The Call of the Blood

R >> Robert Smythe Hichens >> The Call of the Blood

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"Don't you think so?" Hermione said.

"I dare say," he answered. "But I dare say, I suppose--very few of us can
do that. We can't expect to be perfect, and other people oughtn't to
expect it of us."

His voice had changed. Before, it had been almost an accusing voice and
insincere. Now it was surely a voice that pleaded, and it was absolutely
sincere. Hermione remembered how in London long ago the humility of
Maurice had touched her. He had stood out from the mass of conceited men
because of his beauty and his simple readiness to sit at the feet of
others. And surely the simplicity, the humility, still persisted
beautifully in him.

"I don't think I should ever expect anything of you that you wouldn't
give me," she said to him. "Anything of loyalty, of straightness, or of
manhood. Often you seem to me a boy, and yet, I know, if a danger came to
me, or a trouble, I could lean on you and you would never fail me. That's
what a woman loves to feel when she has given herself to a man, that he
knows how to take care of her, and that he cares to take care of her."

Her body was touching his. He felt himself stiffen. The mental pain he
suffered under the lash of her words affected his body, and his knowledge
of the necessity to hide all that was in his mind caused his body to long
for isolation, to shrink from any contact with another.

"I hope," he said, trying to make his voice natural and simple----"I hope
you'll never be in trouble or in danger, Hermione."

"I don't think I could mind very much if you were there, if I could just
touch your hand."

"Here they come!" he said. "I hope Artois isn't very tired with the ride.
We ought to have had Sebastiano here to play the 'Pastorale' for him."

"Ah! Sebastiano!" said Hermione. "He's playing it for some one else in
the Lipari Islands. Poor Lucrezia! Maurice, I love Sicily and all things
Sicilian. You know how much! But--but I'm glad you've got some drops of
English blood in your veins. I'm glad you aren't all Sicilian."

"Come," he said. "Let us go to the arch and meet him."

XIX

"So this is your Garden of Paradise?" Artois said.

He got off his donkey slowly at the archway, and stood for a moment,
after shaking them both by the hand, looking at the narrow terrace,
bathed in sunshine despite the shelter of the awning, at the columns, at
the towering rocks which dominated the grove of oak-trees, and at the
low, white-walled cottage.

"The garden from which you came to save my life," he added.

He turned to Maurice.

"I am grateful and I am ashamed," he said. "I was not your friend,
monsieur, but you have treated me with more than friendship. I thank you
in words now, but my hope is that some day I shall be given the
opportunity to thank you with an act."

He held out his hand again to Maurice. There had been a certain formality
in his speech, but there was a warmth in his manner that was not formal.
As Maurice held his hand the eyes of the two men met, and each took swift
note of the change in the other.

Artois's appearance was softened by his illness. In health he looked
authoritative, leonine, very sure of himself, piercingly observant,
sometimes melancholy, but not anxious. His manner, never blustering or
offensive, was usually dominating, the manner of one who had the right to
rule in the things of the intellect. Now he seemed much gentler, less
intellectual, more emotional. One received, at a first meeting with him,
the sensation rather of coming into contact with a man of heart than
with a man of brains. Maurice felt the change at once, and was surprised
by it. Outwardly the novelist was greatly altered. His tall frame was
shrunken and slightly bent. The face was pale and drawn, the eyes were
sunken, the large-boned body was frightfully thin and looked uncertain
when it moved. As Maurice gazed he realized that this man had been to the
door of death, almost over the threshold of the door.

And Artois? He saw a change in the Mercury whom he had last seen at the
door of the London restaurant, a change that startled him.

"Come into our Garden of Paradise and rest," said Hermione. "Lean on my
arm, Emile."

"May I?" Artois asked of Maurice, with a faint smile that was almost
pathetic.

"Please do. You must be tired!"

Hermione and Artois walked slowly forward to the terrace, arm linked in
arm. Maurice was about to follow them when he felt a hand catch hold of
him, a hand that was hot and imperative.

"Gaspare! What is it?"

"Signorino, signorino, I must speak to you!"

Startled, Maurice looked into the boy's flushed face. The great eyes
searched him fiercely.

"Put the donkeys in the stable," Maurice said. "I'll come."

"Come behind the house, signorino. Ah, Madonna!"

The last exclamation was breathed out with an intensity that was like the
intensity of despair. The boy's look and manner were tragic.

"Gaspare," Maurice said, "what----?"

He saw Hermione turning towards him.

"I'll come in a minute, Gaspare."

"Madonna!" repeated the boy. "Madonna!"

