Hermione wished he would go. She could not understand his exact feeling about the fisher-boy’s odd little intimacy with them. Her instinct told her that secretly he was fond of Ruffo. Yet sometimes he seemed to be hostile to him, to be suspicious of him, as of some one who might do them harm. Or, perhaps, he felt it his duty to be on guard against all strangers who approached them. She knew well his fixed belief that she and Vere depended entirely on him, felt always perfectly safe when he was near. And she liked to have him near—but not just at this moment. Yet she did not feel that she could ask him to go.
“Thank you very much for your gratitude, Ruffo,” she said. “You mustn’t think—”
She glanced at Gaspare.
“I didn’t want to stop you,” she continued, trying to steer an even course. “But it’s a very little thing. I hope your mother is getting on pretty well. She must have courage.”
As she said the last sentence she thought it came that night oddly from her lips.
Gaspare moved as if he felt impatient, and suddenly Hermione knew an anger akin to Vere’s, an anger she had scarcely ever felt against Gaspare.
She did not show it at first, but went on with a sort of forced calmness and deliberation, a touch even perhaps of obstinacy that was meant for Gaspare.
“I am interested in your mother, you know, although I have not seen her. Tell me how she is.”
Gaspare opened his lips to speak, but something held him silent; and as he listened to Ruffo’s carefully detailed reply, delivered with the perfect naturalness of one sure of the genuine interest taken in his concerns by his auditors, his large eyes travelled from the face of the boy to the face of his Padrona with a deep and restless curiosity. He seemed to inquire something of Ruffo, something of Hermione, and then, at the last, surely something of himself. But when Ruffo had finished, he said, brusquely:
“Signora, it is getting very late. Will not Don Emilio be going? He will want to say good-night, and I must help him with the boat.”