“To the devil with the fishing,” replied the young man. “Ecco! Our dinner is ready, with thanks to the Madonna!”
They sat down, one on each side of the small table, with a smoking lamp between them.
“I have ordered vino bianco,” said the Marchesino, who still looked sentimental. “Cameriere, take away the lamp. Put it on the next table. Va bene. We are going to have ‘zuppa di pesce,’ gamberi and veal cutlets. The wine is Capri. Now then,” he added, with sudden violence and the coarsest imaginable Neapolitan accent, “if you fellows play ‘Santa Lucia,’ ‘Napoli Bella,’ or ‘Sole mio’ you’ll have my knife in you. I am not an Inglese. I am a Neapolitan. Remember that!”
He proved it with a string of gutter words and oaths, at which the musicians smiled with pleasure. Then, turning again to Artois, he continued:
“If one doesn’t tell them they think one is an imbecile. Emilio caro, do you not love to see the moon with a beautiful girl?”
His curious assumption that Artois and he were contemporaries because they were friends, and his apparently absolute blindness to the fact that a man of sixty and a man of twenty-four are hardly likely to regard the other sex with an exactly similar enthusiasm, always secretly entertained the novelist, who made it his business with this friend to be accommodating, and who seldom, if ever, showed himself authoritative, or revealed any part of his real inner self.
“Ma si!” he replied; “the night and the moon are made for love.”
“Everything is made for love,” returned the Marchesino. “Take plenty of soaked bread, Emilio. They know how to make this zuppa here. Everything is made for love.—Look! There is a boat coming with women in it!”
At a short distance from the shore a rowing boat was visible; and from it now came shrill sounds of very common voices, followed by shouts of male laughter.
“Perhaps they are beautiful,” said the Marchesino, at once on the alert.