“He was the deathless boy.”
Suddenly those words started into Artois’ mind. Had he read them somewhere? For a moment he wondered. Or had he heard them? They seemed to suggest speech, a voice whose intonations he knew. His mind was still fatigued by work, and would not be commanded by his will. Keeping his eyes fixed on the ethereal outline of Capri, he strove to remember, to find the book which had contained these words and given them to his eyes, or the voice that had spoken them and given them to his ears.
“He was the deathless boy.”
A piano-organ struck up below him, a little way up the hill to the right, and above its hard accompaniment there rose a powerful tenor voice singing. The song must have been struck forcibly upon some part of his brain that was sleeping, must have summoned it to activity. For instantly, ere the voice had sung the first verse, he saw imaginatively a mountain top in Sicily, evening light—such as was then shining over and transfiguring Capri—and a woman, Hermione. And he heard her voice, very soft, with a strange depth and stillness in it, saying those words: “He was the deathless boy.”
Of course! How could he have forgotten? They had been said of Maurice Delarey. And now idly, strangely, he had recalled them as he thought of Ruffo’s young and careless attitude by the table of the ristorante that afternoon.
The waiter, coming presently to bring the French Signore the plate of oysters from Fusaro, which he had ordered as the prelude to his dinner, was surprised by the deep gravity of his face, and said:
“Don’t you like ‘A Mergellina,’ Signore? We are all mad about it. And it won the first prize at last year’s festa of Piedigrotta.”
“Comment donc?” exclaimed Artois, as if startled. “What?—no—yes. I like it. It’s a capital song. Lemon? That’s right—and red pepper. Va bene!”
And he bent over his plate rather hurriedly and began to eat.
The piano-organ and the singing voice died away down the hill, going towards Mergellina.