Complete Works of F Marion Crawford

by F. Marion Crawford

  “Ruggiero,” said the latter in a quiet tone. “If you want to kill me, you may, for I have betrayed you.”

  Ruggiero stared at him, to see whether he were in earnest or joking.

  “Betrayed me? I do not understand what you say. How could you betray me?”

  “As you shall know. Now listen. We were talking about Teresina to-day, you and I. Then I said to myself, ‘I love Teresina and Ruggiero loves her, but Ruggiero is first. I will go to Teresina and ask her if she will marry him, and if she will, it is well. But if she will not, I will ask Ruggiero if I may court her for myself.’ And so I did. And she will tell you the truth, and I spoke well for you. But she said she never loved you. And then, I do not know how it was, but we found out that we loved each other and we said so. And that is the truth. So you had better get a pig of iron from the ballast and knock me on the head, for I have betrayed my brother and I do not want to live any more, and I shall say nothing.”

  Then Ruggiero who had not laughed much for some time, felt that his mouth was twitching raider his yellow beard, and presently his great shoulders began to move, and his chest heaved, and his handsome head went back, and at last it came out, a mighty peal of Homeric laughter that echoed and rolled down the pier and rang clear and full, up to the Marchesa’s terrace. And it chanced that Beatrice was there, and she looked down and saw that it was Ruggiero. Then she sighed and drew back.

  But Bastianello did not understand, and when the laugh subsided at last, he said so.

  “I laughed — yes. I could not help it. But you are a good brother, and very honest, and when you want to marry Teresina, you may have my savings, and I do not care to be paid back.”

  “But I do not understand,” repeated Bastianello, in the greatest bewilderment. “You loved her so—”

  “Teresina? No. I never loved Teresina, but I never knew you did, or I would not have let you believe it. It is much more I who have cheated you, Bastianello, and when you and Teresina are married I will give you half my earnings, just as I now put them in the bank.”

  “God be blessed!” exclaimed Bastianello, touching his cap, and staring at the same vessel that had attracted Ruggiero’s attention.

  “She carries royal studding-sails,” observed Ruggiero. “You do not often see that in our part of the world.”

  “That is true,” said Bastianello. “But I was not thinking of her, when I looked. And I thank you for what you say, Ruggiero, and with my heart. And that is enough, because it seems that we know each other.”

  “We have been in the same crew once or twice,” said Ruggiero.

  “It seems to me that we have,” answered his brother.

  Neither of the two smiled, for they meant a good deal by the simple jest.

  “Tell me, Ruggiero,” said Bastianello after a pause, “since you never loved Teresina, who is it?”

  “No, Bastianello. That is what I cannot tell any one, not even you.”

  “Then I will not ask. But I think I know, now.”

  Going over the events of the past weeks in his mind, it had suddenly flashed upon Bastianello that his brother loved Beatrice. Then everything explained itself in an instant. Ruggiero was such a gentleman — in Bastianello’s eyes, of course — it was like him to break his heart for a real lady.

  “Perhaps you do know,” answered Ruggiero gravely, “but if you do, then do not tell me. It is a business better not spoken of. But what one thinks, one thinks. And that is enough.”

  A crowd of brown-skinned boys were in the water swimming and playing, as they do all day long in summer, and dashing spray at each other. They had a shabby-looking old skiff with which they amused themselves, upsetting and righting it again in the shallow water by the beach beyond the bathing houses.

  “What a boat!” laughed Bastianello. “A baby can upset her and it takes a dozen boys to right her again!”

  “Whose is she?” enquired Ruggiero idly, as he filled his pipe.

  “She? She belonged to Black Rag’s brother, the one who was drowned last Christmas Eve, when the Leone was cut in two by the steamer in the Mouth of Procida. I suppose she belongs to Black Rag himself now. She is a crazy old craft, but if he were clever he could patch her up and paint her and take foreigners to the Cape in her on fine days.”

  “That is true. Tell him so. There he is. Ohè! Black Rag!”

