But he kept his small eyes wide open and seldom let Maddalena be long
alone with the forestiere, and this supervision began to irritate
Maurice, to make him at last feel hostile to Salvatore. He remembered
Gaspare's words about the fisherman--"To him you are as nothing. But he
likes your money"--and a longing to trick this fox of the sea, who wanted
to take all and make no return, came to him.
"Why can one never be free in this world?" he thought, almost angrily.
"Why must there always be some one on the watch to see what one is doing,
to interfere with one's pleasure?"
He began presently almost to hate Salvatore, who evidently thought that
Maurice was ready to wrong him, and who, nevertheless, grasped greedily
at every soldo that came from the stranger's pocket, and touted
perpetually for more.
His attitude was hideous. Maurice pretended not to notice it, and was
careful to keep on the most friendly possible terms with him. But, while
they acted their parts, the secret sense of enmity grew steadily in the
two men, as things grow in the sun. When Maurice saw the fisherman, with
a smiling, bird's face, coming to meet him as he climbed up through the
trees to the sirens' house, he sometimes longed to strike him. And when
Maurice went away with Gaspare in the night towards the white road where
Tito, tied to a stake, was waiting to carry the empty pannier that had
contained a supper up the mountain to the house of the priest, Salvatore
stood handling his money, and murmuring: "Maledetto straniero! Madonna! Ma io sono più birbante di Lei, mille
volte più birbante, Dio mio!"
And he laughed as he went towards the sirens' house. It amused him to
think that a stranger, an "Inglese," fancied that he could play with a
Sicilian, who had never been "worsted," even by one of his own
countrymen.