The storm lasted long—I cannot say how long; but it had not been over more than a very few minutes when the tension on our minds was broken in an unexpected way; and, mind you, there was tension, for during that storm his late adversary had conceived for Will a warmth of friendship to which for the time even mine could offer no parallel. Will seemed to the Prince the most splendid gentleman he had ever seen, and wild thoughts were surging through the Italian’s brain at the idea of the old tree of the Favara, which had seemed to have borne its last fruit, being brought back to its ancient strength by having this superb Northern stock grafted on to it. The Prince was registering a vow that Will should marry his sister—not by compulsion at the sword’s point, as he had once thought, but as the crown of friendship; not in fulfilment of the ancient prophecy which predicted the end of their house, but in final justification of the courage with which they had always defied Fate.
Only some such dream could account for the extraordinary behaviour of the Prince when the thunder and lightning and hail had ceased, and were succeeded by a cataract of rain; unless it were that the Sicilians, with those strange marriage customs of theirs, considered that a man and a woman who had once been plighted to each other, even in a one-sided troth, of whose existence one of the parties was ignorant, were absolved from the almost monastic restrictions placed between unmarried people of opposite sexes.
What passed between them I have had more than once from Will over our Madeira in his mansion-house at Eastry, when he had for years been married to Katherine. It may have gained a little in the telling, but Will was not like most men—he was too proud to embellish, to himself or others—and I must confess that what he told me afterwards tallied with what I gathered from their mien.
For when physical fear departed with the thunder it is certain—as certain as I could make through rain so heavy—that Donna Rusidda began to regard Will more after the manner of the daughters of Eve.
“Signor Hardres,” she began, “it is strange that I should be prisoned here with you, who have offered me the gravest insult which any man can offer a Sicilian woman.”
“’Tis.”
“I took your word as a gentleman, by the code of your own country, that you were ignorant how you were insulting me.”
“No man shall ever make me break my word.”
“I believe that,” she replied, with a charming expression on her face which he did not then understand, but which in reality marked the struggle between a pure high soul and an impulse inherited from generations of ancestresses for whom intrigue was the one interest open to a woman. Men had their wars, their politics, their painting, many things—and woman nothing; though there was once upon a time a Sicilian poetess. But then what is poetry but the breath of intrigue?
She had something on her mind which she could best gain through Will, and being only a woman, and a woman of the South at that, she was well content to make him burn his fingers for the slight he had put upon her, no matter how unwitting he had been.