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"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. "Good-night. Good-night, Vere." "Good-night, Signora." The Marchesino bowed, with his hat in his hand.
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 to-night everything."
This fact had 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.
As the sailors rowed it out from the Pool the wind had gone down and the sails were useless he 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.
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 lemon-juice into it, holding the fruit lightly in his strong fingers, and watching the drops fall with a quiet attention. "Where have you been to-night?" The Marchesino looked up. "In the Piazza di Masaniello." "Where have you been?"
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 to-day, and it was a fiasco.
And if you will take my advice, Signora, you will go home, and give yourself no trouble at all about the young lady. Lord bless us! what though 'tis Lenten-tide? Young folks will be young, Signora Orsola. They'll come home safe enough. And maybe I might as well say nothing to the Signor Marchesino about your coming here, you know.
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. Vere moved impatiently. "Really!" she began. But she did not continue. The quivering voice began another verse.
Perhaps he thought you liked the Sicilians better than the Neapolitans. But anyhow Sicilian 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.
It was strange that to-night 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 you how she would hate you." But surely Vere and he understood each other very well.
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