He held up his hands and let them drop to his sides. Then he muttered
something--a long sentence--in dialect. His voice sounded like a
miserable old man's.

"Ah--ah!"

He called to the donkeys and drove them forward to the out-house. Maurice
followed.

What had happened? Gaspare had the manner, the look, of one confronted by
a terror from which there was no escape. His eyes had surely at the same
time rebuked and furiously pitied his master. What did they mean?

"This is our Garden of Paradise!" Hermione was saying as Maurice came up
to her and Artois. "Do you wonder that we love it?"

"I wonder that you left it." Artois replied.

He was sunk in a deep straw chair, a chaise longue piled up with
cushions, facing the great and radiant view. After he had spoken he
sighed.

"I don't think," he said, "that either of you really know that this is
Eden. That knowledge has been reserved for the interloper, for me."

Hermione sat down close to him. Maurice was standing by the wall,
listening furtively to the noises from the out-house, where Gaspare was
unsaddling the donkeys. Artois glanced at him, and was more sharply
conscious of change in him. To Artois this place, after the long journey,
which had sorely tried his feeble body, seemed an enchanted place of
peace, a veritable Elysian Field in which the saddest, the most driven
man must surely forget his pain and learn how to rest and to be joyful in
repose. But he felt that his host, the man who had been living in
paradise, who ought surely to have been learning its blessed lessons
through sunlit days and starry nights, was restless like a man in a city,
was anxious, was intensely ill at ease. Once, watching this man, Artois
had thought of the messenger, poised on winged feet, radiantly ready for
movement that would be exquisite because it would be obedient. This man
still looked ready for flight, but for a flight how different! As Artois
was thinking this Maurice moved.

"Excuse me just for an instant!" he said. "I want to speak to Gaspare."

He saw now that Gaspare was taking into the cottage the provisions that
had been carried up by the donkey from Marechiaro.

"I--I told him to do something for me in the village," he added, "and I
want just to know--"

He looked at them, almost defiantly, as if he challenged them not to
believe what he had said. Then, without finishing his sentence, he went
quickly into the cottage.

"You have chosen your garden well," Artois said to Hermione directly they
were alone. "No other sea has ever given to me such an impression of
tenderness and magical space as this; no other sea has surely ever had a
horizon-line so distant from those who look as this."

He went on talking about the beauty, leading her with him. He feared lest
she might begin to speak about her husband.

Meanwhile, Maurice had reached the mountain-side behind the house and was
waiting there for Gaspare. He heard the boy's voice in the kitchen
speaking to Lucrezia, angrily it seemed by the sound. Then the voice
ceased and Gaspare appeared for an instant at the kitchen door, making
violent motions with his arms towards the mountain. He disappeared. What
did he want? What did he mean? The gestures had been imperative. Maurice
looked round. A little way up the mountain there was a large, closed
building, like a barn, built of stones. It belonged to a contadino, but
Maurice had never seen it open, or seen any one going to or coming from
it. As he stared at it an idea occurred to him. Perhaps Gaspare meant him
to go and wait there, behind the barn, so that Lucrezia should not see or
hear their colloquy. He resolved to do this, and went swiftly up the
hill-side. When he was in the shadow of the building he waited. He did
not know what was the matter, what Gaspare wanted, but he realized that
something had occurred which had stirred the boy to the depths. This
something must have occurred while he was at Marechiaro. Before he had
time mentally to make a list of possible events in Marechiaro, Maurice
heard light feet running swiftly up the mountain, and Gaspare came round
the corner, still with the look of tragedy, a wild, almost terrible look
in his eyes.

"Signorino," he began at once, in a low voice that was full of the
pressure of an intense excitement. "Tell me! Where were you last night
when we were making the fireworks go off?"

Maurice felt the blood mount to his face.

"Close to where you left me," he answered.

"Oh, signore! Oh, signore!"

It was almost a cry. The sweat was pouring down the boy's face.

"Ma non e mia colpa! Non e mia colpa!" he exclaimed.

"What do you mean? What has happened, Gaspare?"

"I have seen Salvatore."

His voice was more quiet now. He fixed his eyes almost sternly on his
padrone, as if in the effort to read his very soul.

"Well? Well, Gaspare?"

Maurice was almost stammering now. He guessed--he knew what was coming.

"Salvatore came up to me just before I got to the village. I heard him
calling, 'Stop!' I stood still. We were on the path not far from the
fountain. There was a broken branch on the ground, a branch of olive.
Salvatore said: 'Suppose that is your padrone, that branch there!' and he
spat on it. He spat on it, signore, he spat--and he spat."

