had gone to
Mergellina before her. Why?
She was fully roused now. She felt like one in a conflict. Was there, then, to be a battle between herself and
Gaspare, a battle over this hidden truth?
Now she felt that it was vital to her to know this truth. Yet when her mind, or her tormented heart, was surely
on the verge of its statement, wasor seemed to beabout to say to her, "Perhaps it is that!" or "It
isthat!" something within her, housed deep down in her, refused to listen, refused to hear, revolted
fromwhat it did not acknowledge the existence of.
Paradox alone could hint the condition of her mind just then. She was in the thrall of fear, but, had she been
questioned, would not have allowed that she was afraid.
Afterwards she never rightly knew what was the truth of her during this period of her life.
There was to be a conflict between her and Gaspare.
She came from the window, took a bath, and dressed. When she had finished she looked in the glass. Her face
was calm, but set and grim. She had not known she could look like that. She hated her face, her expression,
and she came away from the glass feeling almost afraid of herself.
At breakfast she and Vere always met. The table was laid outofdoors in the little garden or on the terrace if
the weather was fine, in the diningroom if it was bad. This morning Hermione saw the glimmer of the white
cloth near the figtree. She wondered if Vere was there, and longed to plead a headache and to have her
coffee in her bedroom. Nevertheless, she went down resolved to govern herself.
In the garden she found Giulia smiling and putting down the silver coffeepot in quite a bower of roses. Vere
was not visible.
Hermione exchanged a goodmorning with Giulia and sat down. The servant's smiling face brought her a
mingled feeling of relief and wonder. The pungent smell of coffee, conquering the soft scent of the many
roses, pinned her mind abruptly down to the simple realities and animal pleasures and necessities of life. She
made a strong effort to be quite normal, to think of the moment, to live for it. The morning was fresh and
lively; the warmth of the sun, the tonic vivacity of the air from the sea, caressed and quickened her blood.
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The minute garden was secluded. A world that seemed at peace, a world of rocks and waters far from the roar
of traffic, the uneasy hum of men, lay around her.
Surely the moment was sweet, was peaceful. She would live in it.
Vere came slowly from the house, and at once Hermione's newly made and not yet carried out resolution
crumbled into dust. She forgot the sun, the sea, the peaceful situation and all material things. She was
confronted by the painful drama of the island life! Vere with her secrets, Emile with his, Gaspare fighting to
keep her, his Padrona, still in mystery. And she was confronted by her own passions, those hosts of armed
men that have their dwelling in every powerful nature.
Vere came up listlessly.
"Goodmorning, Madre," she said.
She kissed her mother's cheek with cold lips.
"What lovely roses!"
She smelled them and sat down in her place facing the seawall.
"Yes, aren't they?"
"And such a heavenly morning after the mist! What are we going to do today?"
Hermione gave her her coffee, and the little dry tap of a spoon on an eggshell was heard in the stillness of
the garden.
"Well, II am going across to take the tram."
"Are you?"
"Yes."
"Naples again? I'm tired of Naples."
There was in her voice a sound that suggested rather hatred than lassitude.
"I don't know that I shall go as far as Naples. I am going to Mergellina."
"Oh!"
Vere did not ask her what she was going to do there. She showed no special interest, no curiosity.
"What will you do, Vere?"
"I don't know."
She glanced round. Hermione saw that her usually bright eyes were dull and lacklustre.
"I don't know what I shall do."
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She sighed and began to eat her egg slowly, as if she had no appetite.
"Did you sleep well, Vere?"
"Not very well, Madre."
"Are you tired of the island?"
Vere looked up as if startled.
"Oh no! at least"she paused"No, I don't believe I could ever be really that. I love the island."
"What is it, then?"
"Sometimessome days one doesn't know exactly what to do."
"Well, but you always seem occupied." Hermione spoke with slow meaning, not unkindly, but with a
significance she hardly meant to put into her voice, yet could not keep out of it. "You always manage to find
something to do."
Suddenly Vere's eyes filled with tears. She bent down her head and went on eating. Again she heard
Monsieur Emile's harsh words. They seemed to have changed her world. She felt despised. At that moment
she hated the Marchesino with a fiery hatred.
Hermione was not able to put her arm round her child quickly, to ask her what was the matter, to kiss her
tears away, or to bid them flow quietly, openly, while Vere rested against her, secure that the sorrow was
understood, was shared. She could only pretend not to see, while she thought of the two shadows in the
garden last night.
What could have happened between Emile and Vere? What had been said, done, to cause that cry of pain,
those tears? Was it possible that Emile had let Vere see plainly hishis? But here Hermione stopped. Not
even in her own mind, for herself alone, could she summon up certain spectres.
She went on eating her breakfast, and pretending not to notice that Vere was troubled. Presently Vere spoke
again.
"Would you like me to come with you to Mergellina, Madre?" she said.
Her voice was rather uneven, almost trembling.
"Oh no, Vere!"
Hermione spoke hastily, abruptly, strongly conscious of the impossibility of taking Vere with her. Directly
she had said the words she realized that they must have fallen on Vere like a blow. She realized this still more
when she looked quickly up and saw that Vere's face was scarlet.
"I don't mean that I shouldn't like to have you with me, Vere," she added, hurriedly. "But"
"It's all right, Madre. Well, I've finished. I think I shall go out a little in my boat."
She went away, half humming, half singing the tune of the Mergellina song.
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Hermione put down her cup. She had not finished her coffee, but she knew she could not finish it. Life
seemed at that moment utterly intolerable to her. She felt desperate, as a nature does that is forced back upon
itself by circumstances, that is forced to be, or to appear to be, traitor to itself. And in her desperation action
presented itself to her as imperatively necessarynecessary as air is to one suffocating.
She got up. She would start at once for Mergellina. As she went up stairs she remembered that she did not
know where Ruffo's mother lived, what she was like, even what her name was. The boy had always spoken of
her as "Mia Mamma." They dwelt at Mergellina. That was all she knew.
She did not choose to ask Gaspare anything. She would go alone, and find out somehow for herself where
Ruffo lived. She would ask the fishermen. Or perhaps she would come across Ruffo. Probably he had gone
home by this time from the fishing.
Quickly, energetically she got ready.
Just before she left her room she saw Vere pass slowly by upon the sea, rowing a little way out alone, as she
often did in the calm summer weather. Vere had a book, and almost directly she laid the oars in their places
side by side, went into the stern, sat down under the awning, and beganapparentlyto read. Hermione
watched her for two or three minutes. She looked very lonely; and moved by an impulse to try to erase the
impression made on her by the abrupt exclamation at the breakfasttable, the mother leaned out and hailed
the child.
"Goodbye, Vere! I am just starting!" she cried out, trying to make her voice sound cheerful and ordinary.
Vere looked up for a second.
"Goodbye!"
She bent her head and returned to her book.
Hermione felt chilled.
She went down and met Giulia in the passage.
"Giulia, is Gaspare anywhere about? I want to cross to the mainland. I am going to take the tram."
"Signora, are you going to Naples? Maria says"
"I can't do any commissions, because I shall probably not go beyond Mergellina. Find Gaspare, will you?"
Giulia went away and Hermione descended to the Saint's Pool. She waited there two or three minutes. Then
Gaspare appeared above.
"You want the boat, Signora?"
"Yes, Gaspare."
He leaped down the steps and stood beside her.
"Where do you want to go?"
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She hesitated. Then she looked him straight in the face and said:
"To Mergellina."
He met her eyes without flinching. His face was quite calm.
"Shall I row you there, Signora?"
"I meant to go to the village, and walk up and take the tram."
"As you like, Signora. But I can easily row you there."
"Aren't you tired after being out so early this morning?"
"No, Signora."
"Did you go far?"
"Not so very far, Signora."
Hermione hesitated. She knew Gaspare had been to Mergellina. She knew he had been to see Ruffo's mother.
If that were so her journey would probably be in vain. In their conflict Gaspare had struck the first blow.
Could anything be gained by her going?
Gaspare saw, and perhaps read accurately, her hesitation.
"It will get very hot today, Signora," he said, carelessly.
His words decided Hermione. If obstacles were to be put in her way she would overleap them. At all costs
she would emerge from the darkness in which she was walking. A heat of anger rushed over her. She felt as if
Gaspare, and perhaps Artois, were treating her like a child.
"I must go to Mergellina, Gaspare," she said. "And I shall go by tram. Please row me to the village."
"Va bene, Signora," he answered.
He went to pull in the boat.
CHAPTER XXXVI
When Hermione got out of the boat in the little harbor of the village on the mainland Gaspare said again:
"I could easily row you to Mergellina, Signore. I am not a bit tired."
She looked at him as he stood with his hand on the prow of the boat. His shirtsleeves were rolled up,
showing his strong arms. There was something brave, something "safe"so she called it to herselfin his
whole appearance which had always appealed to her nature. How she longed at that moment to be quite at
ease with him! Why would he not trust her completely? Perhaps in her glance just then she showed her
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thought, her desire. Gaspare's eyes fell before her.
"I think I'll take the tram," she said, "unless"
She was still looking at him, longing for him to speak. But he said nothing. At that moment a fisherman ran
down the steps from the village, and came over the sand to greet them.
"Goodbye, Gaspare," she said. "Don't wait, of course. Giovanni can row me back."
The fisherman smiled, but Gaspare said:
"I can come for you, Signora. You will not be very long, will you? You will be back for colazione?"
"Oh yes, I suppose so."
"I will come for you, Signora."
Again she looked at him, and felt his deep loyalty to her, his strong and almost doglike affection. And,
feeling them, she was seized once more by fear. The thing Gaspare hid from her must be something terrible.
"Thank you, Gaspare."
"A rivederci, Signora."
Was there not a sound of pleading in his voice, a longing to retain her? She would not heed it. But she gave
him a very gentle look as she turned to walk up the hill.
At the top, by the Trattoria del Giardinetto, she had to wait for several minutes before the tram came. She
remembered her solitary dinner there on the evening when she had gone to the Scoglio di Frisio to look at the
visitor's book. She had felt lonely then in the soft light of the fading day. She felt far more lonely now in the
brilliant sunshine of morning. And for an instant she saw herself travelling steadily along a straight road,
from which she could not diverge. She passed milestone after milestone. And now, not far off, she saw in the
distance a great darkness in which the road ended. And the darkness was the ultimate loneliness which can
encompass on earth the human spirit.
The trambell sounded. She lifted her head mechanically. A moment later she was rushing down towards
Naples. Before the tram reached the harbor of Mergellina, on the hill opposite the Donn' Anna, Hermione got
out. Something in her desired delay; there was plenty of time. She would walk a little way among the lively
people who were streaming to the Stabilimenti to have their morning dip.
In the tram she had scarcely thought at all. She had given herself to the air, to speed, to vision. Now, at once,
with physical action came an anxiety, a restlessness, that seemed to her very physical too. Her body felt ill,
she thought; though she knew there was nothing the matter with her. All through her life her health had been
robust. Never yet had she completely "broken down." She told herself that her body was perfectly well.
But she was afraid. That was the truth. And to feel fear was specially hateful to her, because she abhorred
cowardice, and was inclined to despise all timidity as springing from weakness of character.
She dreaded reaching Mergellina. She dreaded seeing this woman, Ruffo's mother. And Ruffo? Did she dread
seeing him?
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She fought against her fear. Whatever might befall her she would remain herself, essentially separate from all
other beings and from events, secure of the tremendous solitude that is the property of every human being on
earth.
"Pain, misery, horror, come from within, not from without." She said that to herself steadily. "I am free so
long as I choose, so long as I have the courage to choose, to be free."
And saying that, and never once allowing her mind to state frankly any fear, she came down to the harbor of
Mergellina.
The harbor and its environs looked immensely gay in the brilliant sunshine. Life was at play here, even at its
busiest. The very workers sang as if their work were play. Boats went in and out on the water. Children
paddled in the shallow sea, pushing handnets along the sand. From the rocks boys were bathing. Their
shouts travelled to the road where the fishermen were talking with intensity, as they leaned against the wall
hot with the splendid sun.
Hermione looked for Ruffo's face among all these sunbrowned faces, for his bright eyes among all the
sparkling eyes of these children of the sea.
But she could not see him. She walked along the wall slowly.
"RuffoRuffoRuffo!"
She was summoning him with her mind.
Perhaps he was among those bathing boys. She looked across the harbor to the rocks, and saw the brown
body of one shoot through the shining air and disappear with a splash into the sea.
Perhaps that boy was hehow far away from her loneliness, her sadness, and her dread!
She began to despair of finding him.
"Barca! Barca!"
She had reached the steps now near the Savoy Hotel. A happylooking boatman, with hazel eyes and a
sensitive mouth, hailed her from the water. It was Fabiano Lari, to whom Artois had once spoken, waiting for
custom in his boat the Stella del Mare.
Hermione was attracted to the man, as Artois had been, and she resolved to find out from him, if possible,
where Ruffo's mother lived. She went down the steps. The man immediately brought his boat right in.
"No," she said, "I don't want the boat."
Fabiano looked a little disappointed.
"I am looking for some one who lives here, a Sicilian boy called Ruffo."
"Ruffo Scarla, Signora? The Sicilian?"
"That must be he. Do you know him?"
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"Si, Signora, I know Ruffo very well. He was here this morning. But I don't know where he is now." He
looked round. "He may have gone home, Signora."
"Do you know where he lives?"
"Si, Signora. It is near where I live. It's near the Grotto."
"Could you possibly leave your boat and take me there?"
"Si, Signora! A moment, Signora."
Quickly he signed to a boy who was standing close by watching them. The boy ran down to the boat. Fabiano
spoke to him in dialect. He got into the boat, while Fabiano jumped ashore.
"Signora, I am ready. We go this way."
They walked along together.
Fabiano was as frank and simple as a child, and began at once to talk. Hermione was glad of that, still more
glad that he talked of himself, his family, the life and affairs of a boatman. She listened sympathetically,
occasionally putting in a word, till suddenly Fabiano said:
"Antonio Bernari will be out today. I suppose you know that, Signora?"
"Antonio Bernari! Who is he? I never heard of him."
Fabiano looked surprised.
"But he is Ruffo's Patrigno. He is the husband of Maddalena."
Hermione stood still on the pavement. She did not know why for a moment. Her mind seemed to need a
motionless body in which to work. It was surely groping after something, eagerly, feverishly, yet blindly.
Fabiano paused beside her.
"Signora," he said, staring at her in surprise, "are you tired? Are you not well?"
"I'm quite well. But wait a minute. Yes, I do want to rest for a minute."
She dared not move lest she should interfere with that mental search. Fabiano's words had sent her mind
sharply to Sicily.
Maddalena!
She was sure she had known, or heard of, some girl in Sicily called Maddalena, some girl or some woman.
She thought of the servants in the Casa del Prete, Lucrezia. Had she any sister, any relation called
Maddalena? Or had Gaspare?
Suddenly Hermione seemed to be on the little terrace above the ravine with Maurice and Artois. She seemed
to feel the heat of noon in summer. Gaspare was there, too. She saw his sullen face. She saw him looking
ugly. She heard him say:
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"Salvatore and Maddalena, Signora."
Why had he said that? In answer to what question?
And then, in a flash, she remembered everything. It was she who had spoken first. She had asked him who
lived in the House of the Sirens.
"Salvatore and Maddalena."
And afterwardsMaurice had said something. Her mind went in search, seized its prey.
"They're quite friends of ours. We saw them at the fair only yesterday."
Maurice had said that. She could hear his voice saying it.
"I'm rested now."
She was speaking to Fabiano. They were walking on again among the chattering people. They had come to
the wooden station where the tram lines converge.
"Is it this way?"
"Si, Signora, quite near the Grotto. Take care, Signora."
"It's all right. Thank you."
They had crossed now and were walking up the street that leads directly to the tunnel, whose mouth
confronted them in the distance. Hermione felt as if they were going to enter it, were going to walk down it to
the great darkness which seemed to wait for her, to beckon her. But presently Fabiano turned to the right, and
they came into a street leading up the hill, and stopped almost immediately before a tall house.
"Antonio and Maddalena live here, Signora."
"And Ruffo," she said, as if correcting him.
"Ruffo! Si, Signora, of course."
Hermione looked at the house. It was evidently let out in rooms to people who were comparatively poor; not
very poor, not in any destitution, but who made a modest livelihood, and could pay their fourteen or fifteen
lire a month for lodging. She divined by its aspect that every room was occupied. For the building teemed
with life, and echoed with the sound of calling, or screaming, voices. The inhabitants were surely all of them
in a flurry of furious activity. Children were playing before and upon the doorstep, which was flanked by an
open shop, whose interior revealed with a blatant sincerity a rummage of mysterious ediblesfruit,
vegetables, strings of strange objects that looked poisonous, fungi, and other delights. Above, from several
windows, women leaned out, talking violently to one another. Two were holding babies, who testified their
newborn sense of life by screaming shrilly. Across other windowspaces heads passed to and fro, denoting
the continuous movement of those within. People in the street called to people in the house, and the latter
shouted in answer, with that absolute lack of selfconsciousness and disregard of the opinions of others
which is the hallmark of the true Neapolitan. From the corner came the rumble and the bell notes of the
trams going to and coming from the tunnel that leads to Fuorigrotta. And from every direction rose the
vehement street calls of ambulant venders of the necessaries of Neapolitan life.
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"Ruffo lives here!" said Hermione.
She could hardly believe it. So unsuitable seemed such a dwelling to that brighteyed child of the sea, whom
she had always seen surrounded by the wide airs and the waters.
"Si, Signora. They are on the third floor. Shall I take you up?"
Hermione hesitated. Should she go up alone?
"Please show me the way," she said, deciding.
Fabiano preceded her up a dirty stone staircase, dark and full of noises, till they came to the third floor.
"It is here, Signora!"
He knocked loudly on a door. It was opened very quickly, as if by some one who was on the watch, expectant
of an arrival.
"Chi e?" cried a female voice.
And, almost simultaneously, a woman appeared with eyes that stared in inquiry.
By these eyes, their shape, and the long, level brows above them, Hermione knew that this woman must be
Ruffo's mother.
"Goodmorning, Donna Maddalena," said Fabiano, heartily.
"Goodmorning," said the woman, directing her eyes with a strange and pertinacious scrutiny to Hermione,
who stood behind him. "I thought perhaps it was"
She stopped. Behind, in the doorway, appeared the head of a young woman, covered with blueblack hair,
then the questioning face of an old woman with a skin like yellow parchment.
"Don Antonio?"
She nodded, keeping her long, Arab eyes on Hermione.
"No. Are you expecting him so early?"
"He may come at any time. Chi lo sa?"
She shrugged her broad, graceless shoulders.
"It isn't he! It isn't Antonio!" bleated a pale and disappointed voice, with a peculiarly irritating timbre.
It was the voice of the old woman, who now darted over Maddalena Bernari's shoulder a hostile glance at
Hermione.
"Madonna Santissima!" baaed the woman with the blueblack hair. "Perhaps he will not be let out today!"
The old woman began to cry feebly, yet angrily.
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"Courage, Madre Teresa!" said Fabiano. "Antonio will be here today for a certainty. Every one knows it.
His friends"he raised a big brown hand significantly"his friends have managed well for him."
"Si! si! It is true!" said the blackhaired woman, nodding her large head, and gesticulating towards Madre
Teresa. "He will be here today. Antonio will be here."
They all stared at Hermione, suddenly forgetting their personal and private affairs.
"Donna Maddalena," said Fabiano, "here is a signora who knows Ruffo. I met her at the Mergellina, and she
asked me to show her the way here."
"Ruffo is out," said Maddalena, always keeping her eyes on Hermione.
"May I come in and speak to you?" asked Hermione.
Maddalena looked doubtful, yet curious.
"My son is in the sea, Signora. He is bathing at the Marina."
Hermione thought of the brown body she had seen falling through the shining air, of the gay splash as it
entered the water.
"I know your son so well that I should like to know his mother," she said.
Fabiano by this time had moved aside, and the two women were confronting each other in the doorway.
Behind Maddalena the two other women stared and listened with all their might, giving their whole attention
to this unexpected scene.
"Are you the Signora of the island?" asked Maddalena.
"Yes, I am."
"Let the Signora in, Donna Maddalena," said Fabiano. "She is tired and wants to rest."
Without saying anything Maddalena moved her broad body from the doorway, leaving enough space for
Hermione to enter.
"Thank you," said Hermione to Fabiano, giving him a couple of lire.
"Grazie, Signora. I will wait downstairs to take you back."
He went off before she had time to tell him that was not necessary.
Hermione walked into Ruffo's home.
There were two rooms, one opening into the other. The latter was a kitchen, the former the sleepingroom.
Hermione looked quietly round it, and her eyes fell at once upon a large green parrot, which was sitting at the
end of the board on which, supported by trestles of iron, the huge bed of Maddalena and her husband was
laid. At present this bed was rolled up, and in consequence towered to a considerable height. The parrot
looked at Hermione coldly, with round, observant eyes whose pupils kept contracting and expanding with a
monotonous regularity. She felt as if it had a soul that was frigidly ironic. Its pertinacious glance chilled and
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repelled her, and she fancied it was reflected in the faces of the women round her.
"Can I speak to you alone for a few minutes?" she asked Maddalena.
Maddalena turned to the two women and spoke to them loudly in dialect. They replied. The old woman spoke
at great length. She seemed always angry and always upon the verge of tears. Over her shoulders she wore a
black shawl, and as she talked she kept fidgeting with it, pulling it first to one side, then to the other, or
dragging at it with her thin and crooked yellow fingers. The parrot watched her steadily. Her hideous voice
played upon Hermione's nerves till they felt raw. At length, looking back, as she walked, with bloodshot eyes,
she went into the kitchen, followed by the young woman. They began talking together in sibilant whispers,
like people conspiring.
After a moment of apparent hesitation Maddalena gave her visitor a chair.
"Thank you," Hermione said, taking it.
