“Tassar!” whispered Sorio suddenly, in a tone strangely and tenderly modulated.
“Well, my child, what is it?” returned the other.
“I only want to tell you,” Adrian went on, “that whatever I may say or do in the future, I recognize that you’re the best friend I’ve got, except one.” As he said the words “except one,” his voice had a vibrant softness in it.
“Thank you, my dear,” replied his friend calmly. “I should certainly be extremely distressed if you made a fool of yourself in any way. But who is my rival, tell me that! Who is this one who’s a better friend than I? Not Philippa, I hope—or Nance Herrick?”
Sorio sighed heavily. “I vowed to myself,” he muttered, “I would never talk to any one again about him: but the sound of that bell—isn’t it weird, Tassar? Isn’t it ghostly?—makes me long to talk about him.”
“Ah! I understand,” and Baltazar Stork drew in his breath with a low whistle, “I understand! You’re talking about your boy over there. Well, my dear, I don’t blame you if you’re homesick for him. I have a feeling that he’s an extraordinarily beautiful youth. I always picture him to myself like my Venetian. Is he like Flambard, Adrian?”
Sorio sighed again, the sigh of one who sins against his secret soul and misses the reward of his sacrilege. “No—no,” he muttered, “it isn’t that! It isn’t anything to do with his being beautiful. God knows if Baptiste is beautiful! It’s that I want him. It’s that he understands what I’m trying to do in the darkness. It’s simply that I want him, Tassar.”
“What do you mean by that ‘trying in the darkness,’ Adriano? What ‘darkness’ are you talking about?”
Sorio made no immediate answer. His hand, as he clung to the stake amid the rocking of the boat, encountered a piece of seaweed of that kind which possesses slippery, bubble-like excrescences, and he dug his nails into one of these leathery globes, with a vague dreamy idea that if he could burst it he would burst some swollen trouble in his brain.
“Do you remember,” he said at last, “what I showed you the other night, or have you forgotten?”