He realized that; but, subtle though he was, he did not understand the inmost and root-cause of Vere’s loss of self-control.
Vere was feeling bitterly ashamed, had been bending under this sense of undeserved shame, ever since the Marchesino’s stratagem on the preceding night. Although she was gay and fearless, she was exquisitely sensitive. Peppina’s confession had roused her maidenhood to a theoretical knowledge of certain things in life, of certain cruel phases of man’s selfishness and lust which, till then, she had never envisaged. The Marchesino’s madness had carried her one step further. She had not actually looked into the abyss. But she had felt herself near to something that she hated even more than she feared it. And she had returned to the hotel full of a shrinking delicacy, not to be explained, intense as snow, which had made the meeting with her mother and Artois a torture to her, which had sealed her lips to silence that night, which had made her half apology to Gaspare in the morning a secret agony, which had even set a flush on her face when she looked at San Francesco. The abrupt change in Monsieur Emile’s demeanor towards her made her feel as if she were despised by him because she had been the victim of the Marchesino’s trick. Or perhaps Monsieur Emile completely misunderstood her; perhaps he thought—perhaps he dared to think, that she had helped the Marchesino in his manoeuvre.
Vere felt almost crucified, but was too proud to speak of the pain and bitterness within her. Only when her mother came out upon the terrace did she suddenly feel that she could bear no more.
That night, directly she was in her room, she locked her door. She was afraid that her mother might follow her, to ask what was the matter.
But Hermione did not come. She, too, wished to be alone that night. She, too, felt that she could not be looked at by searching eyes that night.
She did not know when Artois left the terrace. Long after Ruffo’s song had died away she still leaned over the sea, following his boat with her desirous heart. Artois, too, was on the sea. She did not know it. She was, almost desperately, seeking a refuge in the past. The present failed her. That was her feeling. Then she would cling to the past. And in that song, prompted now by her always eager imagination, she seemed to hear it. For she was almost fiercely, feverishly, beginning to find resemblances in Ruffo to Maurice. At first she had noticed none, although she had been strangely attracted by the boy. Then she had seen that look, fleeting but vivid, that seemed for a moment to bring Maurice before her. Then, on the cliff, she had discerned a likeness of line, a definite similarity of features.
And now—was not that voice like Maurice’s? Had it not his wonderful thrill of youth in it, that sound of the love of life which wakes all the pulses of the body and stirs all the depths of the heart?
“Oh, dolce luna bianca de l’ estate——”
The voice upon the sea was singing always the song of Mergellina. But to Hermione it began to seem that the song was changing to another song, and that the voice that was dying away across the shrouded water was sinking into the shadows of a ravine upon a mountainside.
“Ciao, Ciao, Ciao,
Morettina bella, ciao——”