"Gaspare!"
The form stopped.
"Gaspare!"
"Signora! What are you doing here? Madonna!"
"Gaspare, don't come this way! You are not to come this way."
"Why are you here, signora? I told you to wait for me by Isola Bella."
The startled voice was hard.
"You are not to cross the wall. I won't have it."
"The wall--it is nothing, signora. I have crossed it many times. It is
nothing for a man."
"In the day, perhaps, but at night--don't, Gaspare--d'you hear me?--you
are not--"
She stopped, holding her breath, for she saw him coming lightly, poised
on bare feet, straight as an arrow, and balancing himself with his
out-stretched arms.
"Ah!"
She had shrieked out. Just as he was midway Gaspare had looked down at
the sea--the open sea on the far side of the wall. Instantly his foot
slipped, he lost his balance and fell. She thought he had gone, but he
caught the wall with his hands, hung for a moment suspended above the
sea, then raised himself, as a gymnast does on a parallel bar, slowly
till his body was above the wall. Then--Hermione did not know how--he was
beside her.
She caught hold of him with both hands. She felt furiously angry.
"How dare you disobey me?" she said, panting and trembling. "How dare
you--"
But his eyes silenced her. She broke off, staring at him. All the healthy
color had left his face. There was a leaden hue upon it.
"Gaspare--are you--you aren't hurt--you--"
"Let me go, signora! Let me go!"
She let him go instantly.
"What is it? Where are you going?"
He pointed to the beach.
"To the boat. There's--down there in the water--there's something in the
water!"
"Something?" she said.
"Wait in the road."
He rushed away from her, and she heard him saying: "Madonna! Madonna!
Madonna!"--crying it out as he ran.
Something in the water! She felt as if her heart stood still for a
century, then at last beat again somewhere up in her throat, choking her.
Something--could Gaspare have seen what? She moved on a step. One of her
feet was on the wall, the other still on the firm earth. She leaned down
and tried to look over into the sea beyond, the sea close to the wall.
But her head swam. Had she not moved back hastily, obedient to an
imperious instinct of self-preservation, she would have fallen. She sat
down, there where she had been standing, and dropped her face into her
hands close to her knees, and kept quite still. She felt as if she were
in a train going through a tunnel. Her ears were full of a roaring
clamor. How long she sat and heard tumult she did not know. When she
looked up the night seemed to her to be much darker than before,
intensely dark. Yet all the stars were there in the sky. No clouds had
come to hide them. She tried to get up quickly, but there was surely
something wrong with her body. It would not obey her will at first.
Presently she lay down, turned over on her side, put both hands on the
ground, and with an effort, awkward as that of a cripple, hoisted herself
up and stood on her feet. Gaspare had said, "Wait in the road." She must
find the road. That was what she must do.