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A Spirit in Prison

R >> Robert Hichens >> A Spirit in Prison




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 sea-depths 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?"

"Yes. Are you from Naples?"

"I come from Mergellina, Signorina."

Vere looked at him half-doubtfully, 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 sun-patch 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."

"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."

"Ruffo--that'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 bit--but still--"

She waited to see the effect upon him. He looked at her steadily with
his long bright eyes.

"You are Sicilian, Signorina?"

"My great-grandmother was."

"Si?"

His voice sounded incredulous.

"Don't you believe me?" she cried, rather hotly.

"Ma si, Signorina! Only--that'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 step-father. He--Patrigno--he 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 much--it 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 here--just 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?"

There was a quick step on the stairs, and the girl ran in.

"One more packet of cigarettes--may 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 sixteen--just 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! Addi-io!
Addi-io!"

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 cigarette--a cigarette such as he had never seen--in 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!"

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 window-seat, 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.

"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 grayness--Life 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 athletic--he 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.

As Artois got out, the boat's prow was being held by the Sicilian,
Gaspare, now a man of thirty-five, but still young-looking. Many
Sicilians grow old quickly--hard 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 that--she 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 to-day 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.

"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."

Hermione smiled.

"My cigarettes! They're common property here," she said.

"That boy can't be a pure-bred Neapolitan, surely. And yet he speaks
the language. There's no mistaking the blow he gives to the last
syllable of a sentence."

"He's a Sicilian, Vere says."

"Pure bred?"

"I don't know."

"I fancy I must have run across him somewhere in or about Naples. It
is he who made Vere, as I told her, look so insolently young this
morning."

"Ah, you noticed! I, too, thought I had never seen her so full of the
inner spirit of youth--almost as he was in Sicily."

"Yes," Artois said, gravely. "In some things she is very much his
daughter."

"In some things only?" asked Hermione.

"Don't you think so? Don't you think she has much of you in her also?
I do."

"Has she? I don't know that I see it. I don't know that I want to see
it. I always look for him in Vere. You see, I dreamed of having a boy.
Vere is instead of the boy I dreamed of, the boy--who never came, who
will never come."

"My friend," said Artois, very seriously and gently, "are you still
allowing your mind to dwell upon that old imagination? And with Vere
before you, can you regard her merely as a 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 be--I don't know whether
it is; but I don't pretend to such strength. I don't believe it is
ever given to women. Perhaps even strength has its sex--I 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 years--they have made no difference?"

"Did you think they would? Did you think they had?"

"I hoped so. I thought--I 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 you--you 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 middle-aged woman--to 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 that--passionately. 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 that--I 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 to-day I--"

She got up suddenly from her chair, put her arms on the window-frame,
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
gray-and-white waters, partially muffled in clouds that almost
resembled mist, the mountains of Ischia were 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 down-stairs. 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 to-day, and notice if
this weather has any effect upon that amazing population. I wonder if
my young friend, Marchese Isidoro Panacci-- By-the-way, 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 it--Gaspare! Gaspare!"

"Signora!" cried a strong voice below.

"La piccola barca!"

"Va bene, Signora!"

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."

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