Maurice knew now.

"Go on!" he said.

And this time there was no uncertainty in his voice. Gaspare was
breathing hard. His breast rose and fell.

"I was going to strike him in the face, but he caught my hand, and
then--Signorino, signorino, what have you done?"

His voice rose. He began to look uncontrolled, distracted, wild, as if he
might do some frantic thing.

"Gaspare! Gaspare!"

Maurice had him by the arms.

"Why did you?" panted the boy. "Why did you?"

"Then Salvatore knows?"

Maurice saw that any denial was useless.

"He knows! He knows!"

If Maurice had not held Gaspare tightly the boy would have flung himself
down headlong on the ground, to burst into one of those storms of weeping
which swept upon him when he was fiercely wrought up. But Maurice would
not let him have this relief.

"Gaspare! Listen to me! What is he going to do? What is Salvatore going
to do?"

"Santa Madonna! Santa Madonna!"

The boy rocked himself to and fro. He began to invoke the Madonna and the
saints. He was beside himself, was almost like one mad.

"Gaspare--in the name of God----!"

"H'sh!"

Suddenly the boy kept still. His face changed, hardened. His body became
tense. With his hand still held up in a warning gesture, he crept to the
edge of the barn and looked round it.

"What is it?" Maurice whispered.

Gaspare stole back.

"It is only Lucrezia. She is spreading the linen. I thought----"

"What is Salvatore going to do?"

"Unless you go down to the sea to meet him this evening, signorino, he
is coming up here to-night to tell everything to the signora."

Maurice went white.

"I shall go," he said. "I shall go down to the sea."

"Madonna! Madonna!"

"He won't come now? He won't come this morning?"

Maurice spoke almost breathlessly, with his hands on the boy's hands
which streamed with sweat. Gaspare shook his head.

"I told him if he came up I would meet him in the path and kill him."

The boy had out a knife.

Maurice put his arm round Gaspare's shoulder. At that moment he really
loved the boy.

"Will he come?"

"Only if you do not go."

"I shall go."

"I will come with you, signorino."

"No. I must go alone."

"I will come with you!"

A dogged obstinacy hardened his whole face, made even his shining eyes
look cold, like stones.

"Gaspare, you are to stay with the signora. I may miss Salvatore going
down. While I am gone he may come up here. The signora is not to speak
with him. He is not to come to her."

Gaspare hesitated. He was torn in two by his dual affection, his dual
sense of the watchful fidelity he owed to his padrone and to his padrona.

"Va bene," he said, at last, in a half whisper.

He hung down his head like one exhausted.

"How will it finish?" he murmured, as if to himself. "How will it
finish?"

"I must go," Maurice said. "I must go now. Gaspare!"

"Si, signore?"

"We must be careful, you and I, to-day. We must not let the signora,
Lucrezia, any one suspect that--that we are not just as usual. Do you
see?"

"Si, signore."

The boy nodded. His eyes now looked tired.

"And try to keep a lookout, when you can, without drawing the attention
of the signora. Salvatore might change his mind and come up. The signora
is not to know. She is never to know. Do you think"--he hesitated--"do
you think Salvatore has told any one?"

"Non lo so."

The boy was silent. Then he lifted his hands again and said:

"Signorino! Signorino!"

And Maurice seemed to hear at that moment the voice of an accusing angel.

"Gaspare," he said, "I was mad. We men--we are mad sometimes. But now I
must be sane. I must do what I can to--I must do what I can--and you must
help me."

He held out his hand. Gaspare took it. The grasp of it was strong, that
of a man. It seemed to reassure the boy.

"I will always help my padrone," he said.

Then they went down the mountain-side.

It was perhaps very strange--Maurice thought it was--but he felt now less
tired, less confused, more master of himself than he had before he had
spoken with Gaspare. He even felt less miserable. Face to face with an
immediate and very threatening danger, courage leaped up in him, a
certain violence of resolve which cleared away clouds and braced his
whole being. He had to fight. There was no way out. Well, then, he would
fight. He had played the villain, perhaps, but he would not play the
poltroon. He did not know what he was going to do, what he could do, but
he must act, and act decisively. His wild youth responded to this call
made upon it. There was a new light in his eyes as he went down to the
cottage, as he came upon the terrace.

Artois noticed it at once, was aware at once that in this marvellous
peace to which Hermione had brought him there were elements which had
nothing to do with peace.

"What hast thou to do with peace? Turn thee behind me."

These words from the Bible came into his mind as he looked into the eyes
of his host, and he felt that Hermione and he were surely near to some
drama of which they knew nothing, of which Hermione, perhaps, suspected
nothing.

