The Call of the Blood - Page 121/317

Maurice looked up from the letter and met Gaspare's questioning eyes.

"There's something for you," he said.

And he read in Italian Hermione's message. Gaspare beamed with pride and

pleasure.

"And the sick signore?" he asked. "Is he better?"

Maurice explained how things were.

"The signora is longing to come back to us," he said.

"Of course she is," said Gaspare, calmly.

Then suddenly he jumped up.

"Signorino," he said. "I am going to write a letter to the signora. She

will like to have a letter from me. She will think she is in Sicily."

"And when you have finished, I will write," said Maurice.

"Si, signore."

And Gaspare ran off up the hill towards the cottage, leaving his master

alone.

Maurice began to read the letter again, slowly. It made him feel almost

as if he were with Hermione. He seemed to see her as he read, and he

smiled. How good she was and true, and how enthusiastic! When he had

finished the second reading of the letter he laid it down, and put his

hands behind his head again, and looked up at the quivering blue. Then he

thought of Artois. He remembered his tall figure, his robust limbs, his

handsome, powerful face. It was strange to think that he was desperately

ill, perhaps dying. Death--what must that be like? How deep the blue

looked, as if there were thousands of miles of it, as if it stretched on

and on forever! Artois, perhaps, was dying, but he felt as if he could

never die, never even be ill. He stretched his body on the warm ground.

The blue seemed to deny the fact of death. He tried to imagine Artois in

bed in the heat of Africa, with the flies buzzing round him. Then he

looked again at the letter, and reread that part in which Hermione wrote

of her duties as sick-nurse.

"I have to see to everything, and be always there to put on the poultices

and the ice."

He read those words again and again, and once more he was conscious of a

stirring of anger, of revolt, such as he had felt on the night after

Hermione's departure when he was alone on the terrace. She was his wife,

his woman. What right had she to be tending another man? His imagination

began to work quickly now, and he frowned as he looked up at the blue. He

forgot all the rest of Hermione's letter, all her love of him and her

longing to be back in Sicily with him, and thought only of her friendship

for Artois, of her ministrations to Artois. And something within him

sickened at the thought of the intimacy between patient and nurse, raged

against it, till he felt revengeful. The wild unreasonableness of his

feeling did not occur to him now. He hated that his wife should be

performing these offices for Artois; he hated that she had chosen to go

to him, that she had considered it to be her duty to go.