She looked round the room again. It was clean and well kept, but humbly furnished. Ruffo's bed was rolled
up in a corner. On the walls were some shields of postcards and photographs, such as the poor Italians love,
deftly enough arranged and fastened together by some mysterious not apparent means. Many of the postcards
were American. Near two small flags, American and Italian, fastened crosswise above the head of the big
bed, was a portrait of Maria Addolorata, under which burned a tiny light. A palm, blessed, and fashioned like
a dagger with a cross for the hilt, was nailed above it, with a coral charm to protect the household against the
evil eye. And a little to the right of it was a small object which Hermione saw and wondered at without
understanding why it should be there, or what was its usea Fattura della morte (deathcharm), in the form
of a green lemon pierced with many nails. This hung by a bit of string to a nail projecting from the wall.
From the deathcharm Hermione turned her eyes to Maddalena.
She saw a woman who was surely not very much younger than herself, with a broad and spreading figure,
wide hips, plump though smallboned arms, heavy shoulders. The facethat, perhapsyes, that,
certainly must have been once pretty. Very pretty? Hermione looked searchingly at it until she saw
Maddalena's eyes drop before hers suddenly, as if embarrassed. She must say something. But now that she
was here she felt a difficulty in opening a conversation, an intense reluctance to speak to this woman into
whose house she had almost forced her way. With the son she was strangely intimate. From the mother she
felt separated by a gulf.
And that fear of hers?
She looked again round the room. Had that fear increased or diminished? Her eyes fell on Maria Addolorata,
then on the Fattura della morte. She did not know why, but she was moved to speak about it.
"You have nice rooms here," she said.
"Si, Signora."
Maddalena had rather a harsh voice. She spoke politely, but inexpressively.
"What a curious thing that is on the wall!"
"Signora?"
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"It's a lemon, isn't it? With nails stuck through it?"
Maddalena's broad face grew a dusky red.
"That is nothing, Signora!" she said, hastily.
She looked greatly disturbed, suddenly went over to the bed, unhooked the string from the nail, and put the
deathcharm into her pocket. As she came back she looked at Hermione with defiance in her eyes.
The gulf between them had widened.
From the kitchen came the persistent sound of whispering voices. The green parrot turned sideways on the
board beyond the pile of rolledup mattresses, and looked, with one round eye, steadfastly at Hermione.
An almost intolerable sensation of desertion swept over her. She felt as if every one hated her.
"Would you mind shutting that door?" she said to Maddalena, pointing towards the kitchen.
The sound of whispers ceased. The women within were listening.
"Signora, we always keep it open."
"But I have something to say to you that I wish to say in private."
"Si!"
The exclamation was suspicious. The voice sounded harsher than before. In the kitchen the silence seemed to
increase, to thrill with anxious curiosity.
"Please shut that door."
It was like an order. Maddalena obeyed it, despite a cataract of words from the old woman that voiced
indignant protest.
"And do sit down, won't you? I don't like to sit while you are standing."
"Signora, I"
"Please do sit down."
Hermione's voice began to show her acute nervous agitation. Maddalena stared, then took another chair from
its place against the wall, and sat down at some distance from Hermione. She folded her plump hands in her
lap. Seated, she looked bigger, more graceless, than before. But Hermione saw that she was not really
middleaged. Hard life and trouble doubtless had combined to destroy her youth and beauty early, to coarsen
the outlines, to plant the many wrinkles that spread from the corners of her eyes and lips to her temples and
her heavy, dusky cheeks. She was now a typical woman of the people. Hermione tried to see her as a girl,
long agoyears and years ago.
"I know your son Ruffo very well," she said.
Maddalena's face softened.
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"Si, Signora. He has told me of you."
Suddenly she seemed to recollect something.
"I have never Signora, thank you for the money," she said.
The harshness was withdrawn from her voice as she spoke now, and in her abrupt gentleness she looked
much younger than before. Hermione divined in that moment her vanished beauty. It seemed suddenly to be
unveiled by her tenderness.
"I heard you were in trouble."
"Si, Signoragreat trouble."
Her eyes filled with tears and her mouth worked. As if moved by an uncontrollable impulse, she thrust one
hand into her dress, drew out the deathcharm, and contemplated it, at the same time muttering some words
that Hermione did not understand. Her face became full of hatred. Holding up the charm, and lifting her head,
she exclaimed:
"Those who bring trouble shall have trouble!"
While she spoke she looked straight before her, and her voice became harsh again, seemed to proclaim to the
world unalterable destiny.
"Yes," said Hermione, in a low voice.
Maddalena hid the deathcharm once more with a movement that was surreptitious.
"Yes," Hermione said again, gazing into Maddalena's still beautiful eyes. "And you have trouble!"
Maddalena looked afraid, like an ignorant person whose tragic superstition is proved true by an assailing fact.
"Signora!"
"You have trouble in your house. Have you ever brought trouble to any one? Have you?"
Maddalena stared at her with dilated eyes, but made no answer.
"Tell me something." Hermione leaned forward. "You know my servant, Gaspare?"
Maddalena was silent.
"You know Gaspare. Did you know him in Sicily?"
"Sicily?" Her face and her voice had become stupid. "Sicily?" she repeated.
The parrot shifted on the board, lifted its left claw, and craned its head forward in the direction of the two
women. The trambell sounded its reiterated appeal.
"Yes, in Sicily. You are a Sicilian?"
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"Who says so?"
"Your son is a Sicilian. At the port they call him 'Il Siciliano.' "
"Do they?"
Her intellect seemed to be collapsing. She looked almost bovine.
Hermione's excitement began to be complicated by a feeling of hot anger.
"But don't you know it? You must know it!"
The parrot shuffled slowly along the board, coming nearer to them, and bowing its head obsequiously.
Hermione could not help watching its movements with a strained attention. Its presence distracted her. She
had a longing to take it up and wring its neck. Yet she loved birds.
"You must know it!" she repeated, no longer looking at Maddalena.
"Si!"
All ignorance and all stupidity were surely enshrined in that word thus said.
"Where did you know Gaspare?"
"Who says I know Gaspare?"
The way in which she pronounced his name revealed to Hermione a former intimacy between them.
"Ruffo says so."
The parrot was quite at the edge of the board now, listening apparently with cold intensity to every word that
was being said. And Hermione felt that behind the kitchen door the two women were straining their ears to
catch the conversation. Was the whole world listening? Was the whole world coldly, cruelly intent upon her
painful effort to come out of darkness intoperhaps a greater darkness?
"Ruffo says so. Ruffo told me so."
"Boys say anything."
"Do you mean it is not true?"
Maddalena's face was now almost devoid of expression. She had set her knees wide apart and planted her
hands on them.
"Do you mean that?" repeated Hermione.
"Boys"
"I know it is true. You knew Gaspare in Sicily. You come from Marechiaro."
At the mention of the last word light broke into Maddalena's face.
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"You are from Marechiaro. Have you ever seen me before? Do you remember me?"
Maddalena shook her head.
"And II don't remember you. But you are from Marechiaro. You must be."
Maddalena shook her head again.
"You are not?"
Hermione looked into the long Arab eyes, searching for a lie. She met a gaze that was steady but dull, almost
like that of a sulky child, and for a moment she felt as if this woman was only a great child, heavy, ignorant,
but solemnly determined, a child that had learned its lesson and was bent on repeating it word for word.
"Did Gaspare come here early this morning to see you?" she asked, with sudden vehemence.
Maddalena was obviously startled. Her face flushed.
"Why should he come?" she said, almost angrily.
"That is what I want you to tell me."
Maddalena was silent. She shifted uneasily in her chair, which creaked under her weight, and twisted her full
lips sideways. Her whole body looked halfsleepily apprehensive. The parrot watched her with supreme
attention. Suddenly Hermione felt that she could no longer bear this struggle, that she could no longer
continue in darkness, that she must have full light. The contemplation of this stolid ignorancethat yet knew
how much?confronting her like a featureless wall almost maddened her.
"Who are you?" she said. "What have you had to do with my lie?"
Maddalena looked at her and looked away, bending her head sideways till her plump neck was like a thing
deformed.
"What have you had to do with my life? What have you to do with it now? I want to know!" She stood up. "I
must know. You must tell me! Do you hear?" She bent down. She was standing almost over Maddalena.
"You must tell me!"
There was again a silence through which presently the trambell sounded. Maddalena's face had become
heavily expressionless, almost like a face of stone. And Hermione, looking down at this face, felt a moment
of impotent despair that was succeeded by a fierce, energetic impulse.
"Then," she said"thenI'll tell you!"
Maddalena looked up.
"Yes, I'll tell you."
Hermione paused. She had begun to tremble. She put one hand down to the back of the chair, grasping it
tightly as if to steady herself.
"I'll tell you."
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What? What was she going to tell?
That first evening in Sicilyjust before they went in to bedMaurice had looked down over the terrace
wall to the sea. He had seen a light far down by the sea.
It was the light in the House of the Sirens.
"You once lived in Sicily. You once lived in the Casa delle Sirene, beyond the old wall, beyond the inlet. You
were there when we were in Sicily, when Gaspare was with us as our servant."
Maddalena's lips parted. Her mouth began to gape. It was obvious that she was afraid.
"Youyou knew Gaspare. You knewyou knew my husband, the Signore of the Casa del Prete on Monte
Amato. You knew him. Do you remember?"
Maddalena only stared up at her with a sort of heavy apprehension, sitting widely in her chair, with her feet
apart and her hands always resting on her knees.
"It was in the summertime" She was again in Sicily. She was tracing out a story. It was almost as if she
saw words and read them from a book. "There were no forestieri in Sicily. They had all gone. Only we were
there" An expression so faint that it was like a fleeting shadow passed over Maddalena's face, the fleeting
shadow of something that denied. "Ah, yes! Till I went away, you mean! I went to Africa. Did you know it
then? But before I wentbefore" She was thinking, she was burrowing deep down into the past, stirring
the heap of memories that lay like drifted leaves. "They used to goat least they went oncedown to the
sea. One night they went to the fishing. And they slept out all night. They slept in the caves. Ah, you know
that? You remember that night!"
The trembling that shook her body was reflected in her voice, which became tremulous. She heard the
trambell ringing. She saw the green parrot listening on its board. And yet she was in Sicily, and saw the line
of the coast between Messina and Cattaro, the Isle of the Sirens, the lakelike sea of the inlet between it and
the shore.
"I see that you remember it. You saw them there. Theythey didn't tell me!"
As she said the last words she felt that she was entering the great darkness. Maurice and Gaspareshe had
trusted them with all her nature. And theyhad they failed her? Was that possible?
"They didn't tell me," she repeated, piteously, speaking now only for herself and to her own soul. "They
didn't tell me!"
Maddalena shook her head like one in sympathy or agreement. But Hermione did not see the movement. She
no longer saw Maddalena. She saw only herself, and those two, whom she had trusted so completely,
andwho had not told her.
What had they not told her?
And then she was in Africa, beside the bed of Artois, ministering to him in the torrid heat, driving away the
flies from his white face.
What had been done in the Garden of Paradise while she had been in exile?
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She turned suddenly sick. Her body felt ashamed, defiled. A shutter seemed to be sharply drawn across her
eyes, blotting out life. Her head was full of sealike noises.
Presently, from among these noises, one detached itself, pushed itself, as it were, forward to attract forcibly
her attentionthe sound of a boy's voice.
"Signora! Signora!"
"Signora!"
A hand touched her, gripped her.
"Signora!"
The shutter was sharply drawn back from her eyes, and she saw Ruffo. He stood before her, gazing at her.
His hair, wet from the sea, was plastered down upon his brown foreheadas his hair had been when, in the
night, they drew him from the sea.
She saw Ruffo in that moment as if for the first time.
And she knew. Ruffo had told her.
CHAPTER XXXVII
Hermione was outside in the street, hearing the cries of ambulant sellers, the calls of women and children, the
tinkling bells and the rumble of the trams, and the voice of Fabiano Lari speakingwas it to her?
"Signora, did you see him?"
"Yes."
"He is glad to be out of prison. He is gay, but he looks wicked."
She did not understand what he meant. She walked on and came into the road that leads to the tunnel. She
turned mechanically towards the tunnel, drawn by the darkness.
"But, Signora, this is not the way! This is the way to Fuorigrotta!"
"Oh!"
She went towards the sea. She was thinking of the green parrot expanding and contracting the pupils of its
round, ironic eyes.
"Was Maddalena pleased to see him? Was Donna Teresa pleased?"
Hermione stood still.
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"What are you talking about?"
"Signora! About Antonio Bernari, who has just come home from prison! Didn't you see him? But you were
therein the house!"
"Ohyes, I saw him. A rivederci!"
"Ma"
"A rivederci!"
She felt in her purse, found a coin, and gave it to him. Then she walked on. She did not see him any more.
She did not know what became of him.
Of course she had seen the return of Antonio Bernari. She remembered now. As Ruffo stood before her with
the wet hair on his forehead there had come a shrill cry from the old woman in the kitchen: a cry that was
hideous and yet almost beautiful, so full it was of joy. Then from the kitchen the two women had rushed in,
gesticulating, ejaculating, their faces convulsed with excitement. They had seized Maddalena, Ruffo. One of
themthe old woman, she thoughthad even clutched at Hermione's arm. The room had been full of cries.
"Ecco! Antonio!"
"Antonio is coming!"
"I have seen Antonio!"
"He is pale! He is white like death!"
"Mamma mia! But he is thin!"
"Ecco! Ecco! He comes! Here he is! Here is Antonio!"
And then the door had been opened, and on the sill a big, broad shouldered man had appeared, followed by
several other evillooking though smiling men. And all the women had hurried to them. There had been shrill
cries, a babel of voices, a noise of kisses.
And Ruffo! Where had he been? What had he done?
Hermione only knew that she had head a rough voice saying:
"Sangue del Diavolo! Let me alone! Give me a glass of wine! Basta! Basta!"
And then she went out in the street, thinking of the green parrot and hearing the cries of the sellers, the
trambells, and Fabiano's questioning voice.
Now she continued her walk towards the harbor of Mergellina alone. The thought of the green parrot
obsessed her mind.
She saw it before her on its board, with the rolledup bed towering behind it. Now it was motionlessonly
the pupils of its eyes moved. Now it lifted its claw, bowed its head, shuffled along the board to hear their
conversation better.
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She saw it with extreme distinctness, and now she also saw on the wall of the room near it the "Fattura della
Morte"the green lemon with the nails stuck through it, like nails driven into a cross.
Vaguely the word "crucifixion" went through her mind. Many people, many women, had surely been
crucified since the greatest tragedy the world had ever known. What had they felt, they who were only
human, they who could not see the face of the Father, who couldsome of them, perhapsonly hope that
there was a Father? What had they felt? Perhaps scarcely anything. Perhaps merely a sensation of numbness,
as if their whole bodies, and their minds, too, were under the influence of a great injection of cocaine. Her
thoughts again returned to the parrot. She wondered where it had been bought, whether it had come with
Antonio from America.
Presently she reached the tramway station and stood still. She had to go back to the "Trattoria del
Giardinetto." She must take the tram here, one of those on which was written in big letters, "Capo di
Posilipo." No, not that! That did not go far enough. The other one what was written upon it?
Something"Sette Settembre." She looked for the words "Sette Settembre."
Tram after tram came up, paused, passed on. But she did not see those words on any of them. She began to
think of the sea, of the brown body of the bathing boy which she had seen shoot through the air and disappear
into the shining water before she had gone to that house where the green parrot was. She would go down to
the sea, to the harbor.
She threaded her way across the broad space, going in and out among the trams and the waiting people. Then
she went down a road not far from the Grand Hotel and came to the Marina.
There were boys bathing still from the breakwater of the rocks. And still they were shouting. She stood by the
wall and watched them, resting her hands on the stone.
How hot the stone was! Gaspare had been right. It was going to be a glorious day, one of the tremendous days
of summer.
The nails driven through the green lemon like nails driven through a crossPeppinathe cross cut on
Peppina's cheek.
That broadshouldered man who had come in at the door had cut that cross on Peppina's cheek.
Was it true that Peppina had the evil eye? Had it been a fatal day for the Casa del Mare when she had been
allowed to cross its threshold? Vere had said somethingwhat was it?about Peppina and her cross. Oh
yes! That Peppina's cross seemed like a sign, a warning come into the house on the island, that it seemed to
say, "There is a cross to be borne by some one here, by one of us!"
And the fishermen's sign of the cross under the light of San Francesco?
Surely there had been many warnings in her life. They had been given to her, but she had not heeded them.
She saw a brown body shoot through the air from the rocks and disappear into the shining sea. Was it Ruffo?
With an effort she remembered that she had left Ruffo in the tall house, in the room where the green parrot
was.
She walked on slowly till she came to the place where Artois had seen Ruffo with his mother. A number of
tables were set out, but there were few people sitting at them. She felt tired. She crossed the road, went to a
table, and sat down. A waiter came up and asked her what she would have.
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"Acqua fresca," she said.
He looked surprised.
"Ohthen wine, vermouthanything!"
He looked more surprised.
"Will you have vermouth, Signora?"
"Yes, yesvermouth."
He brought her vermouth and iced water. She mixed them together and drank. But she was not conscious of
tasting anything. For a considerable time she sat there. People passed her. The trams rushed by. On several of
them were printed the words she had looked for in vain at the station. But she did not notice them.
During this time she did not feel unhappy. Seldom had she felt calmer, more at rest, more able to be still. She
had no desire to do anything. It seemed to her that she would be quite satisfied to sit where she was in the sun
forever.
While she sat there she was always thinking, but vaguely, slowly, lethargically. And her thoughts reiterated
themselves, were like recurring fragments of dreams, and were curiously linked together. The green parrot
she always connected with the deathcharm, because the latter had once been green. Whenever the one
presented itself to her mind it was immediately followed by the other. The shawl at which the old woman's
yellow fingers had perpetually pulled led her mind to the thought of the tunnel, because she imagined that the
latter must eventually end in blackness, and the shawl was black. She knew, of course, really that the tunnel
was lit from end to end by electricity. But her mind arbitrarily put aside this knowledge. It did not belong to
her strange mood, the mood of one drawing near to the verge either of some abominable collapse or of some
terrible activity. Occasionally, she thought of Ruffo; but always as one of the brown boys bathing from the
rocks beyond the harbor, shouting, laughing, triumphant in his glorious youth. And when the link was, as it
were, just beginning to form itself from the thoughtshape of youth to another thoughtshape, her mind
stopped short in that progress, recoiled, like a creature recoiling from a precipice it has not seen but has
divined in the dark. She sipped the vermouth and the iced water, and stared at the drops chasing each other
down the clouded glass. And for a time she was not conscious where she was, and heard none of the noises
round about her.
It was the song of Mergellina, sung at some distance off in dialect, by a tenor voice to the accompaniment of
a pianoorgan. Hermione ceased from gazing at the drops on the glass, looked up, listened.
The song came nearer. The tenor voice was hard, strident, sang lustily but inexpressively in the glaring
sunshine. And the dialect made the song seem different, almost new. Its charm seemed to have evaporated.
Yet she remembered vaguely that it had charmed her. She sought for the charm, striving feebly to recapture
it.
The pianoorgan hurt her, the hard voice hurt her. It sounded cruel and greedy. But the songonce it had
appealed to her. Once she had leaned down to hear it, she had leaned down over the misty sea, her soul had
followed it out over the sea.
"Oh, dolce luna bianca de l' estate
Mi fugge il sonno accanto a la Marina:
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Mi destan le dolcissime serate
Gli occhi di Rosa e il mar di Mergellina."
Those were the real words. And what voice had sung them?
And then, suddenly, her brain worked once more with its natural swiftness and vivacity, her imagination and
her heart awaked. She was again alive. She saw the people. She heard the sounds about her. She felt the
scorching heat of the sun. But in it she was conscious also of the opposite of day, of the opposite of heat. At
that moment she had a double consciousness. For she felt the salt coolness of the night around the lonely
island. And she heard not only the street singer, but Ruffo in his boat.
Ruffoin his boat.
Suddenly she could not see anything. Her sight was drowned by tears. She got up at once. She felt for her
purse, found it, opened it, felt for money, found some coins, laid them down on the table, and began to walk.
She was driven by fear, the fear of falling down in the sun in the sight of all men, and crying, sobbing, with
her face against the ground. She heard a shout. Some one gave her a violent push, thrusting her forward. She
stumbled, recovered herself. A passerby had saved her from a tram. She did not know it. She did not look at
him or thank him. He went away, swearing at the English. Where was she going?
She must go home. She must go to the island. She must go to Vere, to Gaspare, to Emileto her life.
Her body and soul revolted from the thought, her outraged body and her outraged soul, which were just
beginning to feel their courage, as flesh and nerves begin to feel pain after an operation when the effect of the
anaesthetic gradually fades away.
She was walking up the hill and still crying.
She met a boy of the people, swarthy, with impudent black eyes, tangled hair, and a big, pouting mouth,
above which a premature mustache showed like a smudge. He looked into her face and began to laugh. She
saw his white teeth, and her tears rushed back to their sources. At once her eyes were dry. And, almost at
once, she thought, her heart became hard as stone, and she felt selfcontrol like iron within her.
That boy of the people should be the last human being to laugh at her.
She saw a tram stop. It went to the "Trattoria del Giardinetto." She got in, and sat down next to two thin
English ladies, who held guide books in their hands, and whose pointed features looked piteously inquiring.
"Excuse me, but do you know this neighborhood?"
She was being addressed.
"Yes."
"That is fortunatewe do not. Perhaps you will kindly tell us something about it. Is it far to Bagnoli?"
"Not very far."
"And when you get there?"
"I beg your pardon!"
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"When you get there, is there much to see?"
"Not so very much."
"Can one lunch there?"
"No doubt."
"Yes. But I mean, what sort of lunch? Can one get anything clean and wholesome, such as you get in
England?"
"It would be Italian food."
"Oh, dear. Fanny, this lady says we can only get Italian food at Bagnoli!"
"Tcha! Tcha!"
"But perhapsexcuse me, but do you think we could get a good cup of tea there? We might manage with
thattea and some boiled eggs. Don't you think so, Fanny? Could we get a cup of"
The tram stopped. Hermione had pulled the cord that made the bell sound. She paid and got down. The tram
carried away the English ladies, their pointed features red with surprise and indignation.
Hermione again began to walk, but almost directly she saw a wandering carriage and hailed the driver.
"Carrozza!"
She got in.