Maurice acted his part. The tonic of near danger gave him strength, even
gave him at first a certain subtlety. From the terrace he could see far
over the mountain flanks. As one on a tower he watched for the approach
of his enemy from the sea, but he did not neglect his two companions. For
he was fighting already. When he seemed natural in his cordiality to his
guest, when he spoke and laughed, when he apologized for the misfortune
of the previous day, he was fighting. The battle with circumstances was
joined. He must bear himself bravely in it. He must not allow himself to
be overwhelmed.

Nevertheless, there came presently a moment which brought with it a sense
of fear.

Hermione got up to go into the house.

"I must see what Lucrezia is doing," she said. "Your collazione must not
be a fiasco, Emile."

"Nothing could be a fiasco here, I think," he answered.

She laughed happily.

"But poor Lucrezia is not in paradise," she said. "Ah, why can't every
one be happy when one is happy one's self? I always think of that when
I----"

She did not finish her sentence in words. Her look at the two men
concluded it. Then she turned and went into the house.

"What is the matter with Lucrezia?" asked Artois.

"Oh, she--she's in love with a shepherd called Sebastiano."

"And he's treating her badly?"

"I'm afraid so. He went to the Lipari Isles, and he doesn't come back."

"A girl there keeps him captive?"

"It seems so."

"Faithful women must not expect to have a perfect time in Sicily," Artois
said.

As he spoke he noticed that a change came in his companion's face. It was
fleeting, but it was marked. It made Artois think:

"This man understands Sicilian faithlessness in love."

It made him, too, remember sharply some words of his own said long ago in
London:

"I love the South, but I distrust what I love, and I see the South in
him."

There was a silence between the two men. Heat was growing in the long
summer day, heat that lapped them in the influence of the South. Africa
had been hotter, but this seemed the breast of the South, full of glory
and of languor, and of that strange and subtle influence which inclines
the heart of man to passion and the body of man to yield to its desires.
It was glorious, this wonderful magic of the South, but was it wholesome
for Northern men? Was it not full of danger? As he looked at the great,
shining waste of the sea, purple and gold, dark and intense and jewelled,
at the outline of Etna, at the barbaric ruin of the Saracenic castle on
the cliff opposite, like a cry from the dead ages echoing out of the
quivering blue, at the man before him leaning against the blinding white
wall above the steep bank of the ravine, Artois said to himself that the
South was dangerous to young, full-blooded men, was dangerous, to such a
man as Delarey. And he asked himself the question, "What has this man
been doing here in this glorious loneliness of the South, while his wife
has been saving my life in Africa?" And a sense of reproach, almost of
alarm, smote him. For he had called Hermione away. In the terrible
solitude that comes near to the soul with the footfalls of death he had
not been strong enough to be silent. He had cried out, and his friend had
heard and had answered. And Delarey had been left alone with the sun.

"I'm afraid you must feel as if I were your enemy," he said.

And as he spoke he was thinking, "Have I been this man's enemy?"

"Oh no. Why?"

"I deprived you of your wife. You've been all alone here."

"I made friends of the Sicilians."

Maurice spoke lightly, but through his mind ran the thought, "What an
enemy this man has been to me, without knowing it!"

"They are easy to get on with," said Artois. "When I was in Sicily I
learned to love them."

"Oh, love!" said Maurice, hastily.

He checked himself.

"That's rather a strong word, but I like them. They're a delightful
race."

"Have you found out their faults?"

Both men were trying to hide themselves in their words.

"What are their faults, do you think?" Maurice said.

He looked over the wall and saw, far off on the path by the ravine, a
black speck moving.

"Treachery when they do not trust; sensuality, violence, if they think
themselves wronged."

"Are--are those faults? I understand them. They seem almost to belong to
the sun."

Artois had not been looking at Maurice. The sound of Maurice's voice now
made him aware that the speaker had turned away from him. He glanced up
and saw his companion staring over the wall across the ravine. What was
he gazing at? Artois wondered.

"Yes, the sun is perhaps partly responsible for them. Then you have
become such a sun-worshipper that----"

"No, no, I don't say that," Maurice interrupted.

He looked round and met Artois's observant eyes. He had dreaded having
those eyes fixed upon him.

"But I think--I think things done in such a place, such an island as
this, shouldn't be judged too severely, shouldn't be judged, I mean,
quite as we might judge them, say, in England."

He looked embarrassed as he ended, and shifted his gaze from his
companion.

"I agree with you," Artois said.

