The Call of the Blood - Page 156/317

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.