"Put me down at the 'Trattoria del Giardinetto.' "
"Si, Signorabut how much are you going to give me? I can't take you for less than"
"Anythingfive liredrive on at once."
The man drove on, grinning.
Presently Hermione was walking through the short tunnel that leads to the path descending between
vineyards to the sea. She must take a boat to the island. She must go back to the island. Where else could she
go? If Vere had not been there she mightbut Vere was there. It was inevitable. She must return to the
island.
She stood still in the path, between the high banks.
Her body was demanding not to be forced by the will to go to the island.
"I must go back to the island."
She walked on very slowly till she could see the shining water over the sloping, vinecovered land. The sight
of the water reminded her that Gaspare would be waiting for her on the sand below the village. When she
remembered that she stopped again. Then she turned round, and began to walk back towards the highroad.
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Gaspare was waiting. If she went down to the sand she would have to meet his great intent eyes, those
watching eyes full of questions. He would read her. He would see in a moment thatshe knew. And he
would see more than that! He would see that she was hating him. The hatred was only dawning, struggling up
in her tangled heart. But it existed it was there. And he would see that it was there.
She walked back till she reached the tunnel under the highroad. But she did not pass through it. She could not
face the highroad with its traffic. Perhaps the English ladies would be coming back. Perhaps She turned
again and presently sat down on a bank, and looked at the dry and wrinkled ground. Nobody went by. The
lizards ran about near her feet. She sat there over an hour, scarcely moving, with the sun beating upon her
head.
Then she got up and walked fast, and with a firm step, towards the village and the sea.
The village is only a tiny hamlet, ending in a small trattoria with a rough terrace above the sea, overlooking a
strip of sand where a few boats lie. As Hermione came to the steps that lead down to the terrace she stood still
and looked over the wall on her left. The boat from the island was at anchor there, floating motionless on the
still water. Gaspare was not in it, but was lying stretched on his back on the sand, with his white linen hat
over his face.
He lay like one dead.
She stood and watched him, as she might have watched a corpse of some one she had cared for but who was
gone from her forever.
Perhaps he was not asleep, for almost directly he became aware of her observation, sat up, and uncovered his
face, turning towards her and looking up. Already, and from this distance, she would see a fierce inquiry in
his eyes.
She made a determined effort and waved her hand.
Gaspare sprang to his feet, took out his watch, looked at it, then went and fetched the boat.
His actionthe taking out of the watchreminded Hermione of the time. She looked at her watch. It was
halfpast two. On the island they lunched at halfpast twelve. Gaspare must have been waiting for hours.
What did it matter?
She made another determined effort and went down the remaining steps to the beach.
Gaspare should not know that she knew. She was resolved upon that, concentrated upon that. Continually she
saw in front of her the pouting mouth, the white teeth of the boy who had laughed at her in the street. There
should be no more crying, no more visible despair. No one should see any difference in her. All the time that
she had been sitting still in the sun upon the bank she had been fiercely schooling herself in an act new to
herthe act of deception. She had not faced the truth that today she knew. She had not faced the ruin that
its knowledge had made of all that had been sacred and lovely in her life. She had fastened her whole force
fanatically upon that one idea, that one decision and the effort that was the corollary of it.
"There shall be no difference in me. No one is to know that anything has happened."
At that moment she was a fanatic. And she looked like one as she came down upon the sand.
"I'm afraid I'm rather lateGaspare."
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It was difficult to her to say his name. But she said it firmly.
"Signora, it is nearly three o'clock."
"Halfpast two. No, I can get in all right."
He had put out his arm to help her into the boat. But she could not touch him. She knew that. She felt that she
would rather die at the moment than touch or be touched by him.
"You might take away your arm."
He dropped his arm at once.
Had she already betrayed herself?
She got into the boat and he pushed off.
Usually he sat, when he was rowing, so that he might keep his face towards her. But today he stood up to
row, turning his back to her. And this change of conduct made her say to herself again:
"Have I betrayed myself already?"
Fiercely she resolved to be and to do the impossible. It was the only chance. For Gaspare was difficult to
deceive.
"Gaspare!" she said.
"Si, Signora," he replied, without turning his head.
"Can't you row sitting down?"
"If you like, Signora."
"We can talk better then."
"Va bene, Signora."
He turned round and sat down.
The boat was at this moment just off the "Palace of the Spirits." Hermione saw its shattered walls cruelly lit
up by the blazing sun, its gaping windowspaces like eyesockets, sightless, staring, horribly suggestive of
ruin and despair.
She was like that. Gaspare was looking at her. Gaspare must know that she was like that.
But she was a fanatic just then, and she smiled at him with a resolution that had in it something almost brutal,
something the opposite of what she was, of the sum of her.
"I forgot the time. It is so lovely today. It was so gay at Mergellina."
"Si?"
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"I sat for a long time watching the boats, and the boys bathing, and listening to the music. They sang 'A
Mergellina.' "
"Si?"
She smiled again.
"And I went to visit Ruffo's mother."
Gaspare made no response. He looked down now as he plied his oars.
"She seems a nice woman. II dare say she was quite pretty once."
The voice that was speaking now was the voice of a fanatic.
"I am sure she must have been pretty."
"Chi lo sa?"
"If one looks carefully one can see the traces. But, of course, now"
She stopped abruptly. It was impossible to her to go on. She was passionately trying to imagine what that
spreading, graceless woman, with her fat hands resting on her knees set wide apart, was like once was like
nearly seventeen years ago. Was she ever pretty, beautiful? Never could she have been intelligentnever,
never. Then she must have been beautiful. For otherwise Hermione's drawn face was flooded with scarlet.
"Ifif it's easier to you to row standing up, Gaspare," she almost stammered, "never mind about sitting
down."
"I think it is easier, Signora."
He got up, and once more turned his back upon her.
They did not speak again until they reached the island.
Hermione watched his strong body swinging to and fro with every stroke, and wondered if he felt the terrible
change in her feeling for hima change that a few hours ago she would have thought utterly impossible.
She wondered if Gaspare knew that she was hating him.
He was alive and, therefore, to be hated. For surely we cannot hate the dust!
CHAPTER XXXVIII
Gaspare did not offer to help Hermione out of the boat when they reached the island. He glanced at her face,
met her eyes, looked away again immediately, and stood holding the boat while she got out. Even when she
stumbled slightly he made no movement; but he turned and gazed after her as she went up the steps towards
the house, and as he gazed his face worked, his lips muttered words, and his eyes, become almost ferocious in
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their tragic gloom, were clouded with moisture. Angrily he fastened the boat, angrily he laid by the oars. In
everything he did there was violence. He put up his hands to his eyes to rub the moisture that clouded them
away. But it came again. And he swore under his breath. He looked once more towards the Casa del Mare.
The figure of his Padrona had disappeared, but he remembered just how it had gone up the stepsleaning
forward, moving very slowly. It had made him think of an early morning long ago, when he and his Padrona
had followed a coffin down the narrow street of Marechiaro, and over the mountainpath to the Campo Santo
above the Ionian Sea. He shook his head, murmuring to himself. He was not swearing now. He shook his
head again and again. Then he went away, and sat down under the shadow of the cliff, and let his hands drop
down between his knees.
The look he had seen in his Padrona's eyes had made him feel terrible. His violent, faithful heart was
tormented. He did not analyzehe only knew, he only felt. And he suffered horribly. How had his Padrona
been able to look at him like that?
The moisture came thickly to his eyes now, and he no longer attempted to rub it away. He no longer thought
of it.
Never had he imagined that his Padrona could look at him like that. Strong man though he was, he felt as a
child might who is suddenly abandoned by its mother. He began to think now. He thought over all he had
done to be faithful to his dead Padrone and to be faithful to the Padrona. During many, many years he had
done all he could to be faithful to these two, the dead and the living. And at the end of this long service he
received as a reward this glance of hatred.
Tears rolled down his sunburnt cheeks.
The injustice of it was like a barbed and poisoned arrow in his heart. He was not able to understand what his
Padrona was feeling, how, by what emotional pilgrimage, she had reached that look of hatred which she had
cast upon him. If she had not returned, if she had done some deed of violence in the house of Maddalena, he
could perhaps have comprehended it. But that she should come back, that she should smile, make him sit
facing her, talk about Maddalena as she had talked, and thenthen look at him like that!
His amourpropre, his long fidelity, his deep affectionall were outraged.
Vere came down the steps and found him there.
"Gaspare!"
He got up instantly when he heard her voice, rubbed his eyes, and yawned.
"I was asleep, Signorina."
She looked at him intently, and he saw tears in her eyes.
"Gaspare, what is the matter with Madre?"
"Signorina?"
"Oh, what is the matter?" She came a step nearer to him. "Gaspare, I'm frightened! I'm frightened!"
She laid her hand on his arm.
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"Why, Signorina? Have you seen the Padrona?"
"No. ButbutI've heard What is it? What has happened? Where has Madre been all this time? Has she
been in Naples?"
"Signorina, I don't think so."
"Where has she been?"
"I believe the Signora has been to Mergellina."
Vere began to tremble.
"What can have happened there? What can have happened?"
She trembled in every limb. Her face had become white.
"Signorina, Signorina! Are you ill?"
"NoI don't know what to dowhat I ought to do. I'm afraid to speak to the servantsthey are making the
siesta. Gaspare, come with me, and tell me what we ought to do. Butnever say to any onenever say if
you hear!"
"Signorina!"
He had caught her terror. His huge eyes looked awestruck.
"Come with me, Gaspare!"
Making an obvious and great effort, she controlled her body, turned and went before him to the house. She
walked softly, and he imitated her. They almost crept upstairs till they reached the landing outside
Hermione's bedroom door. There they stood for two or three minutes, listening.
"Come away, Gaspare!"
Vere had whispered with lips that scarcely moved.
When they were in Hermione's sittingroom she caught hold of both his hands. She was a mere child now, a
child craving for help.
"Oh, Gaspare, what are we to do? OhI'mI'm frightened! I can't bear it!"
The door of the room was open.
"Shut it!" she said. "Shut it, then we sha'n't"
He shut it.
"What can it be? What can it be?"
She looked at him, followed his eyes. He had stared towards the writingtable, then at the floor near it. On
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the table lay a quantity of fragments of broken glass, and a silver photographframe bent, almost broken. On
the floor was scattered a litter of cardboard.
"She came in here! Madre was in here"
She bent down to the carpet, picked up some of the bits of cardboard, turned them over, looked at them.
Then she began to tremble again.
"It's father's photograph!"
She was now utterly terrified.
"Oh, Gaspare! Oh, Gaspare!"
She began to sob.
"Hush, Signorina! Hush!"
He spoke almost sternly, bent down, collected the fragments of card board from the floor, and put them into
his pocket.
"Father's photograph! She was in hereshe came in here to do that! And she loves that photograph. She
loves it!"
"Hush, Signorina! Don't, Signorinadon't!"
"We must do something! We must"
He made her sit down. He stood by her.
"What shall we do, Gaspare? What shall we do?"
She looked up at him, demanding counsel. She put out her hands again and touched his arm. His
Padroncinashe at least still loved, still trusted him.
"Signorina," he said, "we can't do anything."
His voice was fatalistic.
"Butwhat is it? Isis"
A frightful question was trembling on her lips. She looked again at the fragments of cardboard in her hand,
at the broken frame on the table.
"Can Madre be"
She stopped. Her terror was increasing. She remembered many small mysteries in the recent conduct of her
mother, many moments when she had been surprised, or made vaguely uneasy, by words or acts of her
mother. Monsieur Emile, too, he had wondered, and more than once. She knew that. And Gaspareshe was
sure that he, also, had seen that change which now, abruptly, had thus terribly culminated. Once in the boat
she had asked him what was the matter with her mother, and he had, almost angrily, denied that anything was
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the matter. But she had seen in his eyes that he was acting a partthat he wished to detach her observation
from her mother.
Her trembling ceased. Her little fingers closed more tightly on his arm. Her eyes became imperious.
"Gaspare, you are to tell me. I can bear it. You know something about Madre."
"Signorina"
"Do you think I'm a coward? I was frightenedI am frightened, but I'm not really a coward, Gaspare. I can
bear it. What is it you know?"
"Signorina, we can't do anything."
"Is it Does Monsieur Emile know what it is?"
He did not answer.
Suddenly she got up, went to the door, opened it, and listened. The horror came into her face again.
"I can't bear it," she said. "II shall have to go into the room."
"No, Signorina. You are not to go in."
"If the door isn't locked I must"
"It is locked."
"You don't know. You can't know."
"I know it is locked, Signorina."
Vere put her hands to her eyes.
"It's too dreadful! I didn't know any oneI have never heard"
Gaspare went to her and shut the door resolutely.
"You are not to listen, Signorina. You are not to listen."
He spoke no longer like a servant, but like a master.
Vere's hands had dropped.
"I am going to send for Monsieur Emile," she said.
"Va bene, Signorina."
She went quickly to the writingtable, sat down, hesitated. Her eyes were riveted upon the
photographframe.
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"How could she? How could she?" she said, in a choked voice.
Gaspare took the frame away reverently, and put it against his breast, inside his shirt.
"I can't go to Don Emilio, Signorina. I cannot leave you."
"No, Gaspare. Don't leave me! Don't leave me!"
She was the terrified child again.
"Perhaps we can find a fisherman, Signorina."
"Yes, but don't Wait for me, Gaspare!"
"I am not going, Signorina."
With feverish haste she took a pen and a sheet of paper and wrote:
"DEAR MONSIEUR EMILE,Please come to the island at once.
Something terrible has happened. I don't know what it is. But
Madre is No, I can't put it. Oh, do comepleaseplease come!
VERE
"Come the quickest way."
When the paper was shut in an envelope and addressed she got up. Gaspare held out his hand.
"I will go and look for a fisherman, Signorina."
"But I must come with you. I must keep with you."
She held on to his arm.
"I'm not a coward. But I can'tI can't"
"Si, Signorina! Si, Signorina!"
He took her hand and held it. They went to the door. When he put out his other hand to open it Vere shivered.
"If we can't do anything, let us go down quickly, Gaspare!"
"Si, Signorina. We will go quickly."
He opened the door and they went out.
In the Pool of the Saint there was no boat. They went to the crest of the island and looked out over the sea.
Not far off, between the island and Nisida, there was a boat. Gaspare put his hands to his mouth and hailed
her with all his might. The two men in her heard, and came towards the shore.
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A few minutes later, with money in their pockets, and set but cheerful faces, they were rowing with all their
strength in the direction of Naples.
That afternoon Artois, wishing to distract his thoughts and quite unable to work, went up the hill to the
Monastery of San Martino. He returned to the hotel towards sunset feeling weary and depressed,
companionless, too, in this gay summer world. Although he had never been deeply attached to the
Marchesino he had liked him, been amused by him, grown accustomed to him. He missed the "Toledo
incarnate." And as he walked along the Marina he felt for a moment almost inclined to go away from Naples.
But the people of the island! Could he leave them just now? Could he leave Hermione so near to the hands of
Fate, those hands which were surely stretched out towards her, which might grasp her at any moment, even
tonight, and alter her life forever? No, he knew he could not.
"There is a note for Monsieur!"
He took it from the hall porter.
"No, I'll walk upstairs."
He had seen the lift was not below, and did not wish to wait for its descent. Vere's writing was on the
envelope he held; but Vere's writing distorted, frantic, tragic. He knew before he opened the envelope that it
must contain some dreadful statement or some wild appeal; and he hurried to his room, almost feeling the
pain and fear of the writer burn through the paper to his hand.
"DEAR MONSIEUR EMILE,Please come to the island at once.
Something terrible has happened. I don't know what it is. But
Madre is No, I can't put it. Oh, do comepleaseplease come!
VERE
"Come the quickest way."
"Something terrible has happened." He knew at once what it was. The walls of the cell in which he had
enclosed his friend had crumbled away. The spirit which for so long had rested upon a lie had been torn from
its repose, had been scourged to its feet to face the fierce light of truth. How would it face the truth?
"But Madre is No, I can't put it."
That phrase struck a chill almost of horror to his soul. He stared at it for a moment trying to imaginethings.
Then he tore the note up.
The quickest way to the island!
"I shall not be in to dinner tonight."
He was speaking to the waiter at the door of the Egyptian Room. A minute later he was in the Via
Chiatamone at the back of the hotel waiting for the tram. He must go by Posilipo to the Trattoria del
Giardinetto, walk down to the village below, and take a boat from there to the island. That was the quickest
way. The trambell sounded. Was he glad? As he watched the tram gliding towards him he was conscious of
an almost terrible reluctancea reluctance surely of fearto go that night to the island.
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But he must go.
The sun was setting when he got down before the Trattoria del Giardinetto. Three soldiers were sitting at a
table outside on the dusty road, clinking their glasses of marsala together, and singing, "Piange Rosina! La
Mamma ci domanda." Their brown faces looked vivid with the careless happiness of youth. As Artois went
down from the road into the tunnel their lusty voices died away.
Because his instinct was to walk slowly, to linger on the way, he walked very fast. The slanting light fell
gently, delicately, over the opulent vineyards, where peasants were working in huge straw hats, over the still
shining but now reposeful sea. In the sky there was a mystery of color, very pure, very fragile, like the
mystery of color in a curving shell of the sea. The pomp and magnificence of sunset were in abeyance
tonight, were laid aside. And the sun, like some spirit modestly radiant, slipped from this world of vineyards
and of waters almost surreptitiously, yet shedding exquisite influences in his going.
And in the vineyards, as upon the dusty highroad, the people of the South were singing.
The sound of their warm voices, rising in the golden air towards the tender beauty of the virginal evening sky,
moved Artois to a sudden longing for a universal brotherhood of happiness, for happy men on a happy earth,
men knowing the truth and safe in their knowledge. And he longed, too, just then to give happiness. A
strongly generous emotion stirred him, and went from him, like one of the slanting rays of light from the sun,
towards the island, towards his friend, Hermione. His reluctance, his sense of fear, were lessened, nearly died
away. His quickness of movement was no longer a fight against, but a fulfilment of desire.
Once she had helped him. Once she had even, perhaps, saved him from death. She had put aside her own
happiness. She had shown the divine selfsacrifice of woman.
And now, after long years, life brought to him an hour which would prove him, prove him and show how far
he was worthy of the friendship which had been shed, generously as the sunshine over these vineyards of the
South, upon him and his life.
He came down to the sea and met the fisherman, Giovanni, upon the sand.
"Row me quickly to the island, Giovanni!" he said.
"Si, Signore."
He ran to get the boat.
The light began to fall over the sea. They cleared the tiny harbor and set out on their voyage.
"The Signora has been here today, Signore," said Giovanni.
"Si! When did she come?"
"This morning, with Gaspare, to take the tram to Mergellina."
"She went to Mergellina?"
"Si, Signore. And she was gone a very long time. Gaspare came back for her at halfpast eleven, and she did
not come till nearly three. Gaspare was in a state, I can tell you. I have known himfor years I have known
himand never have I seen him as he was today."
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"And the Signora? When she came, did she look tired?"
"Signore, the Signora's face was like the face of one who has been looked on by the evil eye."
"Row quickly, Giovanni!"
"Si, Signore."
The men talked no more.
When they came in sight of the island the last rays of the sun were striking upon the windows of the Casa del
Mare.
The boat, urged by Giovanni's powerful arms, drew rapidly near to the land, and Artois, leaning forward with
an instinct to help the rower, fixed his eyes upon these windows which, like swift jewels, focussed and gave
back the light. While he watched them the sun sank. Its radiance was withdrawn. He saw no longer jewels,
casements of magic, but only the windows of the familiar house; and then, presently, only the window of one
room, Hermione's. His eyes were fixed on that as the boat drew nearer and nearerwere almost hypnotized
by that. Where was Hermione? What was she doing? How was she? How could she be, now that she
knew? A terrible but immensely tender, immensely pitiful curiosity took possession of him, held him fast,
body and soul. She knew, and she was in that house!
The boat was close in now, but had not yet turned into the Pool of San Francesco. Artois kept his eyes upon
the window for still a moment longer. He felt now, he knew, that Hermione was in the room beyond that
window. As he gazed up from the sea he saw that the window was open. He saw behind the frame of it a
white curtain stirring in the breeze. And then he saw something that chilled his blood, that seemed to drive it
in an icy stream back to his heart, leaving his body for a moment numb.
He saw a figure come, with a wild, falling movement to the windowa white, distorted face utterly strange
to him looked outa hand lifted in a frantic gesture.
The gesture was followed by a crash.
The green Venetian blind had fallen, hiding the window, hiding the stranger's face.
"Who was that at the window, Signore?" asked Giovanni, staring at Artois with round and startled eyes.
And Artois answered: "It is difficult to see, Giovanni, now that the sun has gone down. It is getting dark so
quickly."
"Si, Signore, it is getting dark."
CHAPTER XXXIX
There was no one at the foot of the cliff. Artois got out of the boat and stood for a moment, hesitating
whether to keep Giovanni or to dismiss him.
"I can stay, Signore," said the man. "You will want some one to row you back."
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"No, Giovanni. I can get Gaspare to put me ashore. You had better be off."
"Va bene, Signore," he replied, looking disappointed.
The Signora of the Casa del Mare was always very hospitable to such fishermen as she knew. Giovanni
wanted to seek out Gaspare, to have a cigarette. But he obediently jumped into the boat and rowed off into
the darkness, while Artois went up the steps towards the house.
A cold feeling of dread encompassed him. He still saw, imaginatively, that stranger at the window, that
falling movement, that frantic gesture, the descending blind that brought to Hermione's bedroom a great
obscurity. And he remembered Hermione's face in the garden, half seen by him once in shadows, with surely
a strange and terrible smile upon ita smile that had made him wonder if he had ever really known her.
He came out on the plateau before the front door. The door was shut, but as he went to open it it was opened
from within, and Gaspare stood before him in the twilight, with the dark passage for background.
Gaspare looked at Artois in silence.
"Gaspare," Artois said, "I came home from San Martino. I found a note from the Signorina, begging me to
come here at once."
"Lo so, Signore."
"I have come. What haswhat is it? Where is the Signorina?"
Gaspare stood in the middle of the narrow doorway.
"The Signorina is in the garden."
"Waiting for me?"
"Si, Signore."
"Very well."
He moved to enter the house; but Gaspare stood still where he was.
