"Ha--!" He threw his head on one side and spread out his hands, as if to say--"What do you want, if you don"t find Naples lovely."
"I should like to see it. But I shouldn"t like to die," she said.
"What?"
"They say "See Naples and die,"" she laughed.
He opened his mouth, and understood. Then he smiled at her directly.
"You know what that means?" he said cutely. "It means see Naples and die afterwards. Don"t die _before_ you"ve seen it." He smiled with a knowing smile.
"I see! I see!" she cried. "I never thought of that."
He was pleased with her surprise and amus.e.m.e.nt.
"Ah Naples!" he said. "She is lovely--" He spread his hand across the air in front of him--"The sea--and Posilippo--and Sorrento--and Capri--Ah-h! You"ve never been out of England?"
"No," she said. "I should love to go."
He looked down into her eyes. It was his instinct to say at once he would take her.
"You"ve seen nothing--nothing," he said to her.
"But if Naples is so lovely, how could you leave it?" she asked.
"What?"
She repeated her question. For answer, he looked at her, held out his hand, and rubbing the ball of his thumb across the tips of his fingers, said, with a fine, handsome smile:
"Pennies! Money! You can"t earn money in Naples. Ah, Naples is beautiful, but she is poor. You live in the sun, and you earn fourteen, fifteen pence a day--"
"Not enough," she said.
He put his head on one side and tilted his brows, as if to say "What are you to do?" And the smile on his mouth was sad, fine, and charming. There was an indefinable air of sadness or wistfulness about him, something so robust and fragile at the same time, that she was drawn in a strange way.
"But you"ll go back?" she said.
"Where?"
"To Italy. To Naples."
"Yes, I shall go back to Italy," he said, as if unwilling to commit himself. "But perhaps I shan"t go back to Naples."
"Never?"
"Ah, never! I don"t say never. I shall go to Naples, to see my mother"s sister. But I shan"t go to live--"
"Have you a mother and father?"
"I? No! I have a brother and two sisters--in America. Parents, none.
They are dead."
"And you wander about the world--" she said.
He looked at her, and made a slight, sad gesture, indifferent also.
"But you have Madame for a mother," she said.
He made another gesture this time: pressed down the corners of his mouth as if he didn"t like it. Then he turned with the slow, fine smile.
"Does a man want two mothers? Eh?" he said, as if he posed a conundrum.
"I shouldn"t think so," laughed Alvina.
He glanced at her to see what she meant, what she understood.
"My mother is dead, see!" he said. "Frenchwomen--Frenchwomen--they have their babies till they are a hundred--"
"What do you mean?" said Alvina, laughing.
"A Frenchman is a little man when he"s seven years old--and if his mother comes, he is a little baby boy when he"s seventy. Do you know that?"
"I _didn"t_ know it," said Alvina.
"But now--you do," he said, lurching round a corner with her.
They had come to the stables. Three of the horses were there, including the thoroughbred Ciccio was going to ride. He stood and examined the beasts critically. Then he spoke to them with strange sounds, patted them, stroked them down, felt them, slid his hand down them, over them, under them, and felt their legs.
Then, he looked up from stooping there under the horses, with a long, slow look of his yellow eyes, at Alvina. She felt unconsciously flattered. His long, yellow look lingered, holding her eyes. She wondered what he was thinking. Yet he never spoke. He turned again to the horses. They seemed to understand him, to p.r.i.c.k up alert.
"This is mine," he said, with his hand on the neck of the old thoroughbred. It was a bay with a white blaze.
"I think he"s nice," she said. "He seems so sensitive."
"In England," he answered suddenly, "horses live a long time, because they _don"t_ live--never alive--see? In England railway-engines are alive, and horses go on wheels." He smiled into her eyes as if she understood. She was a trifle nervous as he smiled at her from out of the stable, so yellow-eyed and half-mysterious, derisive. Her impulse was to turn and go away from the stable. But a deeper impulse made her smile into his face, as she said to him:
"They like you to touch them."
"Who?" His eyes kept hers. Curious how _dark_ they seemed, with only a yellow ring of pupil. He was looking right into her, beyond her usual self, impersonal.
"The horses," she said. She was afraid of his long, cat-like look.
Yet she felt convinced of his ultimate good-nature. He seemed to her to be the only pa.s.sionately good-natured man she had ever seen. She watched him vaguely, with strange vague trust, implicit belief in him. In him--in what?
That afternoon the colliers trooping home in the winter afternoon were rejoiced with a spectacle: Kishwegin, in her deerskin, fringed gaiters and fringed frock of deerskin, her long hair down her back, and with marvellous cloths and trappings on her steed, riding astride on a tall white horse, followed by Max in chieftain"s robes and chieftain"s long head-dress of dyed feathers, then by the others in war-paint and feathers and brilliant Navajo blankets. They carried bows and spears. Ciccio was without his blanket, naked to the waist, in war-paint, and brandishing a long spear. He dashed up from the rear, saluted the chieftain with his arm and his spear on high as he swept past, suddenly drew up his rearing steed, and trotted slowly back again, making his horse perform its paces. He was extraordinarily velvety and alive on horseback.
Crowds of excited, shouting children ran chattering along the pavements. The colliers, as they tramped grey and heavy, in an intermittent stream uphill from the low grey west, stood on the pavement in wonder as the cavalcade approached and pa.s.sed, jingling the silver bells of its trappings, vibrating the wonderful colours of the barred blankets and saddle cloths, the scarlet wool of the accoutrements, the bright tips of feathers. Women shrieked as Ciccio, in his war-paint, wheeled near the pavement. Children screamed and ran. The colliers shouted. Ciccio smiled in his terrifying war-paint, brandished his spear and trotted softly, like a flower on its stem, round to the procession.
Miss Pinnegar and Alvina and James Houghton had come round into Knarborough Road to watch. It was a great moment. Looking along the road they saw all the shopkeepers at their doors, the pavements eager. And then, in the distance, the white horse jingling its trappings of scarlet hair and bells, with the dusky Kishwegin sitting on the saddle-blanket of brilliant, lurid stripes, sitting impa.s.sive and all dusky above that intermittent flashing of colour: then the chieftain, dark-faced, erect, easy, swathed in a white blanket, with scarlet and black stripes, and all his strange crest of white, tip-dyed feathers swaying down his back: as he came nearer one saw the wolfskin and the brilliant moccasins against the black sides of his horse; Louis and Goeffrey followed, lurid, horrid in the face, wearing blankets with stroke after stroke of blazing colour upon their duskiness, and sitting stern, holding their spears: lastly, Ciccio, on his bay horse with a green seat, flickering hither and thither in the rear, his feathers swaying, his horse sweating, his face ghastlily smiling in its war-paint. So they advanced down the grey pallor of Knarborough Road, in the late wintry afternoon. Somewhere the sun was setting, and far overhead was a flush of orange.