  Black Rag came down the pier to the two brothers, a middle-aged, bow-legged, leathery fellow with a ragged grey beard and a weather-beaten face.

  “What do you want?” he asked, stopping before them with his hands in his pockets.

  “Bastianello says that old tub there is yours, and that if you had a better head than you have you could caulk her and paint her white with a red stripe and take foreigners to the Bath of Queen Giovanna in her on fine days. Why do you not try it? Those boys are making her die an evil death.”

  “Bastianello always has such thoughts!” laughed the sailor. “Why does he not buy her of me and paint her himself? The paint would hold her together another six months, I daresay.”

  “Give her to me,” said Ruggiero. “I will give you half of what I earn with her.”

  Black Rag looked at him and laughed, not believing that he was in earnest. But Ruggiero slowly nodded his head as though to conclude a bargain.

  “I will sell her to you,” said the sailor at last. “She belonged to that blessed soul, my brother, who was drowned — health to us — to-day is Saturday — and I never earned anything with her since she was mine. I will sell her cheap.”

  “How much? I will give you thirty francs for her.”

  Bastianello stared at his brother, but he made no remark while the bargain was being made, nor even when Ruggiero finally closed for fifty francs, paid the money down and proceeded to take possession of the old tub at once, to the infinite and forcibly expressed regret of the lads who had been playing with her. Then the two brothers hauled her up upon the sloping cement slip between the pier and the bathing houses, and turned her over. The boys swam away, and Black Rag departed with his money.

  “What have you bought her for, Ruggiero?” asked Bastianello.

  “She has copper nails,” observed the other examining the bottom carefully. “She is worth fifty francs. Your thought was good. To-morrow she will be dry and we will caulk the seams, and the next day we will paint her and then we can take foreigners to the Cape in her if we have a chance and the signori do not go out. Lend a hand, Bastianello; we must haul her up behind the boats.”

  Bastianello said nothing and the two strong men almost carried the old tub to a convenient place for working at her.

  “Do you want to do anything more to her to-night?” asked Bastianello.

  “No.”

  “Then I will go up.”

  “Very well.”

  Ruggiero smiled as he spoke, for he knew that Bastianello was going to try and get another glimpse of Teresina. The ladies would probably go to drive and Teresina would be free until they came back.

  He sat down on a boat near the one he had just bought, and surveyed his purchase. He seemed on the whole well satisfied. It was certainly good enough for the foreigners who liked to be pulled up to the cape on summer evenings. She was rather easily upset, as Ruggiero had noticed, but a couple of bags of pebbles in the right place would keep her steady enough, and she had room for three or four people in the stern sheets and for two men to pull. Not bad for fifty francs, thought Ruggiero. And San Miniato had asked about going after crabs by torchlight. This would be the very boat for the purpose, for getting about in and out of the rocks on which the crabs swarm at night. Black Rag might have earned money with her. But Black Rag was rather a worthless fellow, who drank too much wine, played too much at the public lottery and wasted his substance on trifles.

  Ruggiero’s purchase was much discussed that evening and all the next day by the sailors of the Piccola Marina. Some agreed that he had done well, and some said that he had made a mistake, but Ruggiero said nothing and paid no at
tention to the gossips. On the next day and the day after that he was at work before dawn with Bastianello, and Black Rag was very much surprised at the trim appearance of his old boat when the brothers at last put her into the water and pulled themselves round the little harbour to see whether the seams were all tight. But he pretended to put a good face on the matter, and explained that there were more rotten planks in her than any one knew of and that only the nails below the water line were copper after all, and he predicted a short life for Number Fifty Seven, when Ruggiero renewed the old licence in the little harbour office. Ruggiero, however, cared for none of these things, but ballasted the tub properly with bags of pebbles and demonstrated to the crowd that she was no longer easy to upset, inviting any one who pleased to stand on the gunwale and try.

  “But the ballast makes her heavy to pull,” objected Black Rag, as he looked on.