"Signore," he said.
Artois stopped at the doorsill.
"What is it?"
"What are you going to do here?"
At last Gaspare was frankly the watchdog guarding the sacred house. His Padrona had cast upon him a look
of hatred. Yet he was guarding the sacred house and her within it. Deep in the blood of him was the sense
that, even hating him, she belonged to him and he to her.
And his Padroncina had trusted him, had clung to him that day.
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"What are you going to do here?"
"If there is trouble here, I want to help."
"How can you help, Signore?"
"First tell me,there is great trouble?"
"Si, Signore."
"And you know what it is? You know what caused it?"
"No one has told me."
"But you know what it is."
"Si, Signore."
"Doesthe Signorina doesn't know?"
"No, Signore."
He paused, then added:
"The Signorina is not to know what it is."
"You do not think I shall tell her?"
"Signore, how can I tell what you will do here? How can I tell what you are here?"
For a moment Artois felt deeply woundedwounded to the quick. He had not supposed it was possible for
any one to hurt him so much with a few quiet words. Anger rose in him, an anger such as the furious attack of
the Marchesino had never brought to the birth.
"You can say that!" he exclaimed. "You can say that, after Sicily!"
Gaspare's face changed, softened for an instant, then grew stern again.
"That was long ago, Signore. It was all different in Sicily!"
His eyes filled with tears, yet his face remained stern. But Artois was seized again, as when he walked in the
golden air between the vineyards and heard the peasants singing, by an intense desire to bring happiness to
the unhappy, especially and above all to one unhappy woman. Tonight his intellect was subordinate to his
heart, his pride of intellect was lost in feeling, in an emotion that the simplest might have understood and
shared: the longing to be of use, to comfort, to pour balm into the terrible wound of one who had been his
friendsuch a friend as only a certain type of woman can be to a certain type of man.
"Gaspare," he said, "you and Iwe helped the Signora once, we helped her in Sicily."
Gaspare looked away from him, and did not answer.
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"Perhaps we can help her now. Perhaps only we can help her. Let me into the house, Gaspare. I shall do
nothing here to make your Padrona sad."
Gaspare looked at him again, looked into his eyes, then moved aside, giving room for him to enter. As soon
as he was in the passage Gaspare shut the door.
"I am sorry, Signore; the lamp is not lighted."
Artois felt at once an unusual atmosphere in the house, an atmosphere not of confusion but of mystery, of
secret curiosity, of brooding apprehension. At the foot of the servants' staircase he heard a remote sound of
whispering, which emphasized the otherwise complete silence of this familiar dwelling, suddenly become
unfamiliar to him unfamiliar and almost dreadful.
"I had better go into the garden."
"Si, Signore."
Gaspare looked down the servants' staircase and hissed sharply:
"Sh! Sssh!"
"The Signora?" asked Artois, as Gaspare came to him softly.
"The Signora is always in her room. She is shut up in her room."
"I saw the Signora just now, at the window," Artois said, in an undervoice.
"You saw the Signora?"
Gaspare looked at him with sudden eagerness mingled with a flaming anxiety.
"From the boat. She came to the window and let down the blind."
Gaspare did not ask anything. They went to the terrace above the sea.
"I will tell the Signorina you have come, Signore."
"Sha'n't I go down?"
"I had better go and tell her."
He spoke with conviction. Artois did not dispute his judgment. He went away, always softly. Artois stood
still on the terrace. The twilight was spreading itself over the sea, like a veil dropping over a face. The house
was dark behind him. In that darkness Hermione was hidden, the Hermione who was a stranger to him, the
Hermione into whose heart and soul he was no longer allowed to look. Upon Monte Amato at evening she
had, very simply, showed him the truth of her great sorrow.
Nowhe saw the face at the window, the falling blind. Between then and nowwhat a gulf fixed!
Vere came from the garden followed by Gaspare. Her eyes were wide with terror. The eyelids were red. She
had been weeping. She almost ran to Artois, as a child runs to refuge. Never before had he felt so acutely the
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childishness that still lingered in this little Vere of the island lingered unaffected, untouched by recent
events. Thank God for that! In that moment the Marchesino was forgiven; and Artoisdid he not perhaps
also in that moment forgive himself?
"Oh Monsieur EmileI thought you wouldn't come!"
There was the open reproach of a child in her voice. She seized his hand.
"Has Gaspare told you?" She turned her head towards Gaspare. "Something terrible has happened to Madre.
Monsieur Emile, do you know what it is?"
She was looking at him with an intense scrutiny.
"Gaspare is hiding something from me"
Gaspare stood there and said nothing.
"something that perhaps you know."
Gaspare looked at Artois, and Artois felt now that the watchdog trusted him. He returned the Sicilian's
glance, and Gaspare moved away, went to the rail of the terrace, and looked down over the sea.
"Do you know? Do you know anythinganything dreadful about Madre that you have never told me?"
"Vere, don't be frightened."
"Ah, but you haven't been here! You weren't here when"
"What is it?"
Her terror infected him.
"Madre came back. She had been to Mergellina all alone. She was away such a long time. When she came
back I was in my room. I didn't know. I didn't hear the boat. But my door was open, and presently I heard
some one come upstairs and go into the boudoir. It was Madre. I know her step. I know it was Madre!"
She reiterated her assertion, as if she anticipated that he was going to dispute it.
"She stayed in the boudoir only a very little whileonly a few minutes. Oh, Monsieur Emile, but"
"Vere. What do you mean? Didwhat happened therein the boudoir?"
He was reading from her face.
"She wentMadre went in there to"
She stopped and swallowed.
"Madre took father's photographthe one on the writingtableand tore it to pieces. And the framethat
was all bent and nearly broken. Father's photograph, that she loves so much!"
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Artois said nothing. At that moment it was as if he entered suddenly into Hermione's heart, and knew every
feeling there.
"Monsieur Emileis sheis Madreill?"
She began to tremble once more, as she had trembled when she came to fetch Gaspare from the nook of the
cliff beside the Saint's Pool.
"Not as you mean, Vere."
"You are sure? You are certain?"
"Not in that way."
"But then I heard Madre come out and go to her bedroom. I didn't hear whether she locked the door. I only
heard it shut. But Gaspare says he knows it is locked. Two or three minutes after the door was shut I
heardI heard"
"Don't be afraid. Tell meif I ought to know."
Those words voiced a deep and delicate reluctance which was beginning to invade him. Yet he wished to help
Vere, to release this child from the thrall of a terror which could only be conquered if it were expressed.
"Tell me," he added, slowly.
"I heard MadreMonsieur Emile, it was hardly crying!"
"Don't. You needn't tell me any more."
"Gaspare heard it too. It went on for a long, long time. WeGaspare made the servants keep downstairs ever
since. And II have been waiting for you to come, because Madre cares for you."
Artois put his hand down quickly upon Vere's right hand.
"I am glad that you sent for me, Vere. I am glad you think that. Come and sit down on the bench."
He drew her down beside him. He felt that he was with a child whom he must comfort. Gaspare stood always
looking down over the rail of the terrace to the sea.
"Vere!"
"Yes, Monsieur Emile."
"You mother is not ill as you thoughtfeared. Buttodayshe has had, she must have had, a great
shock."
"But at Mergellina?"
"Only that could account for what you have just told me."
"But I don't understand. She only went to Mergellina."
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"Did you see her before she went there?"
"Yes."
"Was she as usual?"
"I don't think she was. I think Madre has been changing nearly all this summer. That is why I am so afraid.
You know she has been changing."
He was silent. The difficulty of the situation was great. He did not know how to resolve it.
"You have seen the change, Monsieur Emile!"
He did not deny it. He did not know what to do or say. For of that change, although perhaps now he partly
understood it, he could never speak to Vere or to any one.
"It has made me so unhappy," Vere said, with a break in her voice.
And he had said to himself: "Vere must be happy!" At that moment he and his intellect seemed to him less
than a handful of dust.
"But this change of today is different," he said, slowly. "Your mother has had a dreadful shock."
"At Mergellina?"
"It must have been there."
"But what could it be? We scarcely ever go there. We don't know any one thereoh, except Ruffo."
Her eyes, keen and bright with youth, even though they had been crying, were fixed upon his face while she
was speaking, and she saw a sudden conscious look in his eyes, a movement of his lipshe drew them
sharply together, as if seized by a spasm.
"Ruffo!" she repeated. "Has it something to do with Ruffo?"
There was a profound perplexity in her face, but the fear in it was less.
"Something to do with Ruffo?" she repeated.
Suddenly she moved, she got up. And all the fear had come back to her face, with something added to it,
something intensely personal.
"Do you meanis Ruffo dead?" she whispered.
A voice rose up from the sea singing a sad little song. Vere turned towards the sea. All her body relaxed. The
voice passed on. The sad little song passed under the cliff, to the Saint's Pool and the lee of the island.
"Ah, Monsieur Emile," she said, "why don't you tell me?"
She swayed. He put his arm quickly behind her.
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"No, no! It's all right. That was Ruffo!"
And she smiled.
At that moment Artois longed to tell her the truth. To do so would surely be to do something that was
beautiful. But he dared nothe had no right.
A bell rang in the house, loudly, persistently, tearing its silence. Gaspare turned angrily from the rail, with an
expression of apprehension on his face.
Giulia was summoning the household to dinner.
"Perhapsperhaps Madre will come down," Vere whispered.
Gaspare passed them and went into the house quickly. They knew he had gone to see if his Padrona was
coming. Moved by a mutual instinct, they stayed where they were till he should come to them again.
For a long time they waited. He did not return.
"We had better go in, Vere. You must eat."
"I can'tunless she comes."
"You must try to eat."
He spoke to her as to a child.
"And perhapsGaspare may be with her, may be speaking with her. Let us go in."
They passed into the house, and went to the diningroom. The table was laid. The lamp was lit. Giulia stood
by the sideboard looking anxious and subdued. She did not even smile when she saw Artois, who was her
favorite.
"Where is Gaspare, Giulia?" said Artois.
"Upstairs, Signore. He came in and ran upstairs, and he has not come down. Ah!"she raised her
hands"the evil eye has looked upon this house! When that girl Peppina"
"Be quiet!" Artois said, sharply.
Giulia's round, black eyes filled with tears, and her mouth opened in surprise.
He put his hand kindly on her arm.
"Never mind, Giulia mia! But it is foolish to talk like that. There is no reason why evil should come upon the
Casa del Mare. Here is Gaspare!"
At that moment he entered, looking tragic.
"Go away, Giulia!" he said to her, roughly.
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"Ma"
"Go away!"
He put her out of the room without ceremony, and shut the door.
"Signore!" he said to Artois, "I have been up to the Padrona's room. I have knocked on the door. I have
spoken"
"What did you say?"
"I did not say that you were here, Signore."
"Did you ask the Signora to come down?"
"I asked if she was coming down to dinner. I said the Signorina was waiting for her."
"Yes?"
"The Signora did not answer. There was no noise, and in the room there is no light!"
"Let me go!" Vere said, breathlessly.
She was moving towards the door when Artois stopped her authoritatively.
"No, Verewait!"
"But some one mustI'm afraid"
"Wait, Vere!"
He turned once more to Gaspare.
"Did you try the door, Gaspare?"
"Signore, I did. After I had spoken several times and waited a long time, I tried the door softly. It is locked."
"You see!"
It was Vere speaking, still breathlessly.
"Let me go, Monsieur Emile. We can't let Madre stay like that, all alone in the dark. She must have food. We
can't stay down here and leave her."
Artois hesitated. He thought of the stranger at the window, and he felt afraid. But he concealed his fear.
"Perhaps you had better go, Vere," he said, at length. "But if she does not answer, don't try the door. Don't
knock. Just speak. You will find the best words."
"Yes. I'll tryI'll try."
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Gaspare opened the door. Giulia was sobbing outside. Her pride and dignity were lacerated by Gaspare's
action.
"Giulia, never mind! Don't cry! Gaspare didn't mean"
Before she had finished speaking the servant passionately seized her hand and kissed it. Vere released her
hand very gently and went slowly up the stairs.
The instinct of Artois was to follow her. He longed to follow her, but he denied himself, and sat down by the
dinnertable, on which the zuppa di pesce was smoking under the lamp. Giulia, trying to stifle her sobs, went
away down the kitchen stairs, and Gaspare stood near the door. He touched his face with his hands, opened
and shut his lips, then thrust his hands into his pockets, and stared first at Artois then at the floor. His cheeks
and his forehead looked hot, as if he had just finished some difficult physical act. Artois did not glance at
him. In that moment both men, in their different ways, felt dreadfully, almost unbearably, selfconscious.
Presently Vere's step was heard again on the stairs, descending softly and slowly. She came in and went at
once to Artois.
"Madre doesn't answer."
Artois got up.
"What ought we to do?"
Vere was whispering.
"Did you hear anything?"
"No."
Gaspare moved, took his hands violently out of his pockets, then thrust them in again.
Artois stood in silence. His face, generally so strong, so authoritative, showed his irresolution, and Vere,
looking to him like a frightened child for guidance, felt her terror increase.
"Shall I go up again. I didn't knock. You told me not to. Shall I go and knock? Or shall Gaspare go again?"
She did not suggest that Artois should go himself. He noticed that, even in this moment of the confusion of
his will.
"I think we had better leave her for a time," he said, at last.
As he spoke he made an effort, and recovered himself.
"We had better do nothing more. What can we do?"
He was looking at Gaspare.
Gaspare went out into the passage and called down the stairs.
"Giulia! Come up! The Signorina is going to dinner."
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His defiant voice sounded startling in the silent house.
"We are to eat!"
"Yes, Vere. I shall stay. Presently our mother may come down. She feels that she must be alone. We have no
right to try to force ourselves upon her."
"Do you think it is that? Are you telling me the truth? Are you?"
"If she does not come down presently I will go up. Don't be afraid. I will not leave you till she comes down."
Giulia returned, wiping her eyes. When he saw her Gaspare disappeared. They knew he had gone to wait
outside his Padrona's door.
The dinner passed almost in silence. Artois ate, and made Vere eat. Vere sat in her mother's place, with her
back to the door. Artois was facing her. Often his eyes travelled to the door. Often, too, Vere turned her head.
And in the silence both were listening for a step that did not come: Vere with a feverish eagerness, Artois
with a mingling of longing and of dread. For he knew he dreaded to see Hermione that night. He knew that it
would be terrible to him to meet her eyes, to speak to her, to touch her hand. And yet he longed for her to
come. For he was companioned by a great and growing fear, which he must hide. And that act of secrecy,
undertaken for Vere's sake, seemed to increase the thing he hid, till the shadow it had been began to take
form, to grow in stature, to become dominating, imperious.
Giulia put some fruit on the table. The meal was over, and there had been no sound outside upon the stairs.
"Monsieur Emile, what are you going to do?"
"Go to the drawingroom, Vere. I will go out and see whether there is any light in your mother's window."
She obeyed him silently and went away. Then he took his hat and went out upon the terrace.
Gaspare had said that Hermione's room was dark. Perhaps he had been mistaken. The key might have been so
placed in the lock that he had been deceived. As Artois walked to a point from which he could see one of the
windows of Hermione's bedroom, he knew that he longed to see a light there. If the window was dark the
form of his fear would be more distinct. He reached the point and looked up. There was no light.
He stood there for some time gazing at that darkness. He thought of the bent photograph frame, of the
photograph that had been so loved torn into fragments, of the sound that washardly crying, and of the face
he had seen for an instant as he drew near to the island. He ought to come to some decision, to take some
action. Vere was depending upon him. But he felt as if he could do nothing. In answer to Vere's appeal he had
hastened to the island. And now he was paralyzed, he was utterly useless.
He felt as if he dared not do anything. Hermione in her grief, had suddenly passed from him into a darkness
that was sacred. What right had he to try to share it?
And yetif that great shape of fear were not the body of a lie, but of the truth?
Never had he felt so impotent, so utterly unworthy of his manhood.
He moved away, turned, came back and stood once more beneath the window. Ought he to go up to
Hermione's door, to knock, to speak, to insist on admittance? And if there was no reply?what ought he to
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do then? Break down the door?
He went into the house. Vere was sitting in the drawingroom looking at the door. She sprang up.
"Is there a light in Madre's room?"
"No."
He saw, as he answered, that she caught his fear, that hers now had the same shape as his.
"Monsieur Emile, youyou don't think?"
Her voice faltered, her bright eyes became changed, dim, seemed to sink into her head.
"You must go to her room. Go to Madre, Monsieur Emile, Go! Speak to her! Make her answer! Make her!
make her!"
She put her hands on him. She pushed him frantically.
He took her hands and held them tightly.
"I am going, Vere. Don't be frightened!"
"But you are frightened! You are frightened!"
"I will speak to your mother. I will beg her to answer."
"And if she doesn't answer?"
"I will get into the room."
He let go her hands and went towards the door. Just as he reached it there came from below in the house a
loud, shrill cry. It was followed by an instant of silence, then by another cry, louder, nearer than before. And
this time they could hear the words:
"La fattura della morte! La fattura della morte!"
Running, stumbling feet sounded outside, and Peppina appeared at the door, her disfigured face convulsed
with terror, her hand out stretched.
"Look!" she cried shrilly. "Look, Signorina! Look, Signore! La fattura della morte! La fattura della morte! It
has been brought to the house tonight! It has been put in my room tonight!"
In her hand lay a green lemon pierced by many nails.
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CHAPTER XL
"Monsieur Emile, what is it?" exclaimed Vere.
The frightened servants were gone, half coaxed and half scolded into silence by Artois. He had taken the
lemon from Peppina, and it lay now in his hand.
"It is what the people of Naples call a deathcharm."
"A deathcharm?"
In her eyes superstition dawned.
"Why do they call it that?"
"Because it is supposed to bring death to any oneany enemynear whom it is placed."
"Who can have put it in the house tonight?" Vere said. Her voice was low and trembling. "Who can have
wished to bring death here tonight?"
"I don't know, Vere."
"And such a thingcould it bring death?"
"Vere! You can ask me!"
He spoke with an attempt at smiling irony, but his eyes held something of the awe, the cloudy apprehension
that had gathered in hers.
"Where is your mind?" he added.
She answered: "Are you going to Madre's room, Monsieur Emile?"
He put the deathcharm down quickly, as if it had burned his hand.
"I am going now. Gaspare!"
At this moment Gaspare came into the room with a face that was almost livid.
"Who is it that has brought a fattura della morte here?" he exclaimed.
His usually courageous eyes were full of superstitious fear.
"Signore, do you"
He stopped. He had seen the deathcharm lying on the little table covered with silver trifles. He approached
it, made a sign of the cross, bent down his head and examined it closely, but did not touch it.
Artois and Vere watched him closely. He lifted up his head at last.
"I know who brought the fattura della morte here," he said, solemnly. "I know."
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"Who?" said Vere.
"It was Ruffo."
"Ruffo!"
Vere reddened. "Ruffo! He loves our house, and he loves us!"
"It is Ruffo, Signorina. It is Ruffo. He brought it, and it is he that must take it away. Do not touch it,
Signorina. Do not touch it, Signore. Leave it where it is till Ruffo comes, till Ruffo takes it away."
He again made the sign of the cross, and drew back from the death charm with a sort of mysterious caution.
"Signore," he said to Artois, "I will go down to the Saint's Pool. I will find Ruffo. I will bring him here. I will
make him come here."
He was going out when Artois put a hand on his shoulder.
"And the Padrona?"
"Signore, she is always there, in her room, in the dark."
"And you have heard nothing?"
"Signore, I have heard the Padrona moving."
The hand of Artois dropped down. He was invaded by a sense of relief that was almost overwhelming.
"You are certain?"
"Si, Signore. The Padrona is walking up and down the room. When Peppina screamed out I heard the
Padrona move. And then I heard her walking up and down the room."
He looked again at the deathcharm and went out. Vere stood for a moment. Then she, too, went suddenly
away, and Artois heard her light footstep retreating from him towards the terrace.
He understood her silent and abrupt departure. His fear had been hers. His relief was hers, too, and she was
moved to hide it. He was left alone with the deathcharm.
He sat down by the table on which it lay among the bright toys of silver. Released from his great fear,
released from his undertaking to force his way into the darkness of that room which had been silent, he
seemed suddenly to regain his identity, to be put once more into possession of his normal character. He had
gone out from it. He returned to it. The cloud of superstition, in which even he had been for a moment
involved with Vere and with the servants, evaporated, and he was able to smile secretly at them and at
himself. Yet while he smiled thus secretly, and while he looked at the lemon with its perforating nails, he
realized his own smallness, helplessness, the smallness and the helplessness of every man, as he had never
realized them before. And he realized also something, much, of what it would have meant to him, had the
body of his fear been the body of a truth, not of a lie.
If death had really come into the Casa del Mare that night with the deathcharm!
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He stretched out his hand to the table, lifted the deathcharm from among the silver ornaments, held it, kept it
in his hand, which he laid upon his knee.
If Ruffo had carried death in his boy's hand over the sea to the island, had carried death to Hermione!
Artois tried to imagine that house without Hermione, his life without Hermione.
For a long time he sat, always holding the deathcharm in his hand, always with his eyes fixed upon it, until
at last in it, as in a magic mirror, among the scars of its burning, and among the nails that pierced it, as the
woman who had fashioned it, and fired it, and muttered witch's words over it, longed to pierce the heart of
her enemy, he saw scenes of the past, and shadowy, moving figures. He saw among the scars and among the
nails Hermione and himself!
They were in Paris, at a table strewn with flowers. That was the first scene in the magic mirror of the fattura
della morte, the scene in which they met for the first time. Hermione regarded him almost with timidity. And
he looked at her doubtfully, because she had no beauty.
Then they were in another part of Paris, in his "Morocco slipper of a room," crammed with books, and dim
with Oriental incense and tobacco smoke, his room red and yellow, tinted with the brilliant colors of the East.
And he turned to her for sympathy, and he received it in full measure, pressed down and running over. He
told her his thought, and he told her his feelings, his schemes, his struggles, his moments of exaltation, his
depressions. Something, much indeed of him was hers, the egotistic part of a man that does really give, but
that keeps back much, and that seeks much more than it gives. And what he sought she eagerly, generously
gave, with both hands, never counting any cost. Always she was giving and always he was taking.
