The young Italian’s eyes flashed, as, quick as lightning, he took the allusion to mean himself, and he turned sharply away without a word, and went right aft to sit gazing back over the water.
“Well, you’ve been and done it now, Mr Rob, and no mistake,” whispered Shaddy. “You’ve made Master Jovanni’s pot boil over on to the fire, and it ain’t water, but oil.”
“Oh, I am sorry, Shaddy,” said Rob in a low tone, for all his own anger had evaporated the moment he saw the effect of his words on the hot-blooded young Southerner.
“Sorry, lad? I should think you are. Why, if I said such a thing as that to an Italian man, I should think the best thing I could do would be to go and live in old England again, where there would be plenty of policemen to take care of me.”
“But I was not serious.”
“Ay, but you were, my lad, and that’s the worst of it. You said it in a passion on purpose to sting him, and he’s as thin-skinned as a silkworm. He has gone yonder thinking you despise him and consider he’s no better than a monkey, and if you’d set to for six hundred years trying to think out the nastiest thing you could invent to hurt his feelings you couldn’t have hit on a worse.”
“But it was a mere nothing—the thought of the moment, Shaddy,” whispered Rob.
“O’ course it was, dear lad, but, you see, that thought of the moment, as you call it, has put his back up. For long enough now English folk have said nasty things to Italians, comparing ’em to monkeys, because of some of ’em going over to England playing organs and showing a monkey at the end of a string. You see, they’re so proud and easily affronted that such a word feels like a wapps’s sting and worries ’em for days.”
“I’ll go and beg his pardon. I am sorry.”
“Won’t be no good now, sir. Better wait till he has cooled down.”