A Spirit in Prison | Page 6

You thought I should be a boy?"
"I felt sure you would be a boy."
"Madre! How strange!"
The girl was looking up at her mother. Her dark eyes--almost Sicilian
eyes they were--opened very wide, and her lips remained slightly
parted after she had spoken.
"I wonder why that was?" she said at length.
"I have wondered too. It may have been that I was always thinking of
your father in those days, recalling him--well, recalling him as he had
been in Sicily. He went away from me so suddenly that somehow his
going, even when it had happened, for a long time seemed to be an
impossibility. And I fancied, I suppose, that my child would be him in a
way."
"Come back?"
"Or never quite gone."
The girl was silent for a moment.
"Povera Madre mia!" at last she said.
But she did not seem distressed for herself. No personal grievance, no
doubt of complete love assailed her. And the fact that this was so
demonstrated, very quietly and very completely, the relation existing
between this mother and this child.
"I wonder, now," Vere said, presently, "why I never specially wished to
be a boy until to-day--because, after all, it can't be from you that the
wish came. If it had been it must have come long ago. And it didn't. It
only came when I heard that boy's voice. He sings like all the boys, you
know, that have ever enjoyed themselves, that are still enjoying
themselves in the sun."

"I wish he would sing once more!" said Hermione.
"Perhaps he will. Look! He's getting into the boat. And the men are
stopping too."
The boy was very quick in his movements. Almost before Vere had
finished speaking he had pulled on his blue jersey and white trousers,
and again taken the big oars in his hands. Standing up, with his face set
towards the islet, he began once more to propel the boat towards it.
And as he swung his body slowly to and fro he opened his lips and
sang lustily once more,
"O Napoli, bella Napoli!"
Hermione and Vere sat silently listening as the song grew louder and
louder, till the boat was almost in the shadow of the islet, and the boy,
with a strong stroke of the left oar turned its prow towards the pool
over which San Francesco watched.
"They're going into the Saint's Pool to have a siesta," said Vere. "Isn't
he a splendid boy, Madre?"
As she spoke the boat was passing almost directly beneath them, and
they saw its name painted in red letters on the prow, /Sirena del Mare/.
The two men, one young, one middle-aged, were staring before them at
the rocks. But the boy, more sensitive, perhaps, than they were to the
watching eyes of women, looked straight up to Vere and to her mother.
They saw his level rows of white teeth gleaming as the song came out
from his parted lips, the shining of his eager dark eyes, full of the
careless merriment of youth, the black, low-growing hair stirring in the
light sea breeze about his brow, bronzed by sun and wind. His slight
figure swayed with an easy motion that had the grace of perfectly
controlled activity, and his brown hands gripped the great oars with a
firmness almost of steel, as the boat glided under the lee of the island,
and vanished from the eyes of the watchers into the shadowy pool of
San Francesco.
When the boat had disappeared, Vere lifted herself up and turned round

to her mother.
"Isn't he a jolly boy, Madre?"
"Yes," said Hermione.
She spoke in a low voice. Her eyes were still on the sea where the boat
had passed.
"Yes," she repeated, almost as if to herself.
For the first time a little cloud went over Vere's sensitive face.
"Madre, how horribly I must have disappointed you," she said.
The mother did not break into protestations. She always treated her
child with sincerity.
"Just for a moment, Vere," she answered. "And then, very soon, you
made me feel how much more intimate can be the relationship between
a mother and a daughter than between a mother and any son."
"Is that true, really?"
"I think it is."
"But why should that be?"
"Don't you think that Monsieur Emile can tell you much better than I? I
feel all the things, you know, that he can explain."
There was a touch of something that was like a half-hidden irony in her
voice.
"Monsieur Emile! Yes, I think he understands almost everything about
people," said Vere, quite without irony. "But could a man explain such
a thing as well as a woman? I don't think so."
"We have the instincts, perhaps, men the vocabulary. Come, Vere,