Then they were in London, in another room full of books. He stood by a fire, and she was seated with a
bundle of letters in her lap. And his heart was full of something that was like anger, and of a dull and
smouldering jealousy. And hers was full of a new and wonderful beauty, a piercing joy.
He sighed deeply. He stirred. He looked up for a moment and listened.
But all the house was silent. And again he bent over the deathcharm.
He stood by a door. Outside was the hum of traffic, inside a narrow room. And now in the magic mirror a
third figure showed itself, a figure of youth incarnate, brave, passionate, thrilling with the joy of life. He
watched it, how coldly, although he felt its charm, the rays of fire that came from it, as sunbeams come from
the sun! And apprehension stirred within him. And presently in the night, by ebony waters, and by strange
and wandering lights, and under unquiet stars, he told Hermione something of his fear.
Africaand the hovering flies, and the dreadful feeling that death's hands were creeping about his body and
trying to lay hold of it! A very lonely creature lay there in the mirror, with the faint shadow of a palmleaf
shifting and swaying upon the ghastly whiteness of its facehimself, in the most desolate hour of his life. As
he gazed he was transported to the City of the Mosques. The years rolled back. He felt again all, or nearly all,
that he had felt then of helplessness, abandonment, despair. It was frightful to go out thus alone, to be
extinguished in the burning heat of Africa, and laid in that arid soil, where the vipers slid through the hot
crevices of the earth, and the scorpions bred in the long days of the summer. Now it was evening. He heard
the call to prayer, that wailing, wonderful cry which saluted the sinking sun.
He remembered exactly how it had come into his ears through the half opened window, the sensation of
remoteness, of utter solitude, which it had conveyed to him. An Arab had passed under the window, singing
in a withdrawn and drowsy voice a plaintive song of the East which had mingled with the call to prayer. And
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then, he, Artois being quite alone, had given way in his great pain and weakness. He remembered feeling the
tears slipping over his cheeks, one following another, quickly, quickly. It had seemed as if they would never
stop, as if there would always be tears to flow from those sources deep within his stricken body, his stricken
soul.
He looked into the mirror. The door of the room was opened. A woman stood upon the threshold. The sick
man turned upon his pillow. He gazed towards the woman. And his tears ceased. He was no longer alone. His
friend had come from her garden of Paradise to draw him back to life.
In the magic mirror of the fattura della morte other scenes formed themselves, were clearly visible for a
moment, then dispersed, dissolvedtill scenes of the island came, till the last scene in the mirror dawned
faintly before his eyes.
He saw a dark room, and a woman more desolate than he had been when he lay alone with the shadow of the
palmtree shifting on his face, and heard the call to prayer. He saw Hermione in her room in the Casa del
Mare that night, after she knew.
Suddenly he put his hand to his eyes.
Those were the first tears his eyes had known since that evening in Africa years and years ago.
He laid the deathcharm down once more among the silver toys. But he still looked at it as he sat back now
in his chair, waiting for Gaspare's return.
He gazed at the symbol of death. And he began to think how strangely appropriate was its presence that night
in the Casa del Mare, how almost more than strange had been its bringing there by Ruffoif indeed Ruffo
had brought it, as Gaspare declared. And Ruffo, all ignorantly and unconsciously, had pierced the heart of
Hermione.
Artois knew nothing of what had happened that day at Mergellina, but he divined that it was Ruffo who,
without words, had told Hermione the truth. It must have been Ruffo, in whom the dead man lived again.
And, going beyond the innocent boy, deep into the shadows where lies so much of truth, Artois saw the
murdered man stirring from his sleep, unable to rest because of the lie that had been coiled around his
memory, making it what it should not be. Perhaps only the dead know the true, the sacred passion for justice.
Perhaps only they are indifferent to everything save truth, they who know the greatest truth of all.
And Artois saw Maurice Delarey, the gay, the fullblooded youth, grown stern in the halls of death, unable to
be at peace until she who had most loved him knew him at last as he had been in life.
As no one else would tell Hermione the truth, the dead man himself, speaking through his son, the fruit of his
sin, had told her the truth that day. He, too, had been perhaps a spirit in prison, through all these years since
his death.
Artois saw him in freedom.
And at that moment Artois felt that in the world there was only one thing that was perfectly beautiful, and
that thing was absolute truth. Its knowledge must make Hermione greater.
But now she was hanging on her cross.
If he could only comfort her!
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As she had come to him in Africa, he longed now to go to her. She had saved him from the death of the body.
If only he could save her from another and more terrible deaththe death of the spirit that believes and trusts
in life!
He had been absorbed in thought and unconscious of time. Now he looked up, he was aware of things. He
listened. Surely Gaspare had been away a long while. And Verewhere was she?
He had a strange desire to see Ruffo now. Something new and mystic had been born, or had for the first time
made itself apparent, within him tonight. And he knew that tonight he would look at Ruffo as he had never
looked at him before.
He got up and, leaving the deathcharm lying on the table, went to the door. There he hesitated. Should he go
to the terrace, to Vere? Or should he go upstairs to that dark room and try to speak to his friend? Or should
he go out to the cliff, to seek Gaspare and Ruffo?
Ruffo drew him. He had to go to the cliff.
He went out by the front door. At first he thought of descending at once by the steps to the Pool of San
Francesco. But he changed his mind and went instead to the bridge.
He looked over into the Pool.
It was a very clear night. San Francesco's light was burning brightly. Very sincerely it was burning beneath
the blessing hands of the Saint. A ray of gold that came from it lay upon the darkness of the Pool, stealing
through the night a little way, as if in an effort to touch the Casa del Mare.
In the Pool there was one boat. Artois saw no one by the sea's edge, heard no voices there, and he turned
towards the crest of the island, to the seat where Vere so often went at night, and where Hermione, too, had
often sought out Ruffo.
Gaspare and Ruffo were near it. Almost directly he saw their forms, relieved against the dimness but not deep
darkness of the night, and heard their voices talking. As he went towards them Gaspare was speaking
vehemently. He threw up one arm in a strong, even, and excited gesture, and was silent. Then Artois heard
Ruffo say, in a voice that, though respectful and almost deprecatory, was yet firm like a man's:
"I cannot take it away, Gaspare. When I go home my mamma will ask me if I have put it in the house."
"Dio mio!" cried Gaspare. "But you have put it in the house! Is it not thereis it not there now to bring death
upon the Signora, upon the Signorina, upon us all?"
"It was made for Peppina. My mamma made it only against Peppina, because she has brought evil into our
house. It will hurt only Peppina! It will kill only Peppina!"
He spoke now with a vehemence and passion almost equal to Gaspare's. Artois stood still. They did not see
him. They were absorbed in their conversation.
"It will not hurt the Signora or the Signorina. The fattura della morteit is to harm Peppina. Has she not
done us injury? Has she not taken my Patrigno from my mamma? Has she not made him mad? Is it not for
her that he has been in prison, and that he has left my mamma without a soldo in the house? The
Signorashe has been good to me and my mamma. It is she who sent my mamma moneytwenty lire! I
respect the Signora as I respect my mamma. Only today, only this very day she came to Mergellina, she
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came to see my mama. And when she knew that my Patrigno was let out of prison, when I cried out at the
door that he was coming, the Signora was so glad for us that she lookedshe looked Madre di Dio! She
was all white, she was shakingshe was worse than my poor mamma. And when I came to her, and when I
called out, 'Signora! Signora!' you should have seen! She opened her eyes! She gave me such a look! And
then my Patrigno came in at the door, and the Signorashe went away. I was going to follow her, but she
put out her handso, to make me stayshe wanted me to stay with my mamma. And she went down the
stairs all trembling because my Patrigno was let out of prison. Per dio! She has a good heart. She is an angel.
For the Signora I would die. For the Signora I would do anything! Iyou say I would kill the Signora!
Would I kill my mamma? Would I kill the Madonna? La Brunawould I kill her? To me the Signora is as
my mamma! I respect the Signora as I respect my mamma. Ecco!"
"The fattura della morte will bring evil on the house, it will bring death into the house."
Gaspare spoke again, and his voice was dogged with superstition, but it was less vehement than before.
"Alreadywho knows what it has brought? Who knows what evil it has done? All the house is sad tonight,
all the house is terrible tonight."
"It is Peppina who has looked on the house with the evil eye," said Ruffo. "It is Peppina who has brought
trouble to the house."
There was silence. Then Gaspare said:
"No, it is not Peppina."
As he spoke Artois saw him stretch out his hand, but gently, towards Ruffo.
"Who is it, then?" said Ruffo.
Moved by an irresistible impulse to interpose, Artois called out:
"Gaspare!"
He saw the two figures start.
"Gaspare!" he repeated, coming up to them.
"Signore! What is it? Has the Signora"
"I have not heard her. I have not seen her."
"Then what is it, Signore?"
"Goodevening, Ruffo," Artois said, looking at the boy.
"Goodevening, Signore."
Ruffo took off his cap. He was going to put it back on his dark hair, when Artois held his arm.
"Wait a minute, Ruffo!"
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The boy looked surprised, but met fearlessly the eyes that were gazing into his.
"Va bene, Ruffo."
Artois released his arm, and Ruffo put on his cap.
"I heard you talking of the fattura della morte," Artois said.
Ruffo reddened slightly.
"Si, Signore."
"Your mother made it?"
Ruffo did not answer. Gaspare stood by, watching and listening with deep, halfsuspicious attention.
"I heard you say so."
"Si, Signore. My mamma made it."
"And told you to bring it to the island and put it in the house tonight?"
"Si, Signore."
"Are you sure it was Peppina your mother wished to do evil?"
"Si, Signore, quite sure. Peppina is a bad girl. She made my Patrigno mad. She brought trouble to our house."
"You love the Signora, don't you, Ruffo?"
His face changed and grew happier at once.
"Si, Signore. I love the Signora and the Signorina."
He would not leave out Vere. Artois's heart warmed to him for that.
"Ruffo"
While he had been on the crest of the island an idea had come to him. At first he had put it from him. Now,
suddenly, he caressed it, he resolved to act on its prompting.
"Ruffo, the Signora is in the house."
"Si, Signore."
"I don't think she is very well. I don't think she will leave the house tonight. Wouldn't you like to see her?"
"Signore, I always like to see the Signora."
"And I think she likes to see you. I know she does."
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"Si, Signore. The Signora is always glad when I come."
He spoke without conceit or vanity, with utterly sincere simplicity.
"Go to the house and ask to see her nowGaspare will take you."
As he spoke he looked at Gaspare, and Gaspare understood.
"Come on, Ruffo!"
Gaspare's voice was rough, arbitrary, but the eyes that he turned on Ruffo were full of the almost melting
gentleness that Hermione had seen in them sometimes and that she had always loved.
"Come on, Ruffino!"
He walked away quickly, almost sternly, towards the house. And Ruffo followed him.
CHAPTER XLI
Artois did not go with them. Once again he was governed by an imperious feeling that held him inactive, the
feeling that it was not for him to approach Hermionethat others might draw near to her, but that he dared
not. The sensation distressed and almost humiliated him. it came upon him like a punishment for sin, and as a
man accepts a punishment which he is conscious of deserving Artois accepted it.
So now he waited alone on the crest of the island, looking towards the Casa del Mare.
What would be the result of this strange and daring embassy?
He was not long to be in doubt.
"Signore! Signore!"
Gaspare's voice was calling him from somewhere in the darkness.
"Signore."
"I am coming."
There had been a thrill of emotion in the appeal sent out to him. He hurried towards the house. He crossed the
bridge. When he was on it he heard the splash of oars below him in the Pool, but he took no heed of it. What
were the fishermen to him tonight? Before the house door he met Gaspare and Ruffo.
"What is it?"
"The Signora is not in her room, Signore."
"Not? How do you know? Is the door open?"
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"Si, Signore. The Signora has gone! And the fattura della morte has gone."
"The fattura della morte has gone!" repeated Ruffo.
The repetition of the words struck a chill to the heart of Artois. Again he was beset by superstition. He caught
it from these children of the South, who stared at him now with their grave and cloudy eyes.
"Perhaps one of the servants" he began.
"No, Signore. I have asked them. And they would not dare to touch it."
"The Signorina?"
He shook his head.
"She is in the garden. She has been there all the time. She does not know"he lowered his voice almost to a
whisper"she does not know about the Signora and the fattura della morte."
"We must not let her know"
He stopped. Suddenly his ears seemed full of the sound of splashing oars in water. Yet he heard nothing.
"Gaspare," he said quickly, "have you looked everywhere for the Signora?"
"I have looked in the house, Signore. I have been on the terrace and to the Signorina in the garden. Then I
came to tell you. I thought you should know about the Signora and the fattura della morte."
Artois felt that it was this fact of the disappearance of the death charm which for the moment paralyzed
Gaspare's activities. What stirring of ancient superstition was in the Sicilian's heart he did not know, but he
knew that now his own time of action was come. No longer could he delegate to others the necessary deed.
And with this knowledge his nature seemed to change. An ardor that was almost vehement with youth, and
that was hardfibred with manly strength and resolution, woke up in him.
Again his ears were full of the sound of oars in water.
"Ruffo," he said, "will you obey me?"
He laid his hand on the boy's shoulder.
"Si, Signore."
"Go into the garden. Stay with the Signorina till I come."
"Si, Signore."
"If it is a long time, if the Signorina is afraid, if she wants to do anything, you are to say that Don Emilio said
she was not to be afraid, and that she was to wait."
"Si, Signore."
The boy paused, looking steadily at Artois, then, seeing that he had finished, turned away and went softly into
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the house.
"Gaspare, come with me."
Gaspare said nothing, but followed him down to the foot of the cliff. One of the island boats was gone. When
Gaspare saw that he ran to pull in the other. He held out his arm to help Artois into the boat, then took the
oars, standing up and looking before him into the night.
"Row towards the village, Gaspare."
"Si, Signore."
At that moment Gaspare understood much of what was in Artois's mind. He relied upon Artois. He trusted
himand this fact, of Gaspare's trust and reliance upon him, added now to that feeling of ardor that had risen
up in Artois, gave him courage, helped to banish completely that punishing sensation which had condemned
him to keep away from Hermione as one unworthy to approach her, to touch even the hem of her grief.
No need to tell Gaspare to row quickly. With all his strength he forced the boat along through the calm sea.
"Keep near the shore, Gaspare!"
"Si, Signore."
Only the first quarter of the young moon was visible in the sky. It cast but a thin and distant glint of silver
upon the waters. By the near shore the dimness of this hour was unbroken by any light, unstirred by any
sound except the withdrawn and surreptitious murmur of the sea. The humped shapes of the low yellow rocks
showed themselves faintly like shapes of beasts asleep. In the distance, lifted above the sea, two or three
flames shone faintly. They were shed by lamps or candles set in the windows of the fishermen's cottages in
the village.
Had Hermione gone to the village?
She might have left the island with some definite purpose, or moved by a blind impulse to get away, and be
alone. Artois could not tell. But she had taken the fattura della morte.
He wondered whether she knew its meaning, with what sinister intention it had been made. Something in the
little worthless thing must have attracted her, have fascinated her, or she would not have taken it. In her
distress of mind, in her desire for solitude, she would have hastened away and left it lying where it was.
Perhaps she had a purpose in leaving the island with the fattura della morte.
Her taking of it began to seem to Artois, as it had evidently seemed to Gaspare, a fact of profound
significance. His imagination, working with an almost diseased rapidity and excitement, brought before him a
series of scenes in which the deathcharm figured as symbol. In one of these there were two
womenHermione and Maddalena.
Hermione might have set out on some wild quest to Mergellina. He remembered the face at the window, and
knew that tonight everything was possible.
"Row quickly, Gaspare!"
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Gaspare bent almost furiously to the oars. Then sharply he turned his head.
"What is it?"
"I can see the boat! I can see the Signora!"
The words struggled out on a long breath that made his broad chest heave. Instinctively Artois put his hands
on the gunwale of the boat on either side of him, moving as if to stand up.
"Take care, Signore!"
"I'd forgotten" He leaned forward, searching the night. "Where is the Signora?"
"Therein front! She is rowing to the village. No, she has turned."
He stopped rowing.
"The Signora has seen, or she has heard, and she is going in to shore."
"But there are only the rocks."
"The Signora is going in to the Palazzo of the Spirits."
"The Palazzo of the Spirits?" Artois repeated.
"Si, Signore."
Gaspare turned and looked again into the darkness.
"I cannot see the Signora any more."
"Follow the Signora, Gaspare. If she has gone to the Palazzo of the Spirits row in there."
"Si, Signore."
He drew the oars again strongly through the water.
Artois remembered a blinding storm that had crashed over a mountain village in Sicily long ago, a flash of
lightning which had revealed to him the gaunt portal of a palace that seemed abandoned, a strip of black
cloth, the words "Lutto in famiglia." They had seemed to him prophetic words.
And now?
In the darkness he saw another darkness, the strange and broken outline of the ruined palace by the sea, once
perhaps, the summer home of some wealthy Roman, now a mere shell visited in the lonely hours by the
insatiate waves. Were Hermione and he to meet here? Today he had thought of his friend as a spirit that had
been long in prison. Now he came to the Palace of the Spirits to face her truth with his. The Palace of the
Spirits! The name suggested the very nakedness of truth. Well, let it be so, let the truth stand there naked.
Again, mingling with a certain awe, there rose up in him a strong ardor, a courage that was vehement, that
longed at last to act. And it seemed to him suddenly that for many years, through all the years that divided
Hermione and him from the Sicilian life, they had been held in leash, waiting for the moment of this
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encounter. Now the leash slackened. They were being freed. And for what?
Gaspare plunged his right oar into the sea alone. The boat swung round obediently, heading for the shore.
One of the faint lights that gleamed in the village was extinguished.
"Signore, the Signora has left the boat!"
"Si?"
"Madonna! She has let it go! She has left it to the sea!"
He backed water. A moment later the little boat in which Vere loved to go out alone grated against theirs.
"Madonna! To leave the boat like that!" exclaimed Gaspare, bending to catch the towrope. "The Signora is
not safe tonight. The Signora's saint will not look on her tonight."
"Put me ashore, Gaspare."
"Si, Signore."
The boat passed before the façade of the palace.
Artois knew the palace well by day. This was the first time he had come to it by night. In daylight it was a
small and picturesque ruin washed by the laughing sea, lonely but scarcely sad. Leaping from its dark and
crumbling walls the fisherboys often plunged into the depths below; or they lay upon the broad sills of the
gaping windowspaces to dry themselves in the sun. Men came with rods and lines to fish from its deserted
apartments, through which, when rough weather was at hand, the screaming seabirds flew. The waves
played frivolously enough in its recesses. And their voices were heard against the slimy and defiant stones
calling to teach other merrily, as perhaps once the voices of revellers long dead called in the happy hours of a
vanished villeggiatura.
But the night wrought on it, in it, and about it change. Its solitude then became desolation, the darkness of its
stones a blackness that was tragic, its ruin more than a suggestion, the decisive picture of despair.
At its base was a line of halfdiscovered windowspaces, the lower parts of which had become long since the
prey of the waves. Above it were more windowspaces, fully visible, and flanking a high doorway, once, no
doubt, connected with a staircase, but now giving upon mid air. Formerly there had been another floor, but
this had fallen into decay and disappeared, with the exception of one small and narrow chamber situated
immediately over the doorway. Isolated, for there was no means of approach to it, this chamber had
something of the aspect of a low and sombre tower sluggishly lifting itself towards the sky. The palace was
set upon rock and flanked by rocks. Round about it grass grew to the base of a high cliff at perhaps two
hundred yards distance from it. And here and there grass and tufts of rank herbage pushed in its crevices,
proclaiming the triumph of time to exulting winds and waters.
As Gaspare rowed in cautiously and gently to this deserted place, to which from the land no road, no footpath
led, he stared at the darkness of the palace with superstitious awe, then at the small, familiar boat, which
followed in their wake because he held the tow rope.
"Signore," he said, "I am afraid!"
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"YouGaspare!"
"I am afraid for the Signora. Why should she come here all alone with the fattura della morte? I am afraid for
the Signora."
The boat touched the edge of the rock to the right of the palace.
"And where has the Signora gone, Signore? I cannot see her, and I cannot hear her."
He lifted up his hand. They listened. But they heard only the sucking murmur of the sea against the rocks
perforated with little holes, and in distant, abandoned chambers of the palace.
"Where has the Signora gone?" Gaspare repeated, in a whisper.
"I will find the Signora," said Artois.
He got up. Gaspare held his arm to assist him to the shore.
"Thank you."
He was on the rocks.
"Gaspare," he said, "wait here. Lie off the shore close by till I come back."
"Si, Signore."
Artois hesitated, looking at Gaspare.
"I will persuade the Signora to come back with us," he said.
"Si, Signore. You must persuade the poor Signora. The poor Signora is mad tonight. She gave me a look"
His eyes clouded with moisture. "If the poor Signora had not been mad she could not have looked at me like
thatat another, perhaps, but not at me."
It seemed as if at last his long reserve was breaking down. He put up his hand to his eyes.
"I did not think that my Padrona"
He stopped. Artois remembered the face at the window. He grasped Gaspare's hand.
"The Signora does not understand," he said. "I will make the Signora understand."
"Si, Signore, you must make the poor Signora understand."
Gaspare's hand held on to the hand of Artois, and in that clasp the immense reserve, that for so many years
had divided, and united, these two men, seemed to melt like gold in a crucible of fire.
"I will make the Signora understand."
"And I will wait, Signore."
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He pushed the boat off from the rocks. It floated away, with its sister boat, on the calm sea that kissed the
palace walls. He gave his Padrona's fate into the hands of Artois. It was a tribute which had upon Artois a
startling effect.
It was like a great resignation which conferred a great responsibility.
Always Gaspare had been very jealous, very proud of his position of authority as the confidential servant and
protector of Hermione. And now, suddenly, and very simply, he seemed to acknowledge his helplessness
with Hermioneto rely implicitly upon the power of Artois.
Vere, too, in her way had performed a kindred action. She had summoned "Monsieur Emile" in her great
trouble. She had put herself in his hands. And hehe had striven to delegate to others the burden he was
meant to bear. He had sent Vere to Hermione. He had sent Gaspare to her. He had even sent Ruffo to her.
