Hermione still was bending down. And she formed the last words with lips that trembled a little.
“Gli occhi di Rosa e il mar di Mergellina.”
Then she said: “Maurice—Maurice!”
And then she stood trembling.
Yes, it was Maurice whom she had seen again for an instant in the melting look of Ruffo’s face. She felt frightened in the dark. Maurice—when he kissed her for the last time, had looked at her like that. It could not be fancy. It was not.
Was this the very first time she had noticed in Ruffo a likeness to her dead husband? She asked herself if it was. Yes. She had never—or had there been something? Not in the face, perhaps. But—the voice? Ruffo’s singing? His attitude as he stood up in the boat? Had there not been something? She remembered her conversation with Artois in the cave. She had said to him that—she did not know why—the boy, Ruffo, had made her feel, had stirred up within her slumbering desires, slumbering yearnings.
“I have heard a hundred boys sing on the Bay—and just this one touches some chord, and all the strings of my soul quiver.”
She had said that.
Then there was something in the boy, something not merely fleeting like that look of gentleness—something permanent, subtle, that resembled Maurice.
Now she no longer felt frightened, but she had a passionate wish to go down to the boat, to see Ruffo again, to be with him again, now that she was awake to this strange, and perhaps only faint, imitation by another of the one whom she had lost. No—not imitation; this fragmentary reproduction of some characteristic, some—