"Good Heavens, no!" laughed the Englishman. "But I have a very great liking and regard for her, and so has my friend Rupert. It is poor old Buck who loves her, and I am really sorry for him. It's bad enough to love a woman and be unable to win her, but it must be awful to see her in the power of a man whom you know to be an utter blackguard.... Queer thing, Life.... I suppose there is some purpose in it.... Here they come," he added, looking round.
"Who's gwine ter intervoo Carmelita, and put her wise to the sitooation?" asked the Bucking Bronco as he and Rupert joined the others. "Guess yew'd better, John. Yew know more Eye-talian and French than we do, an', what's more, Carmelita wouldn't think there was any 'harry-air ponsey'--or is it 'double-intender'--ef the young woman is interdooced, as sich, by yew."
"All right," replied John Bull. "I'll do my best--and we must all weigh in with our entreaties if I fail."
"Yew'll do it, John. I puts my shirt on Carmelita every time...."
Le Café de la Légion was swept and garnished, and Carmelita sat in her sedia pieghevole[#] behind her bar, awaiting her evening guests.
[#] Deck-chair.
It was a sadder-looking, thinner, somewhat older-looking Carmelita than she who had welcomed Rupert and his fellow bleus on the occasion of their first visit to her café. Carmelita's little doubt had grown, and worry was bordering upon anxiety--for Luigi Rivoli was Carmelita's life, and Carmelita was not only a woman, but an Italian woman, and a Neapolitan at that. Far better than life she loved Luigi Rivoli, and only next to him did she love her own self-respect and virtue. As has been said before, Carmelita considered herself a married woman. Partly owing to her equivocal position, partly to an innate purity of mind, Carmelita had a present passion for "respectability" such as had never troubled her before.
And Luigi was causing her grief and anxiety, doubt and care, and fear. For long she had fought it off, and had stoutly refused to confess it even to herself, but day by day and night by night, the persistent attack had worn down her defences of Hope and Faith until at length she stood face to face with the relentless and insidious assailant and recognised it for what it was--Fear. It had come to that, and Carmelita now frankly admitted to herself that she had fears for the faith, honesty and love of the man whom she regarded as her husband and knew to be the father of the so hoped-for bambino....
Could it be possible that the man for whom she had lived, and for whom she would at any time have died, her own Luigi, who, but for her, would be in a Marseilles graveyard, her own husband--was laying siege to fat and ugly Madame la Cantinière, because her business was a more profitable one than Carmelita's? It could not be. Men were not devils. Men did not repay women like that. Not even ordinary men, far less her Luigi. Of course not--and besides, there was the Great Secret.
For the thousandth time Carmelita found reassurance, comfort and cheer in the thought of the Great Secret, and its inevitable effect upon Luigi when he knew it. What would he say when he realised that there might be another Luigi Rivoli, for, of course, it would be a boy--a boy who would grow up another giant among men, another Samson, another Hercules, another winner of a World's Championship.