Artois left the island that night without speaking to Hermione. He waited a long time. But she did not move to come to him. And he did not dare to go to her. He did not dare! In all their long friendship never before had his spirit bent before, or retreated as if in fear from Hermione’s. To-night he was conscious that in her fierce anger, and afterwards in her tears, she had emancipated herself from him. He was conscious of her force as he had never been conscious of it before. Something within him almost abdicated to her intensity. And at last he turned and went softly away from the terrace. He descended to the sea. He left the island.
Were they no longer friends?
As the boat gave itself to the mist he wondered. It had come to this, then—that he did not know whether Hermione and he were any longer friends. Almost imperceptibly, with movement so minute that it had seemed like immobility, they had been drifting apart through these days and nights of the summer. And now abruptly the gulf appeared between them.
He felt just then that they could never more be friends, that their old happy camaraderie could never be reestablished.
That they could ever be enemies was unthinkable. Even in Hermione’s bitterness and anger Artois felt her deep affection. In her cry, “Take care, Emile, or I shall hate you for keeping me in the dark!” he heard only the hatred that is the other side of love.
But could they ever be comrades again? And if they could not, what could they be?
As the boat slipped on, under the Saint’s light, which was burning although the mist had hidden it from Hermione’s searching eyes, and out to the open sea, Artois heard again her fierce exclamation. It blended with Vere’s sob. He looked up and saw the faint lights of the Casa del Mare fading from him in the night. And an immense sadness, mingled with an immense, but chaotic, longing invaded him. He felt horribly lonely, and he felt a strange, new desire for the nearness to him of life. He yearned to feel life close to him, pulsing with a rhythm to which the rhythm of his being answered. He yearned for that strange and exquisite satisfaction, compounded of mystery and wonder, and thrilling with something akin to pain, that is called forth in the human being who feels another human being centring all its highest faculties, its strongest powers, its deepest hopes in him. He desired intensely, as he had never desired before, true communion with another, that mingling of bodies, hearts, and spirits, that is the greatest proof of God to man.
The lights of the Casa del Mare were lost to his eyes in the night. He looked for them still. He strained his eyes to see them. But the powerful night would not yield up its prey.
And now, in the darkness and with Hermione’s last words ringing in his ears, he felt almost overwhelmed by the solitariness of his life in the world of lives.
That day, before he came to the island, he had met himself face to face like a man meeting his double. He had stripped himself bare. He had searched himself for the truth. Remembering all the Marchesino had said, he had demanded of his heart the truth, uncertain whether it would save or slay him. It had not slain him. When the colloquy was over he was still upright.