After all, they were very common people. They ought to be glad to have her. Look how Madame snapped up that brooch! And look what an uncouth lout Ciccio was! After all, she was demeaning herself shamefully staying with them in common, sordid lodgings. After all, she had been bred up differently from that. They had horribly low standards—such low standards—not only of morality, but of life altogether. Really, she had come down in the world, conforming to such standards of life. She evoked the images of her mother and Miss Frost: ladies, and noble women both. Whatever could she be thinking of herself!
However, there was time for her to retrace her steps. She had not given herself away. Except to Ciccio. And her heart burned when she thought of him, partly with anger and mortification, partly, alas, with undeniable and unsatisfied love. Let her bridle as she might, her heart burned, and she wanted to look at him, she wanted him to notice her. And instinct told her that he might ignore her forever. She went to her room an unhappy woman, and wept and fretted till morning, chafing between humiliation and yearning.
X
The Fall of Manchester House
Alvina rose chastened and wistful. As she was doing her hair, she heard the plaintive nasal sound of Ciccio’s mandolin. She looked down the mixed vista of backyards and little gardens, and was able to catch sight of a portion of Ciccio, who was sitting on a box in the blue-brick yard of his house, bareheaded and in his shirtsleeves, twitching away at the wailing mandolin. It was not a warm morning, but there was a streak of sunshine. Alvina had noticed that Ciccio did not seem to feel the cold, unless it were a wind or a driving rain. He was playing the wildly-yearning Neapolitan songs, of which Alvina knew nothing. But, although she only saw a section of him, the glimpse of his head was enough to rouse in her that overwhelming fascination, which came and went in spells. His remoteness, his southernness, something velvety and dark. So easily she might miss him altogether! Within a hair’s-breadth she had let him disappear.
She hurried down. Geoffrey opened the door to her. She smiled at him in a quick, luminous smile, a magic change in her.
“I could hear Ciccio playing,” she said.
Geoffrey spread his rather thick lips in a smile, and jerked his head in the direction of the back door, with a deep, intimate look into Alvina’s eyes, as if to say his friend was lovesick.
“Shall I go through?” said Alvina.
Geoffrey laid his large hand on her shoulder for a moment, looked into her eyes, and nodded. He was a broad-shouldered fellow, with a rather flat, handsome face, well-coloured, and with the look of the Alpine ox about him, slow, eternal, even a little mysterious. Alvina was startled by the deep, mysterious look in his dark-fringed ox-eyes. The odd arch of his eyebrows made him suddenly seem not quite human to her. She smiled to him again, startled. But he only inclined his head, and with his heavy hand on her shoulder gently impelled her towards Ciccio.
When she came out at the back she smiled straight into Ciccio’s face, with her sudden, luminous smile. His hand on the mandolin trembled into silence. He sat looking at her with an instant reestablishment of knowledge. And yet she shrank from the long, inscrutable gaze of his black-set, tawny eyes. She resented him a little. And yet she went forward to him and stood so that her dress touched him. And still he gazed up at her, with the heavy, unspeaking look, that seemed to bear her down: he seemed like some creature that was watching her for his purposes. She looked aside at the black garden, which had a wiry gooseberry bush.
“You will come with me to Woodhouse?” she said.
He did not answer till she turned to him again. Then, as she met his eyes,
“To Woodhouse?” he said, watching her, to fix her.
“Yes,” she said, a little pale at the lips.
And she saw his eternal smile of triumph slowly growing round his mouth. She wanted to cover his mouth with her hand. She preferred his tawny eyes with their black brows and lashes. His eyes watched her as a cat watches a bird, but without the white gleam of ferocity. In his eyes was a deep, deep sun-warmth, something fathomless, deepening black and abysmal, but somehow sweet to her.
“Will you?” she repeated.
But his eyes had already begun to glimmer their consent. He turned aside his face, as if unwilling to give a straight answer.
“Yes,” he said.
“Play something to me,” she cried.
He lifted his face to her, and shook his head slightly.
“Yes do,” she said, looking down on him.
And he bent his head to the mandolin, and suddenly began to sing a Neapolitan song, in a faint, compressed head-voice, looking up at her again as his lips moved, looking straight into her face with a curious mocking caress as the muted voix blanche came through his lips at her, amid the louder quavering of the mandolin. The sound penetrated her like a thread of fire, hurting, but delicious, the high thread of his voice. She could see the Adam’s apple move in his throat, his brows tilted as he looked along his lashes at her all the time. Here was the strange sphinx singing again, and herself between its paws! She seemed almost to melt into his power.
Madame intervened to save her.
“What, serenade before breakfast! You have strong stomachs, I say. Eggs and ham are more the question, hein? Come, you smell them, don’t you?”
A flicker of contempt and derision went over Ciccio’s face as he broke off and looked aside.
“I prefer the serenade,” said Alvina. “I’ve had ham and eggs before.”
“You do, hein? Well—always, you won’t. And now you must eat the ham and eggs, however. Yes? Isn’t it
