She had unwittingly given the boy the chance to save her from any worse
suspicion. With Sicilian sharpness he seized it. Till now he had been in
a dilemma, and it was that which had made him sullen, almost rude. His
position was a difficult one. He had to keep his padrone's confidence.
Yet he could not--physically he could not--stay on the mountain when he
knew that some tragedy was probably being enacted, or had already been
enacted by the sea. He was devoured by an anxiety which he could not
share and ought not to show because it was caused by the knowledge which
he was solemnly pledged to conceal. This remark of Hermione gave him a
chance of shifting it from the shoulders of the truth to the shoulders of
a lie. He remembered the morning of sirocco, his fear, his passion of
tears in the boat. The memory seemed almost to make the lie he was going
to tell the truth.
"Si, signora. It was that."
His voice was no longer sullen.
"The padrone had an attack like that?"
Again the terrible fear came back to her.
"Signora, it was one morning."
"Used you to bathe in the morning?"
A hot flush came in Gaspare's face, but Hermione did not see it in the
darkness.
"Once we did, signora. We had been fishing."
"Go on. Tell me!"
Then Gaspare related the incident of his padrone's sinking in the sea.
Only he made Maurice's travesty appear a real catastrophe. Hermione
listened with painful attention. So Maurice had nearly died, had been
into the jaws of death, while she had been in Africa! Her fears there had
been less ill-founded than she had thought. A horror came upon her as she
heard Gaspare's story.
"And then, signora, I cried," he ended. "I cried."
"You cried?"
"I thought I never could stop crying again."
How different from an English boy's reticence was this frank confession!
and yet what English boy was ever more manly than this mountain lad?
"Why--but then you saved the padrone's life! God bless you!"
Hermione had stopped, and she now put her hand on Gaspare's arm.
"Oh, signora, there were two of us. We had the boat."
"But"--another thought came to her--"but, Gaspare, after such a thing as
that, how could you let the padrone go down to bathe alone?"
Gaspare, a moment before credited with a faithful action, was now to be
blamed for a faithless one. For neither was he responsible, if strict
truth were to be regarded. But he had insisted on saving his padrone from
the sea when it was not necessary. And he knew his own faithfulness and
was secretly proud of it, as a good woman knows and is proud of her
honor. He had borne the praise therefore. But one thing he could not
bear, and that was an imputation of faithlessness in his stewardship.