Norman Douglas - "South Wind"

Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel - "Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words"

George MacDonald - "Thomas Wingfold, Curate V3"

St George Stock - "A Little Book of Stoicism"

A Spirit in Prison

R >> Robert Hichens >> A Spirit in Prison




"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."

"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?"

Artois only said:

"Are you going to fish?"

"Emilio, I cannot fish to-night. 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 mind--or 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."

"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 re-read the letter. She wondered, perhaps more than Vere, why
there was no message for the child. The child--she was still calling
Vere that in her mind, even after the night conversation with Gaspare.
Two or three times she re-read 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 large-eyed 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:

"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 so--that 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 to-day 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 fore-ordained 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 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 writing-table 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 sun-rays 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 ice-creams, 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 passers-by
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 tree-shaded 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 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
over-charged 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.

"Yes--certainly. 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 Pool--who
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 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 onward--whither?

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 best--the 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 far-off 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.

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 hope--that 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 bathing-dress 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.

"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 to-day."

"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 bathing-dress, 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."

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