A Spirit in Prison | Page 5

She held her breath, trying to feel exactly as he was feeling. And then suddenly she lifted her hands up to her face, covering her nostrils. What a horrible sensation it was, this suffocation, this pressing of the life out of the body, almost as one may push a person brutally out of a room! She could bear it no more, and she dropped her hands. As she did so the boy's dark head rose above the sea.
Vere uttered a cry of joy.
"Brave! Bravo!"
She felt as if he had returned from the dead. He was a wonderful boy.
"Bravo! Bravissimo!"
Serenely unconscious of her enthusiasm, the boy swam slowly for a moment, breathing the air into his lungs, then serenely dived again.
"Vere!" called a woman's voice from the house--"Vere!"
"Madre!" cried the girl in reply, but without turning away from the sea. "I am here! Do come out! I want to show you something."
On a narrow terrace looking towards Naples a tall figure appeared.
"Where are you?"
"Here! here!"
The mother smiled and left the terrace, passed through a little gate, and almost directly was standing beside the girl, saying:
"What is it? Is there a school of whales in the Bay, or have you sighted the sea-serpent coming from Capri?"
"No, no! But--you see that boat?"
"Yes. The men are diving for /frutti di mare/, aren't they?"
Vere nodded.
"The men are nothing. But there is a boy who is wonderful."
"Why? What does he do?"
"He stays under water an extraordinary time. Now wait. Have you got a watch, Madre?"
"Yes."
"Take it out, there's a darling, and time him. I want to know--there he is! You see!"
"Yes."
"Have you got your watch? Wait till he goes under! Wait a minute! There! He's gone! Now begin."
She drew into her lungs a long breath, and held it. The mother smiled, keeping her eyes obediently on the watch which lay in her hand.
There was a silence between them as the seconds passed.
"Really," began the mother presently, "he must be--"
"Hush, Madre, hush!"
The girl had clasped her hands tightly. Her eyes never left the sea. The tick, tick of the watch was just audible in the stillness of the May morning. At last--
"There he is!" cried the girl. "Quick! How long has he been under?"
"Just fifty seconds."
"I wonder--I'm sure it's a record. If only Gaspare were here! When will he be back from Naples with Monsieur Emile?"
"About twelve, I should think. But I doubt if they can sail." She looked out to sea, and added: "I think the wind is changing to scirocco. They may be later."
"He's gone down again!"
"I never saw you so interested in a diver before," said the mother. "What made you begin to look at the boy?"
"He was singing. I heard him, and his voice made me feel--" She paused.
"What?" said her mother.
"I don't know. /Un poco diavolesca/, I'm afraid. One thing, though! It made me long to be a boy."
"Did it?"
"Yes! Madre, tell me truly--sea-water on your lips, as the fishermen say--now truly, did you ever want me to be a boy?"
Hermione Delarey did not answer for a moment. She looked away over the still sea, that seemed to be slowly losing its color, and she thought of another sea, of the Ionian waters that she had loved so much. They had taken her husband from her before her child was born, and this child's question recalled to her the sharp agony of those days and nights in Sicily, when Maurice lay unburied in the Casa del Prete, and afterwards in the hospital at Marechiaro--of other days and nights in Italy, when, isolated with the Sicilian boy, Gaspare, she had waited patiently for the coming of her child.
"Sea-water, Madre, sea-water on your lips!"
Her mother looked down at her.
"Do you think I wished it, Vere?"
"To-day I do."
"Why to-day?"
"Because I wish it so much. And it seems to me as if perhaps I wish it because you once wished it for me. 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