"What eyes!" said Hermione. "Did you ever see anything so expressive?"
Maurice did not answer. He was watching Gaspare, fascinated, completely
under the spell of the dance. The blood was beginning to boil in his
veins, warm blood of the south that he had never before felt in his body.
Artois had spoken to Hermione of "the call of the blood." Maurice began
to hear it now, to long to obey it.
Gaspare clapped his hands alternately in front of him and behind him,
leaping from side to side, with a step in which one foot crossed over the
other, and holding his body slightly curved inward. And all the time he
kept his eyes on Delarey, and the wily, merry invitation grew stronger in
them.
"Venga!" he whispered, always dancing. "Venga, signorino, venga--venga!"
He spun round, clapped his hands furiously, snapped his fingers, and
jumped back. Then he held out his hands to Delarey, with a gay authority
that was irresistible.
"Venga, venga, signorino! Venga, venga!"
All the blood in Delarey responded, chasing away something--was it a
shyness, a self-consciousness of love--that till now had held him back
from the gratification of his desire? He sprang up and he danced the
tarantella, danced it almost as if he had danced it all his life, with a
natural grace, a frolicsome abandon that no pure-blooded Englishman could
ever achieve, danced it as perhaps once the Sicilian grandmother had
danced it under the shadow of Etna. Whatever Gaspare did he imitated,
with a swiftness and a certainty that were amazing, and Gaspare,
intoxicated by having such a pupil, outdid himself in countless changing
activities. It was like a game and like a duel, for Gaspare presently
began almost to fight for supremacy as he watched Delarey's startling
aptitude in the tarantella, which, till this moment, he had considered
the possession of those born in Sicily and of Sicilian blood. He seemed
to feel that this pupil might in time become the master, and to be put
upon his mettle, and he put forth all his cunning to be too much for
Delarey.
And Hermione was left alone, watching, for Lucrezia had disappeared,
suddenly mindful of some household duty.
When Delarey sprang up she felt a thrill of responsive excitement, and
when she watched his first steps, and noted the look of youth in him, the
supple southern grace that rivalled the boyish grace of Gaspare, she was
filled with that warm, that almost yearning admiration which is the
child of love. But another feeling followed--a feeling of melancholy. As
she watched him dancing with the four boys, a gulf seemed to yawn between
her and them. She was alone on her side of this gulf, quite alone. They
were remote from her. She suddenly realized that Delarey belonged to the
south, and that she did not. Despite all her understanding of the beauty
of the south, all her sympathy for the spirit of the south, all her
passionate love of the south, she was not of it. She came to it as a
guest. But Delarey was of it. She had never realized that absolutely till
this moment. Despite his English parentage and upbringing, the southern
strain in his ancestry had been revived in him. The drop of southern
blood in his veins was his master. She had not married an Englishman.