Maurice looked at him again, almost eagerly. An odd feeling came to him
that this man, who unwittingly had done him a deadly harm, would be able
to understand what perhaps no woman could ever understand, the tyranny of
the senses in a man, their fierce tyranny in the sunlit lands. Had he
been so wicked? Would Artois think so? And the punishment that was
perhaps coming--did he deserve that it should be terrible? He wondered,
almost like a boy. But Hermione was not with them. When she was there he
did not wonder. He felt that he deserved lashes unnumbered.

And Artois--he began to feel almost clairvoyant. The new softness that
had come to him with the pain of the body, that had been developed by the
blessed rest from pain that was convalescence, had not stricken his
faculty of seeing clear in others, but it had changed, at any rate for a
time, the sentiments that followed upon the exercise of that faculty.
Scorn and contempt were less near to him than they had been. Pity was
nearer. He felt now almost sure that Delarey had fallen into some
trouble while Hermione was in Africa, that he was oppressed at this
moment by some great uneasiness or even fear, that he was secretly
cursing some imprudence, and that his last words were a sort of
surreptitious plea for forgiveness, thrown out to the Powers of the air,
to the Spirits of the void, to whatever shadowy presences are about the
guilty man ready to condemn his sin. He felt, too, that he owed much to
Delarey. In a sense it might be said that he owed to him his life. For
Delarey had allowed Hermione to come to Africa, and if Hermione had not
come the end for him, Artois, might well have been death.

"I should like to say something to you, monsieur," he said. "It is rather
difficult to say, because I do not wish it to seem formal, when the
feeling that prompts it is not formal."

Maurice was again looking over the wall, watching with intensity the
black speck that was slowly approaching on the little path.

"What is it, monsieur?" he asked, quickly.

"I owe you a debt--indeed I do. You must not deny it. Through your
magnanimous action in permitting your wife to leave you, you, perhaps
indirectly, saved my life. For, without her aid, I do not think I could
have recovered. Of her nobility and devotion I will not, because I cannot
adequately, speak. But I wish to say to you that if ever I can do you a
service of any kind I will do it."

As he finished Maurice, who was looking at him now, saw a veil over his
big eyes. Could it--could it possibly be a veil of tears!

"Thank you," he answered.

He tried to speak warmly, cordially. But his heart said to him: "You can
do nothing for me now. It is all too late!"

Yet the words and the emotion of Artois were some slight relief to him.
He was able to feel that in this man he had no secret enemy, but, if
need be, a friend.

"You have a nice fellow as servant," Artois said, to change the
conversation.

"Gaspare--yes. He's loyal. I intend to ask Hermione to let me take him to
England with us."

He paused, then added, with an anxious curiosity:

"Did you talk to him much as you came up?"

He wondered whether the novelist had noticed Gaspare's agitation or
whether the boy had been subtle enough to conceal it.

"Not very much. The path is narrow, and I rode in front. He sang most of
the time, those melancholy songs of Sicily that came surely long ago
across the sea from Africa."

"They nearly always sing on the mountains when they are with the
donkeys."

"Dirges of the sun. There is a sadness of the sun as well as a joy."

"Yes."

As Maurice answered, he thought, "How well I know that now!" And as he
looked at the black figure drawing nearer in the sunshine it seemed to
him that there was a terror in that gold which he had often worshipped.
If that figure should be Salvatore! He strained his eyes. At one moment
he fancied that he recognized the wild, free, rather strutting walk of
the fisherman. At another he believed that his fear had played him a
trick, that the movements of the figure were those of an old man, some
plodding contadino of the hills. Artois wondered increasingly what he was
looking at. A silence fell between them. Artois lay back in the chaise
longue and gazed up at the blue, then at the section of distant sea which
was visible above the rim of the wall though the intervening mountain
land was hidden. It was a paradise up here. And to have it with the great
love of a woman, what an experience that must be for any man! It seemed
to him strange that such an experience had been the gift of the gods to
their messenger, their Mercury. What had it meant to him? What did it
mean to him now? Something had changed him. Was it that? In the man by
the wall Artois did not see any longer the bright youth he remembered.
Yet the youth was still there, the supple grace, the beauty, bronzed now
by the long heats of the sun. It was the expression that had changed. In
cities one sees anxious-looking men everywhere. In London Delarey had
stood out from the crowd not only because of his beauty of the South, but
because of his light-hearted expression, the spirit of youth in his eyes.
And now here, in this reality that seemed almost like a dream in its
perfection, in this reality of the South, there was a look of strain in
his eyes and in his whole body. The man had contradicted his surroundings
in London--now he contradicted his surroundings here.

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