Now he must go himself. Vere, Gaspare, Ruffothey were all looking to him. But Gaspare's eyes were most
expressive, held more of demand for him than the eyes of the girl and boy. For the past was gathered in
Gaspare, spoke to him in Gaspare's voice, looked at him from Gaspare's eyes, and in Gaspare's soul waited
surely to know how it would be redeemed.
He turned from the sea and looked towards the cliff. Now he had the palace on his left hand. On his right, not
far off, was a high bluff going almost sheer into the sea. Nevertheless, access to the village was possible by
the strip of rocks beneath it. Had Hermione gone to the village by the rocks? If she had, Gaspare's keen eyes
would surely have seen her. Artois looked at the blank wall of the palace. This extended a little way, then
turned at right angles. Just beyond the angle, in its shadow, there was a low and narrow doorway. Artois
moved along the wall, reached this doorway, stood without it, and listened.
The grass here grew right up to the stones of the ruin. He had come almost without noise. Before him he saw
blackness, the blackness of a passage extending from the orifice of the doorway to an interior chamber of the
palace. He heard the peculiar sound of moving water that is beset and covered in by barriers of stone, a
hollow and pugnacious murmur, as of something so determined that it would be capable of striving through
eternity, yet of something that was wistful and even sad.
For an instant he yielded his spirit to this sound of eternal striving. Then he said:
"Hermione!"
No one answered.
"Hermione!"
He raised his voice. He almost called the name.
Still there was no answer. Yet the silence seemed to tell him that she was near.
He did not call again. He waited a moment, then he stepped into the passage.
The room to which it led was the central room, or hall, of the palace a vaulted chamber, high and narrow,
opening to the sea at one end by the great doorway already mentioned, to the land beneath the cliff by a
smaller doorway at the other. The faint light from without, penetrating through these facing doorways,
showed to Artois a sort of lesser darkness, towards which he walked slowly, feeling his way along the wall.
When he reached the hall he again stood still, trying to get accustomed to the strange and eerie obscurity, to
pierce it with his eyes.
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Now to his left, evidently within the building, and not far from where he stood, he heard almost loudly the
striving of the sea. He heard the entering wave push through some narrow opening, search round the walls for
egress, lift itself in a vain effort to emerge, fall back baffled, retreat, murmuring discontent, only to be
succeeded by another eager wave. And this startling living noise of water filled him with a sensation of acute
anxiety, almost of active fear.
"Hermione!" he said once more.
It seemed to him that the voice of the water drowned his voice, that it was growing louder, was filling the
palace with an uproar that was angry.
"Hermione! Hermione!"
He strove to dominate that uproar.
Now, far off, through the seaward opening, he saw a streak of silver lying like a thread upon the darkness of
the sea. And as he saw it, the voice of the waves within the palace seemed to sink suddenly away almost to
silence. He did not know why, but the vision of that very distant radiance of the young and already setting
moon seemed to restore to him abruptly the accuracy of his sense of hearing.
He again went forward a few steps, descending in the chamber towards the doorway by the worn remains of
an almost effaced staircase. Reaching the bottom he stood still once more. On either side of him he could
faintly discern openings leading into other rooms. Perhaps Hermione, hearing him call, had retreated from
him through one of them. A sort of horror of the situation came upon him, as he began thoroughly to realize
the hatred, hatred of brain, of nerves, of heart, that was surely quivering in Hermione in this moment, that
was driving her away into the darkness from sound and touch of life. Like a wounded animal she was
creeping away from it and hating it. He remembered Gaspare's words about the look she had cast upon
perhaps the most truly faithful of all her friends.
Butshe did not know. And he, Artois, must tell her. He must make her see the exact truth of the years. He
must win her back to reason.
Reason! As the word went through his mind it chilled him, like the passing of a thing coated with ice. He had
been surely a reasonable man, and his reasonableness had led him to this hour. Suddenly he saw himself, as
he had seen that palace door by lightning. He saw himself for an instant lit by a glare of fire. He looked, he
stared upon himself.
And he shivered, as if he had drawn close to, as if he had stood by, a thing coated with ice.
And he dared to come here, to pursue such a woman as Hermione! He dared to think that he could have any
power over her, that his ice could have any power over her fire! He dared to think that! For a moment all, and
far more than all, his former feelings of unworthiness, of helplessness, of cowardice, rushed back upon him.
Then, abruptly, there came upon him this thought"Vere believes I have power over Hermione." And then
followed the thought"Gaspare believes that I have power over her." And the ice seemed to crack. He saw
fissures in it. He saw it melting. He saw the "thing" it had covered appearing, being gradually revealed
asman.
"Vere believes in my power. Gaspare believes in my power. They are the nearest to Hermione. They know
her best. Their instincts about her must be the strongest, the truest. Why do they believe in it? Why do
theywhy do they knowfor they must, they do know, that I have this power, that I am the one to succeed
where any one else would fail? Why have they left Hermione in my hands tonight?"
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The ice was gone. The lightning flash lit up a man warm with the breath of life. From the gaunt door of the
abandoned palace the strip of black cloth, the tragic words above it, dropped down and disappeared.
Suddenly Artois knew why Vere believed in his power, and why Gaspare believed in itknew how their
instincts had guided them, knew to what secret knowledgeperhaps not even consciously now their
knowledge they had travelled. And he remembered the words he had written in the book at Frisio's on the
night of the storm:
"La Conscience, c'est la quantite de science innee que nous avons en nous."
He had written those words hurriedly, irritably, merely because he had to write something, and they
chancedhe knew not whyto come into his mind as he took hold of the pen. And it was on that night,
surely, that his consciencehis innate knowledgebegan to betray him. Orno it was on that night that
he began to defy it, to deny it, to endeavor to cast it out.
For surely he must have known, he had known, what Vere and Gaspare innately knew. Surely his conscience
had not slept while theirs had been awake.
He did not know. It seemed to him as if he had not time to decide this now. Very rapidly his mind had
worked, rushing surely through corridors of knowledge to gain an inner room. He had only stood at the foot
of the crumbling staircase two or three minutes before he moved again decisively, called again, decisively:
"Hermione! Hermione! I know you are here. I have come for you!"
He went to the right. On the left was the chamber which had been taken possession of by the sea. She could
not have gone that way, unlesshe thought of the fattura della morte, and for a moment the superstitious
horror returned upon him. But he banished it. That could not be. His heart was flooded by conviction that
cruelty has an end, that the most relentless fate fails at last in its pursuing, that the fattura della morte, if it
brought death with it, brought a death that was not of the body, brought, perhaps, a beautiful death of
something that had lived too long.
He banished fear, and he entered the chamber on the right. It was lit only by an opening looking to the sea. As
he came into it he saw a tall thinglike a tall shadowpass close to him and disappear. He saw that, and he
heard the faint sound of material in movement.
There was then still another chamber on this side, and Hermione had passed into it. He followed her in
silence, came to the doorway of it, looked, saw black darkness. There was no other opening either to sea or
land. In it Hermione had found what she soughtabsolute blackness.
But he had found her. Here she could not escape him.
He stood in the doorway. He remembered Vere's trust in him. He remembered Gaspare's trust. He
remembered that Gaspare was waiting in the boat for himfor them. He remembered the words of Gaspare:
"You must make the poor Signora understand!"
That was what he had to do: to make Hermione understand. And that surely he could do. Surely he had the
power to do it now.
For he himself understood.
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CHAPTER XLII
"Hermione!"
Artois spoke to the void.
"Hermione, because I have followed you, because I have come here, don't you think that I am claiming any
right. Don't think that I imagine, because I am yourbecause I amI mean that it has not been easy to me
to come. It has not beenit is not a simple thing to me to break in uponupon"
He had begun to speak with determination. He had said the very first words with energy, almost with a warm
eagerness, as of one hurrying on to vital speech. But suddenly the energy faltered, the eagerness failed, the
ring of naturalness died out of the voice. It was as if a gust of cold air had blown out a flame. He paused.
Then he said, in a low voice:
"You hate me for coming."
He stopped again. He stared at the void, at the blackness.
"You hate me for being here."
As he said the last words the blackness before him surely gathered itself together, took a form, the form of a
wave, towered up as a gigantic wave towers, rolled upon him to overwhelm him. So acute was his sensation
of being attacked, of being in peril, that his body was governed by it and instinctively shrank, trying to make
itself small that it might oppose as little resistance as possible to the oncoming foe.
For it seemed to him that the wave of blackness was the wave of Hermione's present hatred, that it came upon
him, that it struck him, that it stunned and almost blinded him, then divided, rushing onwards he knew not
where, unspent and unsatisfied.
He stood like a man startled and confused, striving to regain lost footing, to recover his normal condition.
"You hate me."
Had he spoken the words or merely thought them? He did not know. He was not conscious of speaking them,
yet he seemed to hear them. He looked at the blackness. And again it surely moved. Again he surely saw it
gathering itself together, and towering up as a wave towers.
His sensation was absolutely one of nightmare. And exactly as in a nightmare a man feels that he is no longer
fully himself, has no longer the power to do any manly or effective thing, so Artois felt now.
It seemed to him that he was nothing, and yet that he was hated. He turned and looked behind him, moved by
a fierce desire for relief. He had not the courage to persist in confronting that blackness which took a form,
which came upon him, which would surely overwhelm him.
In the distance he saw a pallor, where the face of the night looked into the palace from the sea. And he heard
the distant water. Still the little waves were entering the deserted chambers, only to seek an exit which they
could never find. Their ceaseless determination was horrible to him, because it suggested to him the ceaseless
determination of those other waves of black hatred, one following another, from some hidden centre of
energy that was inexhaustible. As he listened the sound of the sea stole into his ears till his brain was full of
it, till he felt as if into his brain, as into those deserted chambers, the waves were penetrating, the waves of the
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sea and those dark waves which gathered themselves together and flowed upon him from the void.
For a moment they possessed him. For a moment he was the prey of these two oceans.
Then he made a violent effort, released himself, and turned again to the chamber in which Hermione was
hidden. He faced the blackness. He was able to do that now. But he was not able to go on speaking to the
woman who remained invisible, but whose influence he was so painfully conscious of. He was not able to
speak to her because she was surely speaking to him, was communicating to him not only her feeling towards
him, but also its reason, its basis, in that wordless language which is only used and comprehended by human
beings in moments of crisis and intense emotion. That was what he felt, seemed to know.
He stood there, facing the blackness and listening, while she seemed to be telling him her woman's reasons
for her present hatred of the man who had been for so long a time her closest friend.
And these reasons were not only the reasons born of a day's events, of the discovery of the lie on which her
spirit had been resting. She did not sayher heart did not say only: "I hate you because you let me believe in
that which never existed except in my imaginationmy husband's complete love of me, complete
faithfulness to me. I hate you because you enclosed me in the prison of a lie. I hate you because during all
these years you have been a witness of my devotion to an idol, a graven image whose wooden grimace I
mistook for the smile of the god's happy messenger, because you have been a witness of my cult for the
memory of one who betrayed my trust in him, who thought nothing of my gift to him, who put another in the
sanctuary that should have been sacred to me, and who has poisoned the sources of the holy streams that flow
into and feed the soul of a good woman."
If Hermione had silently told Artois reasons such as these for hating him she would have roused him to battle
with her, to defend himself with some real hope of holding his own, even of eventual conquest. But other
reasons, too, did they not come from her, creeping out of her brain and heart and soul into his, reasons against
which he had no weapons, against which he could make no defence?
He had claimed to understand the psychology of women. He had believed he comprehended women well.
Hermione best of all women. But these reasons, creeping out of her into him, set a ring of illuminating fire
about his misconception. They told him that though perhaps he had known one Hermione in his friend, there
were other Hermiones in her whom he had never really known. Once in the garden of the island by night he
had seen, or fancied he had seen, a strange smile upon her face that betokened a secret bitterness; and for a
moment he had been confused, and had faltered in his speech, and had felt as if he were sitting with a stranger
who was hostile to him, or, if not actually hostile, was almost cruelly critical of him. Now that stranger
silently spoke to him, silently told him many things.
She told himthat which few men ever knowsomething of what women specially want, specially need in
life. And the catalogue of these needs seemed to him to be also the catalogue of her reasons for hating him at
this moment.
"Women needI needed," she seemed to say, "not only a large and ample friendship, noble condescending,
a friendship like an announcement to citizens affixed to the wall of a marketplace, and covering boldly all
the principal circumstances and likely happenings of ordinary feminine life, but a friendship, an affection,
very individual, very full of subtlety, not such as would suit, would fit comfortably women, but such as
would suit, would fit comfortably, would fit beautifully one individual womanme."
Ah, the "women need" was flung away, like a stone thrown into the sea! It was the "I needed" that was held
fast, that was shown to Artois now. And the "I" stood to Hermione for herself. But might it not have stood to
the world for many a woman?
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"I needed some one to whom I could be kind, for whom I could think, plan, hope, weave a fabric of ambitious
dreams, look forward along the path that leads to glory. I needed some one for whom I could be unselfish, to
whom I could often offer those small burnt sacrifices whose smoke women love to see ascending towards
God, burnt sacrifices of small personal desire, small personal plans and intentions. I needed some one to need
my encouragement, my admirationfrequently expressedmy perpetual sympathy hovering about him like
a warm cloud of fragrant incense, my gentle criticism, leading him to efforts which would win from the
world, and from me, more admiration of and wonder at his energy and genius. I needed some one to stir
within me woman's soft passion for forgiveness, woman's delight in petting the child who has been naughty,
but who puts the naughtiness aside and runs home to be good again. I needed some one to set upon a pedestal.
"These needs you fully satisfied.
"You gave me generously opportunities for kindness, for thoughtfulness, for impersonal ambition, for looking
forward on your behalf, for unselfishness, for the sacrifice of my little personal desires, plans, and intentions,
for encouragement of you, for admiration of your abilities, for sympathyeven for gentle criticism leading
you to efforts which won from me eventually a greater respect for your powers and for secret forgiveness
which ended in open petting. When I prepared the pedestal you were quite ready to mount it, and to remain
upon it without any demonstration of fatigue.
"And so many needs of mine you satisfied.
"But I had more needs, and far other needs, than these.
"I needed not only to make many gifts, to satisfy my passion for generosity, but to have many gifts, and gifts
of a special nature, made in return to me. I needed to feel another often, if not perpetually and exclusively,
intent on me. I needed to feel tendernesswatchful, quick, eager tenderness, not tenderness slow footed
and in blinkersround about me.
"I needed a little blindness in my friend. That is true. But the blindness that I needed was not blindness to my
little sacrifices, but blindness to my little faults.
"To a woman there is such a world of difference between the two! I longed for my friend to see the smoke
ascending from my small burnt offerings of self made for his sake. But I longed, too, for him not always to
see with calm, clear eyes my petty failings, my minute vanities, my inconsistencies, my incongruities, my
frequent lack of reasoning power and logical sequence, my gusts of occasional injustice ending nearly
always in a rain of undue benefitsmy surely forgivable follies of sentiment, my irritabilitieshow often
due to physical causes which no man could ever understand!my blunders of the headof the heart I made
but few, or nonemy weak depressions, struggled against but not always conquered, my perhaps childish
anxieties and apprehensions, my forebodings, not invariably well founded, my fleeting absurdities of temper,
of temperament, of manner, or of word.
"But as definitely as my friend did not see my little sacrifices he saw my little faults, and he made me see that
he saw them. Men are so free from the tender deceits that women are compact of.
"And as I needed blindness in some directions, in others I needed clear sight.
"I needed some one to see that my woman's heart was not only the heart of a happy mother, to whom God
had given an almost perfect child, but also the heart of a lovernot of a grande amoureuse, perhaps, but of a
lover who had been deprived of the love that is the complement of woman's, and who suffered perpetually in
woman's peculiar and terrible way because of that deprivation.
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"I needed an understanding of my sacred hunger, a comprehension of my desolation, a realization that my
efforts to fill my time with work were as the efforts of a traveller in a forest to escape from the wolves whose
voices he hears behind him. I needed the recognition of a simple truththat the thing one is passionately
eager to give is nearly always the thing one is passionately eager to receive, and that when I poured forth
sympathy upon others I was longing to have it poured forth upon me. I gave because secretly I realized the
hunger I was sharing. And often, having satisfied your hunger, I was left to starve, no longer in company, but
entirely alone.
"I needed great things, perhaps, but I needed them expressed in little ways; and I needed little cares, little
attentions, little thoughtfulnesses, little preventions, little, little, absurd kindnesses, tendernesses,
recognitions, forgivenesses. Perhaps, indeed, even more than anything magnificent or great, I needed the so
called little things. It is not enough for a woman to know that a man would do for her something important,
something even superb, if the occasion for it arose. Such an occasion probably never would arise and she
cannot wait. She wants to be shown at every moment that some one is thinking kindly of her, is making little,
kind plots and plans for her, is wishing to ward off from her the chill winds, to keep from pricking her the
thorns of the roses, to shut out from her the shadows of life and let in the sunbeams to her pathway.
"I needed the tender, passing touch to show me my secret grief was understood, and my inconsistency was
pardoned. I needed the generous smile to prove to me that my greed for kindness, even when perhaps
inopportune, was met in an ungrudging spirit. I needed now and thenI needed this sometimes terribly,
more, perhaps, than any other thinga sacrifice of some very small, very personal desire of yours, because it
was not mine or because it was opposite to mine. Never, never, did my heart and my nature demand of yours
any great sacrifice of self, such as mine could have madesuch as mine once did makefor you. But it did
demand, oftenoften it demanded some small sacrifice: the giving up of some trifle, the resignation of some
advantage, perhaps, that your man's intellect gave you over my woman's intellect, the abandoning of some
argumentative position, or the not taking of it, the sweet pretencescarcely a sin against the Holy Ghost of
truth! that I was a tiny bit more persuasive, or more clearsighted, or more happy in some contention, or
more just in some decision, than perhaps I really was. I needed to be shown your affection for me, as I was
ever ready, ever anxious, to show mine for you, in all the little ways that are the language of the heart and that
fill a woman's life with music.
"All this I needed. My nature cried out for it as instinctively as the nature of man cries out for God. But all
this I needed generally in vain. You were not always a niggard. You were ready sometimes to give in your
way. But were you ever ready to give in mine when you sawand sometimes you must have seen,
sometimes you did seewhat mine was? I longed always to give you all you wanted in the way you wanted
it. But you gave when you wished and as you chose to give. I was often grateful. I was too often grateful. I
was unduly grateful. Because I was giving, I was always giving far more than I received.
"But all that time I had something. All that time I had a memory that I counted sacred. All that time, like an
idiot child, I was clasping in my hand a farthing, which I believed, which I stated, to be a shining piece of
gold.
"You knew what it was. You knew it was a farthing! You knewyou knew!
"And now that the hour has come when I know, too, can't you understand that I realize not only that that
farthing is a farthing, but that all farthings are farthings? Can't you understand that I hate those who have
given me farthings when my hands were stretched out for goldmy hands that were giving gold?
"Can't you understand? Can't you? Then I'll make you understand! I'll make you! I'll make you!"
Again the blackness gathered itself together, took a form, the form of a wave, towered up as a gigantic wave
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towers, rolled upon Artois to overwhelm him. He stood firm and received the shock. For he was beginning to
understand. He was no longer confronting waves of hatred which were also waves of mystery.
He had thought that Hermione hated him, hated every one just then, because of what Ruffo had silently told
her that day at Mergellina. But as he stood there in the dark at the door of that black chamber, hearing the
distant murmur of the sea about the palace walls, there were borne in upon him, as if in words she told him,
all the reasons for present hatred of him which preceded the great reason of that day; reasons for hatred which
sprang, perhaps, which surely must spring, from other reasons of love.
His mind was exaggerating, as minds do when the heart is intensely moved, yet it discerned much truth. And
it was very strange, but his now acute consciousness of a personal hatred coming to him from out of the
darkness of this almost secret chamber, and of its complex causes, causes which nevertheless would surely
never have produced the effect he felt but for the startling crisis of that day, this acute consciousness of a
personal and fierce hatred bred suddenly in Artois a new sensation of something that was not hatred, that was
the reverse of hatred. Vere had once compared him to a sleepy lion. The lion was now awake.
"Hermione," he saidand now his voice was strong and unfaltering"I seem to have been listening to you
all this time that I have been standing here. Surely I have been listening to you, hearing your thoughts. Don't
you know it? Haven't you felt it? When I left the island, when I followed you, I thought I understood. I
thought I understood what you were feeling, almost all that you were feeling. I know now how little I
understood. I didn't realize how much there was to understand. You've been telling me. Haven't you,
Hermione? Haven't you?"
He paused. But there was no answer.
"I am sure you have been telling me. We must get down to the truth at last. I thoughttill now I have
thought that I was more able to read the truth than most men. You must often have laughedhow you must
have laughedsecretly at my pretensions. Only onceone night in the garden on the islandI think I saw
you laughing. And even then I didn't understand. Mon Dieu!"
He was becoming fiercely concentrated now on what he was saying. He was losing all selfconsciousness.
He was even losing consciousness of the strange fact that he was addressing a void. It was as if he saw
Hermione, so strongly did he feel her.
"Mon Dieu! It is as if I'd been blind all the time I have known you, blind to the truth of you and blinder still
to my own truth. Perhaps I am blind now. I don't know. But, Hermione, I can see something. I do know
something of you and of myself. I do know that even now there is a link between us. You want to deny it.
You wouldn't acknowledge it. But it is there. We are not quite apart from each other. We can't be that. for
there is somethingthere has always been something, since that night we met in Paris, at Madame
Enthoven's"he paused again, so vividly flashed the scene of that dinner in Paris upon his memory
"something to draw us together, something to hold us together, something strong. Don't deny it even now.
Don't deny it. Can't I be of some help, even now? Don't say I am utterly useless because I have been so
useless to you, so damnably useless in the past. I see all that, my wretched uselessness to you through all
these years. I am seeing it now while I am speaking. All the time I'm seeing it. What you have deserved and
what you have had!"