  “If you had arms like the Children of the King,” retorted the Cripple, “you would not trouble yourself about a couple of hundredweight more or less. But you have not. So you had better go and play three numbers at the lottery, the day of the month, the number of the boat and any other one that you like. In that way you may still make a little money if you have luck. For you have made a bad bargain with the Children of the King, and you know it.”

  Black Rag was much struck by the idea and promptly went up to the town to invest his spare cash in the three numbers, taking his own age for the third. As luck would have it the two first numbers actually turned up and he won thirty francs that week, which, as he justly observed, brought the price of the boat up to eighty. For if he had not sold her he would never have played the numbers at all, and no one pretended that she was worth more than eighty francs, if as much.

  Then, one morning, San Miniato found Ruggiero waiting outside his door when he came out. The sailor grew leaner and more silent every day, but San Miniato seemed to grow stouter and more talkative.

  “If you would like to go after crabs this evening, Excellency,” said the former, “the weather is good and they are swarming on the rocks everywhere.”

  “What does one do with them?” asked San Miniato. “Are they good to eat?”

  “One knows that, Excellency. We put them into a kettle with milk, and they drink all the milk in the night and the next day they are good to cook.”

  “Can we take the ladies, Ruggiero?”

  “In the sail boat, Excellency, and then, if you like, you and the Signorina can go with me in the little one with my brother, and I will pull while Bastianello and your Excellency take the crabs.”

  “Very well. Then get a small boat ready for to-night, Ruggiero.”

  “I have one of my own, Excellency.”

  “So much the better. If the ladies will not go, you and I can go alone.”

  “Yes, Excellency.”

  San Miniato wondered why Ruggiero was so pale.

  CHAPTER XI.

  AGAIN THE MOTHER and daughter were together in the cool shade of their terrace. Outside, it was very hot, for the morning breeze did not yet stir the brown linen curtains which kept out the glare of the sea, and myriads of locusts were fiddling their eternal two notes without pause or change of pitch, in every garden from Massa to Scutari point, which latter is the great bluff from which they quarry limestone for road making, and which shuts off the amphitheatre of Sorrento from the view of Castellamare to eastward. The air was dry, hot and full of life and sound, as it is in the far south in summer.

  “And when do you propose to marry me?” asked Beatrice in a discontented tone.

  “Dearest child,” answered her mother, “you speak as though I were marrying you by force to a man whom you detest.”

  “That is exactly what you are doing.”

  The Marchesa raised her eyebrows, fanned herself lazily and smiled.

  “Are we to begin the old argument every morning, my dear?” she asked. “It always ends in the same way, and you always say the same dreadful things to me. I really cannot bear it much longer. You know very well that you bound yourself, and that you were quite free to tell San Miniato that you did not care for him. A girl should know her own mind before she tells a man she loves him — just as a man should before he speaks.”

  “San Miniato certainly knows his own mind,” retorted Beatrice viciously. “No one can accuse him of not being ready and anxious to marry me — and my fortune.”

  “How you talk, my angel! Of course if you had no fortune, or much less than you have, he could not think of marrying you. That is clear. I never pretended the contrary. But that does not contradict the fact that he loves you to distraction, if that is what you want.”

  “To distraction!” repeated Beatrice with scorn.

  “Why not, dearest child? Do you think a man cannot love because he is poor?”

  “That is not the question, mamma!” cried Beatrice impatiently. “You know it is not. But no woman can be deceived twice by the same comedy, and few would be deceived once. You know as well as I that it was all a play the other night, that he was trying to find words, as he was trying to find sentiments, and that when the words would not be found he thought it would be efficacious to seize my hand and kiss it. I daresay he thought I believed him — of course he did. But not for long — oh! not for long. Real love finds even fewer words, but it finds them better, and the ring of them is truer, and one remembers them longer!”

  “Beatrice!” exclaimed the Marchesa. “What can you know of such things! You talk as though some man had dared to speak to you—”

  “Do I?” asked the girl with sudden coldness, and a strange look came into her eyes, which her mother did not see.

