"I don't know, signorino."
She said it with simplicity and looked at him almost as if she were
inquiring of him whether she were happy or not. That look tempted him.
"Don't you know whether you are happy to-night?" he asked, putting an
emphasis on the last word, and looking at her more steadily, almost
cruelly.
"Oh, to-night--it is a festa."
"A festa? Why?"
"Why? Because it is different from other nights. On other nights I am
alone with my father."
"And to-night you are alone with me. Does that make it a festa?"
She looked down.
"I don't know, signorino."
The childish merriment and slyness had gone out of her now, and there was
a softness almost of sentimentality in her attitude, as she drooped her
head and moved one hand to and fro on the gunwale of the boat, touching
the wood, now here, now there, as if she were picking up something and
dropping it gently into the sea.
Suddenly Maurice wondered about Maddalena. He wondered whether she had
ever had a Sicilian lover, whether she had one now.
"You are not 'promised,' are you, Maddalena?" he asked, leaning a little
nearer to her. He saw the red come into her brown skin. She shook her
head without looking up or speaking.
"I wonder why," he said. "I think--I think there must be men who want
you."
She slightly raised her head.
"Oh yes, there are, signore. But--but I must wait till my father chooses
one."
"Your father will choose the man who is to be your husband?"
"Of course, signore."
"But perhaps you won't like him."
"Oh, I shall have to like him, signore."
She did not speak with any bitterness or sarcasm, but with perfect
simplicity. A feeling of pity that was certainly not Sicilian but that
came from the English blood in him stole into Maurice's heart. Maddalena
looked so soft and young in the dim beauty of the night, so ready to be
cherished, to be treated tenderly, or with the ardor that is the tender
cruelty of passion, that her childlike submission to the Sicilian code
woke in him an almost hot pugnacity. She would be given, perhaps, to some
hard brute of a fisherman who had scraped together more soldi than his
fellows, or to some coarse, avaricious contadino who would make her toil
till her beauty vanished, and she changed into a bowed, wrinkled
withered, sun-dried hag, while she was yet young in years.