He stopped, then he said again:
"What you have deserved and what you have had from me! And fromit was soit was the same long ago,
not here. But till today you didn't know that. I was wrong. I must have been wrong, hideously wrong, but I
didn't want you ever to know that. It isn't that I don't love truth. You know I do. But I thought that he was
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right. And it is only lately, this summer, that I have had any doubts. But I was wrong. I must have been
wrong. It was intended that you should know. God, perhaps, intended it."
He thought he heard a movement. But he was not quite sure. For there was always the noise of the sea in the
deserted chambers of the palace.
"It seems to me now as if I had always been deceived, mistaken, blind with you, about you. I thought you
need never know. I was mad enough to think that. But I was madder still, for I thoughtI must have
thoughtthat you could not bear to know, that you weren't strong enough to endure the knowledge.
But"he was digging deep now, searching for absolute truth: in this moment his natural passion for truth, in
one direction repressed for many years deliberately and consciously, in other directions, perhaps almost
unconsciously frustrated, took entire possession of his being"but nothing should ever be allowed to stand
in the way of truth. I believe that. I know it. I must, I will always act upon the knowledge from this moment.
Never mind if it is bitter, cruel. Perhaps it is sometimes put into the world because of that. I've been a horrible
faineant, the last of faineants. I protected you from the truth. With Gaspare I managed to do it. We never
spoke of itnever. But I think each of us understood. And we acted together for you in that. And Iit has
often seemed to me that it was a fine thing to do, and that my motives in doing it were fine. But sometimes I
have wondered whether they weren't selfishwhether, instead of protecting you, I wasn't only protecting
myself. For it was all my fault. It all came about through me, through my weakness, my cursed weakness, my
cursed weakness and whining for help." He grew scarlet in the dark, realizing how his pride in his strength,
his quiet assumption with Hermione that he was the stronger, must often have made her marvel, or almost
weep. "I called you away. I called you to Africa. And if I hadn't it would all have been different."
"No, it would all have been the same."
Artois started. Out of the darkness a voice, a low, cold, inexorable voice had spokenhad spoken absolute
truth, correcting his lie:
"It would all have been the same!"
The woman's unerring instinct had penetrated much further than the man's. He had been feeling the shell; she
plucked out the kernel. He had been speaking of the outward facts, of the actions of the body; she spoke of
the inward facts, of the actions of the soul. Her husband's sin against her was not his unfaithfulness, the
unfaithfulness at the Fair, but the fact that all the time he had been with her, all the time she had been giving
her whole self to him, all the time that she had been surrounding him with her love, he had retained in his
soul the power to will to commit it. That he had been given an opportunity to sin was immaterial. What was
material was that he had been capable of sinning.
Artois saw his lie. And he stood there silent, rebuked, waiting for the voice to speak again. But it did not
speak. And he felt as if Hermione were silently demanding that he should sound the deeper depths of truth, he
who had always proclaimed to her his love of truth.
"Perhapsyes, it would have been the same," he said. "Butbut" His intention was to say, "But we
should not have known it." He checked himself. Even as they formed themselves in his mind the words
seemed bending like some wretched, flabby reed.
"It would have been the same. But that makes no difference in my conduct. I was weak and called to you.
You were strong and came to me. How strong you were! How strong it was of you to come!"
As if for the first timeand indeed it was for the first timehe really and thoroughly comprehended her
selfsacrifice, the almost bizarre generosity of her implacably unselfish nature. He measured the force of her
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love and the greatness of her sacrifice, by the depth of her disillusion; and he began to wonder, almost as a
child wonders at things, how he had been able during all these years quite simply, with indeed the almost
incredible simplicity of man, never to be shared by any woman, to assume and to feel, when with Hermione,
that he was the dominant spirit of the two, that she was, very rightly and properly, and very happily for her,
leaning comfortably upon his strength. And in his wonder he knew that the real dominance strikes its roots in
the heart, not in the head.
"You were strong, then, and you were strong, you were wonderfully strong, whenafterwards. On Monte
Amatothat eveningyou were strong."
His mind went to that mountain summit. The eyes of his mind saw the evening calm on Etna, and
thensomething else, a small, fluttering fragment of white paper at his feet among the stones. And, as if her
mind read his, she spoke again, still in that low, cold, and inexorable voice.
"That piece of paper you foundwhat was it?"
"HermioneHermioneit was part of a letter of yours written in Africa, telling him that we were coming to
Sicily, the day we were coming."
"It was that!"
The voice had suddenly changed. It struggled with a sob. It sank away in a sob. The sinthat she could
speak of with a sound of calm. But all the woman in her was stricken by the thought of her happy letter
treated like that, hated, denied, destroyed, and thrown to the winds.
"My letter! My letter!"
"Hermione!"
His heart spoke in his voice, and he made a step forward in the darkness.
"Don't!"
The voice had changed again, had become sharp, almost cutting. Like the lash of a whip it fell upon him. And
he stopped at once. It seemed to him as if she had cried out, "If you dare to give me your pity I shall kill
you!"
And he felt as if just then, for such a reason, she would be capable of such an action.
"I will not" He almost faltered. "I am notcoming."
Never before had he been so completely dominated by any person, or by any fate, or by anything at all.
There was again a silence. Then he said:
"You are strong. I know you will be strong now. You can't go against your nature. I ought to have realized
that as I have not realized it. I ought to have trusted to your strength long ago."
If he had known how weak she felt while she listened to him, how her whole being was secretly entreating to
be supported, to be taken hold of tenderly, and guarded and cared for like a child! But he was a man. And at
one moment he understood her and at another he did not.
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"Gaspare and Iwe wished to spare you. And perhaps I wished to spare myself. I think I did. I am sure I did.
I am sure that was partly my reason. I was secretly ashamed of my cowardice, my weakness in Africa; and
when I knewno, when I guessed, for it was only thatwhat my appeal to you had causedall it had
caused"
He paused. He was thinking of Maurice's death, which must have been a murder, which he was certain had
been a murder.
"I hadn't"
But the compelling voice from the darkness interrupted him.
"All?" it said.
He hesitated. Had she read his mind again?
"All?"
"The misery," he answered, slowly. "The sorrow that has lain upon your life ever since."
"Did you mean that? Did you only mean that?"
"No."
"What did you mean?"
"I was thinking of his death," he replied.
He spoke very quietly. He was resolved to have no more subterfuges, whatever the coward or the tender
friend, orthe something else that was more than the tender friend within him might prompt him to try to
hide.
"I was thinking of his death."
"His death!"
Artois felt cold with apprehension, but he was determined to be sincere.
"I don't understand."
"Don t ask me any more, Hermione. I know nothing more."
"He was coming from the island. He slipped and fell into the sea."
"He fell into the sea."
There was a long silence between them, filled by the perpetual striving of the restless waves within the
chambers of the palace. Then she said:
"Her father was on the island that night?"
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"I think he was."
"Was it that? Was it that? Did Maurice make that atonement?"
Artois shuddered. Her voice was so strange, or sounded so strange in the dark. Did she wish to think, wish to
be sure that her husband had been murdered? He heard the faint rustle of her dress. She had moved. Was she
coming nearer? He heard her breathing, or thought he heard it. He longed to be certain. He longed to still the
perpetual cry of the baffled sea.
"Then he was braveat the last. I think he knewI am sure he knew when he went down to the sea. I am
sure he knewwhen he said good bye."
Her voice was nearer to him. And again it had changed, utterly changed. And in the different sounds of her
voice Artois seemed to see the different women who dwelt within her, to understand and to know them as he
had never understood and known them before. This woman was pleading, as women will plead for a man
they have once loved, so long as they have voices, so long as they have hearts.
"Then that last time he didn'tno, he didn't go toher."
The voice was almost a whisper, and Artois knew that she was speaking for herselfthat she was telling
herself that her husband's last action had beennot to creep to the woman, but to stand up and face the man.
"Was it her father?"
The voice was still almost a whisper.
"I think it was."
"Maurice paid thenhe paid!"
"Yes. I am sure he paid."
"Gaspare knew. Gaspare knewthat night. He was afraid. He knewbut he didn't tell me. He has never told
me."
"He loved his master."
"Gaspare loved Maurice more than he loved me."
By the way she said that Artois knew that Gaspare was forgiven. And a sort of passion of love for woman's
love welled up in his heart. At that moment he almost worshipped Hermione for being unable, even in that
moment, not to love Gaspare because Gaspare had loved the dead man more than he loved her.
"But Gaspare loves you," he said.
"I don't believe in love. I don't want love any more."
Again the voice was transformed. It had become hollow and weary, without resonance, like the voice of some
one very old. And Artois thought of Virgil's Grotto, of all they had said there, and of how the rock above
them had broken into deep and sinister murmurings, as if to warn them, or rebuke.
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And now, too, there were murmurings about them, but below them from the sea.
"Hermione, we must speak only the truth tonight."
"I am telling you the truth. You chose to follow me. You chose to hunt meto hunt me when you knew it
was necessary to me to be alone. It was brutal to do it. It was brutal. I had earned the right at least to one
thing: I had earned the right to be alone. But you didn't care. You wouldn't respect my right. You hunted me
as you might have hunted an animal. I tried to escape. But you saw me coming, and you chased me, and you
caught me. I can't get away. You have driven me in here. And I can't get away from you. You won't even let
me be alone."
"I dare not let you be alone tonight."
"Why not? What are you afraid of? What does it matter to you where I go or what I do? Don't say it matters!
Don't dare say that!"
Her voice was fierce now.
"It doesn't matter to anybody, except perhaps a little to Vere and a very little to Gaspare. It never has really
mattered to anybody. I thought it did once to some one. I thought I knew it did. But I was wrong. It didn't. It
never mattered."
As she spoke an immense, a terrific feeling of desolation poured over her, as if from above, coming down
upon her in the dark. It was like a flood that stiffened into ice upon her, making her body and her soul numb
for a moment.
"I've never mattered to any one."
She muttered the words to herself. As she did so Artois seemed again to be looking into the magic mirror of
the fattura della morte, to see the pale man, across whose face the shadow of a palmleaf shifted, turning on
his bed towards a woman who stood by an open door.
"You have always mattered to me," he said.
As he spoke there was in his voice that peculiar ring of utter sincerity which can no more be simulated, or
mistaken, than the ringing music of sterling gold. But perhaps she was not in a condition to hear rightly, or
perhaps something within her chose to deny, had a lust for denial because denial hurt her.
"To you least of all," she said. "Only yourself has ever really mattered to you."
In a sentence she summed up the long catalogue that had been given to him by her silence.
His whole body felt as if it reddened. His skin tingled with a sort of physical anger. His mature pride that had
grown always, as a strong man's natural pride does grow with the passing of the years, seemed to him
instinctively to rush forward to return the blow that had been dealt it.
"That is not quite true," he said.
"It is true. I have always had copper and I have always wanted gold," she answered.
He controlled himself, to prove to himself that she lied, that he was not the eternal egoist she dubbed him.
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Sometimes he had been genuinely unselfish, sometimesnot often, perhaps, but sometimeshe had really
sunk himself in her. She was not being quite just. But how could she be quite just tonight? An almost
reckless feeling overtook him, a desire to conquer at all costs in this struggle; to win her back, whether
against her will or not, to her old self; to eliminate the shocking impression made upon her soul by the
discovery of that day, to wipe it out utterly, to replace it with another; to revive within her that beautiful
enthusiasm which had been as a light always shining for her and from her upon people and events and life; to
make her understand, to prove to her that, after all allowance has been made for uncertainties and
contradictions of fate, for the ironies, the paradoxes, the cruelties, the tragedies, and the despairs of existence,
the great, broad fact emerges, that what the human being gives, in the long run the human being generally
gets, and that she who persistently gives gold will surely at last receive it.
The thought of a lost Hermione struck to his heart a greater fear than had already that night the thought of a
dead Hermione. And if she was changed she was lost.
The real, the beautiful Hermionehe must seize her, grip her, hold her fast before it was too late.
"Hermione," he said, "I think you saved me from death; I am sure you did. Did you save me only to hate
me?"
She made no reply.
"Do you remember that evening when you came into my room at Kairouan all covered with dust from your
journey across the plains? I do. I remember it as if it had happened an hour ago instead of nearly seventeen
years. I remember the strange feeling I had when I turned my head and saw you, a feeling that you and Africa
would fight for me and that you would conquer. It had seemed to me that Africa meant to have me and would
have me. Unless you came I felt certain of that. And I had thought about it all as I lay there in the stifling
heat, till I almost felt the feverish earth enclosing me. I had loved Africa, but Africa seemed to me terrible
then. I thought of only Arabs, always Arabs, walking above me on the surface of the ground when I was
buried. And the thought made me shudder with horror. As if it could have mattered! I was absurd! But one is
often absurd when one is very ill. The child in one comes out then, I suppose. And I had wondered how I
had wondered!whether there was any chance of your coming. I hadn't actually asked you to come. I hadn't
dared to do that. But it was the same thing almost. I had let you knowI had let you know. And I saw you
come into my room all covered with dust. You had come so quicklyat once. Perhapsperhaps sometimes
you have thought I had forgotten that evening. I may be an egoist. I expect most men are egoists. And
perhaps I am the egoist you say I am. Often one doesn't know what one is. But I have never forgotten that
day, and that you were covered with dust. It was thatthe dustwhich seemed to make me realize that you
had not lost a moment as to whether you would come or not. You looked as ifalmost as if you had run all
the way to be in time to save my lifemy wretched life. And you saved it. Did you save me to hate me?"
He waited for her to speak. But still she was silent. He heard no sound of her at all, and for a moment he
almost wondered whether she had discovered that the chamber had some second outlet, whether she had not
escaped while he had been speaking. But he looked round and he saw only dense darkness. She must be there
still, close to him, hearing everything he said, whether against her will or with it. He was being perfectly
sincere, and he was feeling very deeply, with intensity. But out of his natural reserve now rose a fearthe
fear that perhaps his voice, his speech, did not convey his sincerity to her. If she should mistake him! If she
should fancy he was trying to play upon her emotions in order to win her away from some desperate resolve.
He longed to make her see what he was feeling, feel what he was feeling, be him and herself for one moment.
And now the darkness began to distract him. He wanted light. He wanted to see Hermione, to see which of
the women in her faced him, which was listening to him.
"Hermione," he said, "I want youI wantit's hateful speaking like this, always in the darkness. Don't
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make me feel all the time that I am holding you a prisoner. No, I can'tI won't bear that any more."
He moved suddenly from the doorway back into the room behind him, in which there was a very little, very
faint light. There he waited.
Almost immediately the tall shadow which had disappeared into the darkness emerged from it, passed before
him, and went into the central chamber of the palace. He followed it, and found Hermione standing by the
great doorway that overlooked the sea. Hermione she was, no longer a shadow, but the definite darkness of a
human form relieved against the clear but now moonless night. She was waiting. Surely she was waiting for
him. She might have escaped, but she stayed. She was willing, then, to hear what he had to say, all he had to
say.
He stood still at a little distance from her. But in this hall the sound of the sea which came from the chamber
on the left was much more distinct and disturbing than in the chamber where she had hidden. And he came
nearer to her, till he was very near, almost close to her.
"If you hated me foronce, when we were standing on the terrace, you said, 'Take careor I shall hate you
for keeping me in the dark.' If you hated me because of what I have done, with Gaspare, Hermione, I could
bear it. I could bear it, because I think it would pass away. We did keep you in the dark. Now you know it.
But you know our reason, and that it was a reason of very deep affection. And I think you would forgive us, I
know you would forgive us in the end. But I understand it isn't only that"
Suddenly he thought of Vere, of that perhaps dawning folly, so utterly dead now, so utterly dead that he could
no longer tell whether it had ever even sluggishly stirred with life. He thought of Vere, and of the poems, and
of the secret of Peppina's revelation. And he wondered whether the record he seemed to read in the silence
had been a true record, or whether his imagination and his intellect of a psychologist, alert even in this hour
of intense emotion, had been deceiving him. Hermione had seemed to be speaking to him. But had he really
been only impersonating her? Had it been really himself that had spoken to himself? As this question arose in
his mind he longed to make Hermione speak. Then he could be sure of all. He must clear away all
misconception. Yet, even now, how could he speak of that episode with Vere?
"You say you have always wanted gold, and that you have never been given gold"
"Yes."
He saw the dark figure near him lift its head. And he felt that Hermione had come out of the darkness with
the intention of speaking the truth of what she felt. If she could not have spoken she would have stayed in the
inner chamber, or she would have escaped altogether from the palace when he moved from the doorway. He
was sure that only if she spoke would she change. In her silence there was damnation for them both. But she
meant to speak.
"I have been a fool. I see that now. But I think I have been suspecting it for some timenearly all this
summer."
He could hear by the sound of her voice that while she was speaking she was thinking deeply. Like him, she
was in search of absolute truth.
"It is only this summer that I have begun to see why peopleyouhave often smiled at my enthusiasms. No
wonder you smiled! No wonder you laughed at me secretly!"
Her voice was hard and bitter.
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"I never laughed at you, nevereither secretly or openly!" he said, with a heat almost of anger.
"Oh yes, you did, as a person who can see clearly might laugh at a shortsighted person tumbling over all the
little obstacles on a road. I was always tumbling over thingsalwaysand you must always have been
laughing. I have been a fool. Instead of growing up, my heart has remained a childtill now. That's what it
is. Children who have been kindly treated think the world is all kindness. Because my friends were good to
me, the world was good to me, I got into the habit of believing that I was lovable, and of loving in return.
And I trusted people. I always thought they were giving me what I was giving them. That has been my great
folly, the folly I'm punished for. I have been a credulous fool. I have thought that because I gave a thing with
all my heart it wasit must begiven back to me. And yet I was surprised I could scarcely believe
itwhenwhen"
He knew she was thinking of her beautiful wonder when Maurice had said he loved her.
"I could scarcely believe it! But, because I was a fool, I got to believe it, and I have believed it till
todayyou have stood by, and watched me believing it, and laughed at me for believing it till today."
"Hermione!"
"Yes, you mayn't have meant to laugh, but you must have laughed. Your mind, your intellect must have
laughed. Don't say they haven't. I wouldn't believe you. And I know your mindat any rate, I know that. Not
your heart! I shall never pretendI shall never think again for a moment that I know anythinganything at
allabout a man's heart. But I do know something about your mind. And I know the irony in it. What a
subject I have presented to you all these years for the exercise of your ironic faculty! You ought to thank me!
You ought to go on your knees and thank me and bless me for that!"
"Hermione!"
"Just now you talked of my coming into your room in Kairouan all covered with dust. You asked me if I
remembered it. Yes, I do. And I remember something you don'tprobably you don'tremember. There was
no lookingglass in your room."
She stopped.
"No lookingglass!" he repeated, wondering.
"No, there was no lookingglass. And I remember when I came in I saw there wasn't, and I was glad.
Because I couldn't look at myself and see how dreadful and dishevelled and hideous I washow dirty even I
was. My impulse was to go to a glass. And then I was glad I couldn't. And I looked at your face. And I
thought 'he doesn't care. He loves me, all dusty and hideous and horrid, as I am.' And then I didn't care either.
I said to myself, 'I look an object, and I don't mind a bit, because I see in his face that he loves me for myself,
because he sees my heart, and' "
And suddenly in her voice there was a sharp, hissing catch, and she stopped short. For a full minute she was
silent. And Artois did not speak. Nor did he move.
"I felt then, perhaps for the first time, 'the outside doesn't matter to real people.' I felt that. I felt, 'I'm real, and
he is real, and and Maurice is real. And though it is splendid to be beautiful, and beauty means so much,
yet it doesn't mean so much as I used to think. Real people get beyond it. And when once they have got
beyond it then life begins.' I remember thinking that, feeling that, andjust for a minute loving my own
ugliness. And then, suddenly, I wished there was a lookingglass in the room that I might stand before it and
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see what an object I was, and then look into your face and see that it didn't matter. And I even triumphed in
my ugliness. 'I have a husband who doesn't mind,' I thought. 'And I have a friend who doesn't mind. They
love me, both of them, whatever I look like. It's methe woman inside they love, because they know I
care, and how I care for them.' And that thought made me feel as if I could do anything for Maurice and
anything for you; heroic things, or small, dreadful, necessary things; as if I could be the servant of, or
sacrifice my life easily for, those who loved me so splendidly, who knew how to love so splendidly. And I
was happy then even in sacrificing my happiness with Maurice. And I thanked God then for not having given
me beauty.
"And I was a fool. But I didn't find it out. And so I revelled in selfsacrifice. You don't know, you could
never understand, how I enjoyed doing the most menial things for you in your illness. Often you thanked me,
and often you seemed ashamed that I should do such things. And the doctorthat little
Frenchmanapologized to me. And you both thought that doing so much in the frightful heat would make
me ill. And I blessed the heat and the flies and everything that made what I did for you more difficult to do.
Because the doing of what was more difficult, more trying, more fatiguing needed more love. And my
gratitude to you for your loving friendship, and for needing me more than any one else, wanted to be tried to
the uttermost. And I thought, too, 'When I go back to Maurice I shall be worth a little more, I shall be a little
bit finer, and he'll feel it. He'll understand exactly what it was to me to leave him so soon, to leaveto leave
what I thought of then as my Garden of Paradise. And he'll love me more because I had the courage to leave
it to try and save my friend. He'll realizehe'll realize' But men don't. They don't want to. Or they can't.
I'm sureI'm positive now that men think less of women who are ready to sacrifice themselves than of
women who wish to make slaves of them. I see that now. It's the selfish women they admire, the women who
take their own way and insist on having all they want, not the women who love to serve themnot slavishly,
but out of love. A selfish woman they can understand; but a woman who gives up something very precious to
her they don't understand. Maurice never understood my action in going to Africa. And youI don't believe
you ever understood it. You must have wondered at my coming as much as he did at my going. You were
glad I came at the moment. Oh yes, you were glad. I know that. But afterwards you must have wondered, you
did wonder. You thought it Quixotic, odd. You said to yourself, 'It was just like Hermione. How could she do
it? How could she come to me if she really loved her husband?' And very likely my coming made you doubt
my really loving Maurice. I am almost sure it did. I don't believe all these years you have ever understood
what I felt about him, what his death meant to me, what life meant to me afterwards. I toldI tried to tell
you in the cavethat day. But I don't think you really understood at all. And hehe didn't understand my
love for him. But I suppose he didn't even want to. When I went away he simply forgot all about me. That
was it. I wasn't there, and he forgot. I wasn't there, and another woman was thereand that was enough for
him. And I dare saynowit is enough for most men, perhaps for every man. And then I'd made another
mistake. I was always making mistakes when my heart led me. And I'd made a mistake in thinking that real
people get beyond looks, the outsideand that then life begins. They don'tat least real men don't. A
woman may spend her heart's blood for a man through years, and for youthful charm and a face that is pretty,
for the mere look in a pair of eyes or the curve of a mouth, he'll almost forget that she's alive, even when she's
there before him. He'll take the other woman's part against her instinctively, whichever is in the right. If both
women do exactly the same thing a man will find that the pretty woman has performed a miracle and the ugly
woman made some preposterous mistake. That is how men are. That is how you are, I suppose, and that was
Maurice, too. He forgot me for a peasant. Butshe must have been pretty once. And I was always ugly!"