  “Yes, you do. And yet I know that it is impossible. Besides the whole discussion is useless and wears me out, though it seems to interest you. Of course you will marry San Miniato. When you have got past this absurd humour you will see what a good husband you have got, and you will be very happy.”

  “Happy! With that man!” Beatrice’s lip curled.

  “You will,” answered her mother, taking no notice. “Happiness depends upon two things in this world, when marriage is concerned. Money and a good disposition. You have both, between you, and you will be happy.”

  “I never heard anything more despicable!” cried the young girl. “Money and disposition! And what becomes of the heart?”

  The Marchesa smiled and fanned herself.

  “Young girls without experience cannot understand these things,” she said. “Wait till you are older.”

  “And lose what looks I have and the power to enjoy anything! And you say that you are not forcing me into this marriage! And you try to think, or to make me think, that it is all for the best, and all delightful and all easy, when you are sacrificing me and my youth and my life and my happiness to the mere idea of a better position in society — because poor papa was a sulphur merchant and bought a title which was only confirmed because he spent a million on a public charity — and every one knows it — and the Count of San Miniato comes of people who have been high and mighty gentlemen for six or seven hundred years, more or less. That is your point of view, and you know it. But if I say that my father worked hard to get what he got and deserved it, and was an honest man, and that this great personage of San Miniato is a penniless gambler, who does not know to-day where he will find pocket money for to-morrow, and has got by a trick the fortune my father got by hard work — then you will not like it. Then you will throw up your hands and cry ‘Beatrice!’ Then you will tell me that he loves me to distraction, and you will even try to make me think that I love him. It is all a miserable sham, mamma, a vile miserable sham! Give it up. I have said that I will marry him, since it appears that I have promised. But do not try to make me think that I am marrying him of my own free will, or he marrying me out of disinterested, pure, beautiful, upright affection!”

  Having delivered herself of these particularly strong sentiments, Beatrice was silent for a while. As for the Marchesa, she was either too wise, or too lazy
, to answer her daughter for the present and she slowly fanned herself, lying quite still in her long chair, her eyes half closed and her left hand hanging down beside her.

  Indeed Beatrice, instead of becoming more reconciled with the situation she had accepted, was growing more impatient and unhappy every day, as she realised all that her marriage with San Miniato would mean during the rest of her natural life. She had quite changed her mind about him, and with natures like hers such sudden changes are often irrevocable. She could not now understand how she could have ever liked him, or found pleasure in his society, and when she thought of the few words she had spoken and which had decided her fate, she could not comprehend the state of mind which had led her into such a piece of folly, and she was as angry with herself as, for the time being, she was angry with all the world besides.

  She saw, too, and for the first time, how lonely she was in the world, and a deep and burning longing for real love and sympathy took possession of her. She had friends, of course, as young girls have, of much her own age and not unlike her in their inexperienced ideas of life. But there was not one of them at Sorrento, nor had she met any one among the many acquaintances she had made, to whom she would care to turn. Even her own intimate associates from childhood, who were far away in Sicily, or travelling elsewhere, would not have satisfied her. They could not have understood her, their answers to her questions would have seemed foolish and worthless, and they would have tormented her with questions of their own, inopportune, importunate, tiresome. She herself did not know that what she craved was the love or the friendship of one strong, honest man.

  It was strange to find out suddenly how wide was the breach which separated her from her mother, with whom she had lived so happily throughout her childhood and early youth, with whom she had agreed — or rather, who had agreed with her — on the whole almost without a discussion. It was hard to find in her now so little warmth of heart, so little power to understand, above all such a display of determination and such quiet force in argument. Very indolent women are sometimes very deceptive in regard to the will they hold in reserve, but Beatrice could not have believed that her mother could influence her as she had done. She reflected that it had surely been within the limits of the Marchesa’s choice to take her daughter’s side so soon as she had seen that the latter had mistaken her own feelings. She need not have agreed with San Miniato, on that fatal evening at Tragara, that the marriage was definitely settled, until she had at least exchanged a word with Beatrice herself.