The Call of the Blood - Page 133/317

"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.