"Delarey loved you," Artois said, suddenly, interrupting her in a strong, deep voice, a voice that rang with
true conviction.
"He never loved me. Perhaps he thought he did. He must have thought so. And that first daywhen we were
coming up the mountainside"
She stopped. She was seized; she was held fast in the grip of a memory so intense, so poignant, that she
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made, she could make, no effort to release herself. She heard the drowsy wail of the Ceramella dropping
down the mountainside in the radiant heat of noon. She felt Maurice's warm hand. She remembered her
words about the woman's need to love"I wanted, I needed to lovedo men ever feel that? Women do
often, nearly always, I think." The Pastoraleit sounded in her ears. Or was it the sea that sounded, the sea
in the abandoned chambers of the Palace of the Spirits? She listened. No, it was the Pastorale, that antique,
simple, holy tune, that for her must always be connected with the thought of love, man's love for woman, and
the Bambino's love for all the creatures of God. It flooded her heart, and beneath it sank down, like a
drowning thing, for a moment the frightful bitterness that was alive in her heart tonight.
"Delarey loved you," Artois repeated. "He loved you on the first day in Sicily, and he loved you on the last."
"Andand the days between?"
Her voice spoke falteringly. In her voice there was a sound of pleading that struck into the very depths of his
heart. The real Hermione was in that sound, the loving woman who needed love, who deserved a love as deep
as that which she had given, as that which she surely still had to give.
"He loved you always, but he loved you in his way."
"In his way!" she repeated, with a sort of infinite, hopeless sadness.
"Yes, Hermione, in his way. Oh, we all have our ways, all our different ways of loving. But I don't believe a
human being ever existed who had no way at all. Delarey's way was different from your way, so different
that, now you know the truth of him, perhaps you can't believe he ever loved you. But he did. He was young,
and he was hotbloodedhe was really of the South. And the sun got hold of him. And he betrayed you. But
he repented. That last day he was stricken, not by physical fear, but by a tremendous shame at what he had
done to you, and perhaps, also, by fear lest you should ever know it. I sat with him by the wall, and I felt
without at all fully understanding it the drama in his soul. But now I understand it. I'm sure I understand it.
And I think the depth of a shame is very often the exact measure of the depth of a love. Perhaps, indeed, there
is no more exact measure."
Again he thought of the episode with Vere, and of his determination always from henceforth to be absolutely
sincere with himself and with those whom he really loved.
"I am sure there is no more exact measure. Hermione, it is very difficult, I think, to realize what any human
being is, to judge any one quite accurately. Some judge a nature by the distance it can sink, others by the
distance it can rise. Which do you do? Do you judge Delarey by his act of faithlessness? And, if you do, how
would you judge me?"
"You!"
There was a sound of wonder in her voice.
"Yes. You say I am an egoist. And this that I am saying will seem to you egoism. It is egoism, I suppose. But
I want to knowI must know. How would you judge me? How do you judge me?"
She was silent.
"How are you judging me at this moment? Aren't you judging me by the distance I fall, the distance, perhaps,
you think I have fallen?"
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He spoke slowly. He was delaying. For all the time he spoke he was secretly battling with his prideand his
pride was a strong fighter. But tonight his passion for sincerity, his instinct that for Hermione and for
him, toosalvation lay in their perfect, even in their cruel sincerity to themselves and to each other, was a
strong fighter also. In it his pride met an antagonist that was worthy of it. And he went on:
"Are you judging me by this summer?"
He paused.
"Go on," she said.
He could not tell by her voice what she was feeling, thinking. Expression seemed to be withdrawn from it,
perhaps deliberately.
"This summer something has come between us, a cloud has come between us. I scarcely know when I first
noticed it, when it came. But I have felt it, and you have felt it."
"Yes."
"It might, perhaps, have arisen from the fact of my suspicion who Ruffo was, a suspicion that lately became a
certainty. My suspicion, and latterly my knowledge, no doubt changed my mannermade me anxious,
perhaps, uneasy, made me watchful, made me often seem very strange to you. That alone might have caused
a difference in our relations. But I think there was something else."
"Yes, there was something else."
"And I think, I feel sure now, that it was something to do with Vere. I was, I became deeply interested in
Vereinterested in a new way. She was growing up. She was passing from childhood into girlhood. She was
developing swiftly. That development fascinated me. Of course I had always been very fond of Vere. But this
summer she meant more to me than she had meant. One dayit was the day I came back to the island after
my visit to Paris"
"Yes?"
He looked at her, trying to read what she was feeling in her face, but it was too dark for him to discern it.
"Vere made a confession to me. She told me she was working secretly, that she was writing poems. I asked
her to show them to me. She did so. I found some talent in them, enough for me to feel justified in telling her
to continue. Once, Hermione, you consulted me. Then my advice was different."
"I know."
"The remembrance of this, and Vere's knowledge that you had suffered in not succeeding with work,
prompted us to keep the matter of her attempts to write a secret for the time. It seems a trifleall this, but
looking back now I feel that we were quite wrong in not telling you."
"I found it out."
"You knew?"
"I went to Vere's room. The poems were on the table with your corrections. I read them."
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"We ought to have told you."
"I oughtn't to have read them, but I did."
"A mother has the right"
"Not a mother who has resigned her right to question her child. I had said to Vere, 'Keep your secrets.' So I
had no right, and I did wrong in reading them."
He felt that she was instinctively trying to match his sincerity with hers, and that fact helped him to continue.
"The knowledge of this budding talent of Vere's made me take a new interest in her, made me wish very
muchat least I thought, I believed it was that, Hermionethat no disturbing influence should come into
her life. Isidoro Panacci camethrough me. Peppina came through you. Hermione, on the night when
Vere and I went out alone together in the boat Vere learned the truth about Peppina and the life behind the
shutter."
"I knew that, too."
"You knew it?"
"Yes. I suspected something. You led me to suspect it."
"I remember"
"I questioned Peppina. I made her tell me."
He said nothing for a moment. Then, with an effort, he said:
"You knew we had kept those two things from you, Vere and I?"
"Vere and youyes."
Now he understood almost all, or quite all, that had been strange to him in her recent conduct.
"Sometimeshave you almost hated us for keeping those two secrets?"
"I don't think I have ever hated Vere."
"But me?"
"Do you know why I told Vere she might read your books?"
"Why?"
"Because I thought they might make her feel differently towards you."
"Lessless kindly?"
"Yes."
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She spoke very quietly, but he felthe did not know whythat it had cost her very much to say what she
had said.
"You wanted Vere to think badly of me!"
He was honoring her for the moral courage which enabled her to tell him. Yet he felt as if she had struck him.
And so absolutely was he accustomed to delicate tenderness, and the most thoughtful, anxious kindness from
her, that he suffered acutely and from a double distress. The thing itself was cruel and hurt him. But that
Hermione had done it hurt him far more. He could hardly believe it. That by any road she could travel to such
an action seemed incredible to him. He stood, realizing it. And the bitter sharpness of his suffering made him
understand something. In all its fulness he understood what Hermione's tenderness had been in his life for
many, many years. And thenhis mind seemed to take another step. "Why does a woman do such a thing as
this?" he asked himself. "Why does such a woman as Hermione do such a thing?" And he knew what her
suffering must have been, and how her heart must have been stormtossed, before it was driven to succumb
to such an impulse.
And he came quite close to her. And he felt a strange, sudden nearness to her that was no nearness of body.
"Hermione," he said, "I could never judge your character by that action. Don'tdon't judge mine by any
cruelty of which I have been guilty during this summer. You have told me something that it was very difficult
for you to tell. I have something to tell you. And it isit is not easy to tell."
"Tell it me."
He looked at her. He was now quite close to her, and could see the outline of her face but not the expression
in her eyes.
"My interest in Vere increased. I believed it to be an interest aroused in me by the discovery of this talent in
her. I believed the new fondness I felt for her to be a very natural fondness, caused by her charming
confidence in me. Our little secret drew us together. And I understand now, Hermione, that it seemed to set
you apart from us. I believe I understand all now, all the circumstances that have seemed strange to me this
summer. I wanted Vere's talent to develop naturally, unhindered, unaffectedI thought it was merely
thatand I became exigent, I even became jealous of all outside interference. On the night we dined at
Frisio's I felt strongly irritated at Panacci's interest in Vere. And there were other moments"
He looked at her again. She stood perfectly still. Her head was slightly bent and she seemed to be looking at
the ground.
"And then came the night of the Carmine. Hermione, after you and Vere had gone to bed Panacci and I had a
quarrel. He attacked me violently. He told mehe told me that I was in love with Vere, and that you, and
eveneven that Gaspare knew it. At the moment I think I laughed at him. I thought his accusation
ridiculous. But when he was goneand afterwardsI examined myself. I tried to know myself. I spent
hours in selfexamination, cruel selfexamination. I did not spare myself. Believe that, Hermione! Believe
that!"
"I do believe it."
"And at the end I knew that it was not true. I was not, I had never been in love with Vere. When I thought of
Vere and myself in such a relation my spirit recoiled. Such a thing seemed to me monstrous. But though I
knew that it was not true, I knew also that I had been jealous of Vere, unjust to others because of Vere. I had
been, perhaps, foolish, undignified. Perhapsperhapsfor how can we be quite sure of ourselves.
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Hermione? How can we be certain of our own natures, our own conduct?perhaps, if Panacci's coarse
brutality had not waked up my whole being, I might have drifted on towards an affection for Vere that, in a
man of my age, would have been absurd, have made me ridiculous in the eyes of others. I scarcely think so.
But I want to be sincere. I would rather exaggerate than minimize my own shortcomings to you tonight. I
scarcely believe it ever could have been so. But Panacci said it was so. And youI don't know what you
have thought"
"What I have thought doesn't matter now."
She spoke very quietly, but not with bitterness. She knew Artois. And even in that moment of emotion, and
of a sort of strange exhaustion following upon emotion, she knew, as no other living person could have
known, the effort it must have cost him to speak as he had just spoken.
"That, at any rate, is the exact truth."
"I know it is."
"I have thought myself clearsighted, Hermione. I have studied others. Just lately I have been forced to study
myself. It is as ifit seems to me as if events had conspired against my own crass ignorance of myself, as if
a resolve had been come to by the power that directs our destinies that I should know myself. I wish I dared
to tell you more. I wish tonight I dared to tell you all that I have come to know. But I dare not, I dare not.
You would not believe me. I could not even expect you to believe me."
He stopped. Perhaps he hoped for a word that would deny his last observation. But it did not come to him.
And he hesitated for what seemed to him a very long time, almost an eternity. He was beset by indecision, by
an extraordinary deep modesty and consciousness of his own unworthiness that he had never before
experienced, and also by a new and acute consciousness of the splendor of Hermione's nature, of the power of
her heart, of the faithfulness and nobility of her temperament.
"All I can say, Hermione"he at length went on speaking, and in his voice sounded that strange modesty, a
modesty that made his voice seem to her almost like a voice of hesitating youth"all that I dare to say
tonight is this. I told you just now that we all have our different ways of loving. You have loved in your
way. You have loved Delarey as your husband. And you have loved me as your friend. Delarey, as your
husband, betrayed you. Only today you know it. I, as your friendhave I ever betrayed you? Do you
believeeven now when you are ready to believe very much of evildo you really believe that as a friend I
could ever betray you?"
He moved, stood in front of her, lifted his hands and laid them on her shoulders.
"Do you believe that?"
"No."
"You have loved us in your way. He is dead. But I am here to love you always in my way. Perhaps my way
seems to you such a poor wayit must, it mustthat it is hardly worth anything at all. But perhaps, now
that I know so much of myselfand of you"there was a slight break in his voice"and of you, I shall be
able to find a different, a better way. I don't know. Tonight I doubt myself. I feel as if I were so unworthy.
But I mayI may be able to find a better way of loving you."
Quite unconsciously his two hands, which still rested upon her shoulders, began to lean heavily upon them, to
press them, to grip them till she suffered a physical discomfort that almost amounted to pain.
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"I shall seek a better wayI shall seek it. And the only thing I ask you tonight isthat you will not forbid
me to seek it."
The pressure of his hands upon her shoulders was becoming almost unbearable. But she bore it. She bore it
for she loved it. Perhaps that night no words could have quite convinced her of his desperate honesty of soul
in that moment, perhaps no sound of his voice could have quite convinced her. But the unconsciously cruel
pressure of his hands upon her convinced her absolutely. She felt as if it was his soulthe truth of his
soulwhich was grasping herwhich was closing upon her. And she felt that only a thing that needed
could grasp, could close like that.
And even in the midst of her chaos of misery and doubt she felt, she knew, that it was herself that was
needed.
"I will not forbid you to seek it," she said.
He sighed deeply. His hands dropped down from her. They stood for a moment quite still. Then he said, in a
low voice:
"You took the fattura della morte?"
"Yes," she answered. "It was inin her room at Mergellina today."
"Have you got it still?"
"Yes."
She held out her right hand. He took the deathcharm from her.
"She made itthe woman who wronged you made it to bring death into the Casa del Mare."
"Not to me?"
"No, to Peppina. Has it not brought another death? Or, at least, does it not typify another death tonight, the
death of a great lie? I think it does. I look upon it as a symbol. Butbut?"
He looked at her. He was at the huge doorway of the palace. The sea murmured below him. Hermione
understood and bent her head.
Then Artois threw the deathcharm far away into the sea.
"Let me take you to the boat. Let me take you back to the island."
She did not answer him. But when he moved she followed him, till they came to the rocks and saw floating
on the dim water the two white boats.
"Gaspare!"
"Vengo!"
That crywhat did it recall to Hermione? Gaspare's cry from the inlet beneath the Isle of the Sirens when he
was bringing the body of Maurice from the sea. As she had trembled then, she began to tremble now. She felt
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exhausted, that she could bear no more, that she must rest, be guarded, cared for, protected, loved. The boat
touched shore. Gaspare leaped out. He cast an eager, fiery look of scrutiny on his Padrona. She returned it.
Then, suddenly, he seized her hand, bent down and kissed it.
She trembled more. He lifted his head, stared at her again. Then he took her up in his strong arms, as if she
were a child, and carried her gently and carefully to the stern of the boat.
"Lei si riposi!" he whispered, as he set her down.
She shut her eyes, leaning back against the seat. She heard Artois get in, the boat pushed off, the splash of the
oars. But she did not open her eyes, until presently an instinct told her there was something she must see.
Then she looked.
The boat was passing under the blessing hand of San Francesco, under the light of the Saint, which was
burning calmly and brightly.
Hermione moved. She bent down to the water, the acqua benedetta. She sprinkled it over the boat and made
the sign of the cross. When they reached the island Artois got out. As she came on shore he said to her:
"Hermione, I left thethe two children together in the garden. Do you thinkwill you go to them for a
moment? Or"
"I will go," she answered.
She was no longer trembling. She followed him up the steps, walking slowly but firmly. They came to the
house door. Gaspare had kept close behind them. At the door Artois stopped. He felt as if tonight he ought
to go no farther.
Hermione looked at him and passed into the house. Gaspare, seeing that Artois did not follow her, hesitated,
but Artois said to him:
"Go, Gaspare, go with your Padrona."
Then Gaspare went in, down the passage, and out to the terrace.
Hermione was standing there.
"Do you think they are in the garden, Gaspare?" she said.
"Si, Signora. Listen! I can hear them!"
He held up his hand. Not far away there was a sound of voices speaking together.
"Shall I go and tell them, Signora?"
After a moment Hermione said:
"Yes, Gasparego and tell them."
He went away, and she waited, leaning on the balustrade and looking down to the dim sea, from which only
the night before Ruffo's voice had floated up to her, singing the song of Mergellina. Only the night before!
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And it seemed to her centuries ago.
"Madre!"
Vere spoke to her. Vere was beside her. But she gazed beyond her child to Ruffo, who stood with his cap in
his hand and his eyes, full of gentleness, looking at her for recognition.
"Ruffo!" she said.
Vere moved to let Ruffo pass. He came up and stood before Hermione.
"Ruffo!" she said again.
It seemed that she was going to say more. They waited for her to say more. But she did not speak. She stood
quite still for a moment looking at the boy. Then she put one hand on his shoulder, bent down and touched
his forehead with her lips.
And in that kiss the dead man was forgiven.
EPILOGUE
On a radiant day of September in the following year, from the little harbor of Mergellina a white boat with a
green line put off. It was rowed by Gaspare, who wore his festa suit, and it contained two people, a man and a
women, who had that morning been quietly married.
Another boat preceded theirs, going towards the island, but it was so far ahead of them that they could only
see it as a moving dot upon the shining sea, when they rounded the breakwater and set their course for the
point of land where lies the Antico Giuseppone.
Gaspare rowed standing up, with his back towards Hermione and Artois and his great eyes staring steadily
out to sea. He plied the oars mechanically. During the first few minutes of the voyage to the island his mind
was far away. He was a boy in Sicily once more, waiting proudly upon his first, and indeed his only, Padrona
in the Casa del Prete on Monte Amato. Then she was quite alone. He could see her sitting at evening upon the
terrace with a book in her lap, gazing out across the ravine and the olivecovered mountain slopes to the
waters that kissed the shore of the Sirens' Isle. He could see her, when night fell, going slowly up the steps
into the lighted cottage, and turning on its threshold to wish him "Buon riposo."
Then there was an intervaland she came again. He was waiting at the station of Cattaro. Outside stood the
little train of donkeys, decorated with flowers under his careful supervision. Upon Monte Amato, in the Casa
del Prete, everything was in readiness for the arrival of the Padronaand the Padrone. For this time his
Padrona was not to be alone. And the train came in, thundering along by the sea, and he saw a brown eager
face looking out of a windowa face which at once had seemed familiar to him almost as if he had always
known it in Sicily.
And the new and wonderful period of his boy's life began.
But it passed, and in the early morning he stood in the corner of the Campo Santo where Protestants were
buried, and threw flowers from his father's terreno into an open grave.
And once more his Padrona was alone.
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Far away from Sicily, from his "Paese," among the great woods of the Abetone he received for the first time
into his untutored arms his Padroncina. His Padrone was gone from him forever. But once more, as he would
have expressed it to a Sicilian comrade, they were "in three." And still another period began.
And now that period was ended.
As Gaspare rowed slowly on towards the island, in his simple and yet shrewd way he was pondering on life,
on its irresistible movement, on its changes, its alternations of grief and joy, loneliness and companionship.
He was silently reviewing the combined fates of his Padrona and himself.
Behind him for a long while there was silence. But when the boat was abreast of the sloping gardens of
Posilipo Artois spoke at last.
"Hermione!" he said.
"Yes," she answered.
"Do you remember that evening when I met you on the sea?"
"After I had been to Frisio's? Yes I remember it."
"You had been reading what I wrote in the wonderful book."
"And I was wondering why you had written it."
"I had no special reason. I thought of that saying. I had to write something, so I wrote that. I wonderI
wonder now why long ago my conscience did not tell me plainly something. I wonder it did not tell me
plainly what you were in my life, all you were."
"Have Ihave I really been much?"
"I never knew how much till I thought of you permanently changed towards me, till I thought of you living,
but with your affection permanently withdrawn from me. That nightyou know?"
"Yes, I know."
"At first I was not sureI was afraid for a moment about you. Vere and I were afraid, when your room was
dark and we heard nothing. But even then I did not fully understand how much I need you. I only understood
that in the Palace of the Spirits, whenwhen you hated me"
"I don't think I ever hated you."
"Hatred, you know, is the other side of love."
"Then perhaps I did. YesI did."
"How long my conscience was inactive, was useless to me! It needed a lesson, a terrible lesson. It needed a
cruel blow to rouse it."
"And mine!" she answered, in a low voice.
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"We shall make many mistakes, both of us," he said. "But I think, after that night, we can never for very long
misunderstand each other. For that night we were sincere."
"Let us always be sincere."
"Sincerity is the rock on which one should build the house of life."
"Let usyou and Ilet us build upon it our palace of the spirits."
Then they were silent again. They were silent until the boat passed the point, until in the distance the island
appeared, even until the prow of the boat grated against the rock beneath the window of the Casa del Mare.
As Hermione got out Gaspare bent to kiss her hand.
"Benedicite!" he murmured.
And, as she pressed his hand with both of hers, she answered:
"Benedicite!"
That night, not very late, but when darkness had fallen over the sea, Hermione said to Vere:
"I am going out for a little, Vere."
"Yes, Madre."
The child put her arms round her mother and kissed her. Hermione tenderly returned the kiss, looked at
Artois, and went out.
She made her way to the brow of the island, and stood still for a while, drinking in the soft wind that blew to
her from Ischia. Then she descended to the bridge and looked down into the Pool of San Francesco.
The Saint's light was burning steadily. She watched it for a moment, and while she watched it she presently
heard beneath her a boy's voice singing softly the song of Mergellina:
"Oh, dolce luna bianca de l' estate
Mi fugge il sonno accanto a la marina;
Mi destan le dolcissime serate,
Gli occhi di Rosa e il mar di Mergellina."
The voice died away. There was a moment of silence.
She clasped the rail with her hand; she leaned down over the Pool.
"Buona notte, Ruffino!" she said softly.
And the voice from the sea answered her:
"Buona notte, Signora. Buona notte e buon riposo."
A Spirit in Prison
A Spirit in Prison 406
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