It did not occur to him that he was anticipating that which might never happen. He was as unreasonable as a boy who foresees possible interference with his pleasures.
This decision of Hermione to bring with her to Sicily Artois, and its communication to Maurice, pushed him on to the recklessness which he had previously resolved to hold in check. Had Hermione been returning to him alone he would have felt that a gay and thoughtless holiday time was coming to an end, but he must have felt, too, that only tenderness and strong affection were crossing the sea from Africa to bind him in chains that already he had worn with happiness and peace. But the knowledge that with Hermione was coming Artois gave to him a definite vision of something that was like a cage. Without consciously saying it to himself, he had in London been vaguely aware of Artois's coldness of feeling towards him. Had any one spoken of it to him he would probably have denied that this was so. There are hidden things in a man that he himself does not say to himself that he knows of. But Maurice's vision of a cage was conjured up by Artois's mental attitude towards him in London, the attitude of the observer who might, in certain circumstances, be cruel, who was secretly ready to be cruel. And, anticipating the unpleasant probable, he threw himself with the greater violence into the enjoyment of his few more days of complete liberty.
He wrote to Hermione, expressing as naturally as he could his ready acquiescence in her project, and then gave himself up to the light-heartedness that came with the flying moments of these last days of emancipation in the sun. His mood was akin to the mood of the rich man, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." The music, he knew, must presently fail. The tarantella must come to an end. Well, then he would dance with his whole soul. He would not husband his breath nor save his strength. He would be thoughtless because for a moment he had thought too much, too much for his nature of the dancing faun who had been given for a brief space of time his rightful heritage.
Each day now he went down to the sea.
"How hot it is!" he would say to Gaspare. "If I don't have a bath I shall be suffocated."
"Si, signore. At what time shall we go?"
"After the siesta. It will be glorious in the sea to-day."
"Si, signore, it is good to be in the sea."
The boy smiled, at last would sometimes laugh. He loved his padrona, but he was a male and a Sicilian. And the signora had gone across the sea to her friend. These visits to the sea seemed to him very natural. He would have done the same as his padrone in similar circumstances with a light heart, with no sense of doing wrong. Only sometimes he raised a warning voice.
"Signorino," he would say, "do not forget what I have told you."