He spoke lightly, but he felt fully conscious now that his suspicion was well founded. Maurice was uneasy, unhappy. He wanted to get away from this peace that held no peace for him. He wanted to put something behind him. To a man like Artois, Maurice was a boy. He might try to be subtle, he might even be subtle—for him. But to this acute and trained observer of the human comedy he could not for long be deceptive.
During his severe illness the mind of Artois had often been clouded, had been dispossessed of its throne by the clamor of the body's pain. And afterwards, when the agony passed and the fever abated, the mind had been lulled, charmed into a stagnant state that was delicious. But now it began to go again to its business. It began to work with the old rapidity that had for a time been lost. And as this power came back and was felt thoroughly, very consciously by this very conscious man, he took alarm. What affected or threatened Delarey must affect, threaten Hermione. Whether he were one with her or not she was one with him. The feeling of Artois towards the woman who had shown him such noble, such unusual friendship was exquisitely delicate and intensely strong. Unmingled with any bodily passion, it was, or so it seemed to him, the more delicate and strong on that account. He was a man who had an instinctive hatred of heroics. His taste revolted from them as it revolted from violence in literature. They seemed to him a coarseness, a crudity of the soul, and almost inevitably linked with secret falseness. But he was conscious that to protect from sorrow or shame the woman who had protected him in his dark hour he would be willing to make any sacrifice. There would be no limit to what he would be ready to do now, in this moment, for Hermione. He knew that, and he took the alarm. Till now he had been feeling curiosity about the change in Delarey. Now he felt the touch of fear.
Something had happened to change Maurice while Hermione had been in Africa. He had heard, perhaps, the call of the blood. All that he had said, and all that he had felt, on the night when he had met Maurice for the first time in London, came back to Artois. He had prophesied, vaguely perhaps. Had his prophecy already been fulfilled? In this great and shining peace of nature Maurice was not at peace. And now all sense of peace deserted Artois. Again, and fiercely now, he felt the danger of the South, and he added to his light words some words that were not light.
"But I am really no longer an invalid," he said. "And I must be getting northward very soon. I need the bracing air, the Spartan touch of the cold that the Sybarite in me dreads. Perhaps we all need them."
"If you go on like this, you two," Hermione exclaimed, "you will make me feel as if it were degraded to wish to live anywhere except at Clapham Junction or the North Pole. Let us be happy as we are, where we are, to-day and—yes, call me weak if you like—and to-morrow!"
Maurice made no answer to this challenge, but Artois covered his silence, and kept the talk going on safe topics till Gaspare came to the terrace to lay the cloth for collazione.
It was past noon now, and the heat was brimming up like a flood over the land. Flies buzzed about the terrace, buzzed against the white walls and ceilings of the cottage, winding their tiny, sultry horns ceaselessly, musicians of the sun. The red geraniums in the stone pots beneath the broken columns drooped their dry heads. The lizards darted and stopped, darted and stopped upon the wall and the white seats where the tiles were burning to the touch. There was no moving figure on the baked mountains, no moving vessel on the shining sea. No smoke came from the snowless lips of Etna. It was as if the fires of the sun had beaten down and slain the fires of the earth.
Gaspare moved to and fro slowly, spreading the cloth, arranging the pots of flowers, the glasses, forks, and knives upon it. In his face there was little vivacity. But now and then his great eyes searched the hot world that lay beneath them, and Artois thought he saw in them the watchfulness, the strained anxiety that had been in Maurice's eyes.
"Some one must be coming," he thought. "Or they must be expecting some one to come, these two."
"Do you ever have visitors here?" he asked, carelessly.