“Will you be quiet?” exploded Bushmill. “It may be funny to you, but I don’t like to make bad bets, and I’m pretty sore.”
“What nonsense!” remarked Hallie cheerfully. “Why, you were laughing a minute ago!”
“Laughing! You mean at that idiotic account book? Who wouldn’t laugh? Four titles at five hundred francs a head! One baptismal font to American church for presence of clergyman at tea. It’s like the log book of a lunatic asylum!”
“Never mind,” said Hallie. “You can charge the baptismal font off your income tax.”
“That’s consoling,” said her father grimly. “Nevertheless, this young man will spend no more of my money for me.”
“But still he’s a wonderful guide. He knows everything—don’t you? All about the monuments and catacombs and the Battle of Waterloo.”
“Will you please let me talk to Mr. Corcoran?” Hallie was silent. “Mrs Bushmill and my daughter and Mr. Nosby are going to take a trip through Italy as far as Sicily, where Mr. Nosby has some business, and they want you—that is, Hallie and her mother think they would get more out of it if you went along. Understand—it isn’t going to be any royal fandango this time. You’ll get your salary and your expenses and that’s all you’ll get. Do you want to go?”
“No, thanks, Mr. Bushmill,” said Corcoran quietly. “I’m going back to Paris at noon.”
“You’re not!” cried Hallie indignantly. “Why—why how am I going to know which is the Forum and the—the Acropolis and all that?” She rose from her father’s knee. “Look here, daddy, I can persuade him.” Before they guessed her intentions she had seized Corcoran’s arm, dragged him into the hall and closed the door behind her.
“You’ve got to come,” she said intensely. “Don’t you understand? I’ve seen Claude in a new light and I can’t marry him and I don’t dare tell father, and I’ll go mad if we have to go away with him alone.”
The door opened and Mr. Nosby peered suspiciously out into the hall.
“It’s all right,” cried Hallie. “He’ll come. It was just a question of more salary and he was too shy to say anything about it.”
As they went back in Bushmill looked from one to the other.
“Why do you think you ought to get more salary?”
“So he can spend it, of course,” explained Hallie triumphantly. “He’s got to keep his hand in, hasn’t he?”
This unanswerable argument closed the discussion. Corcoran was to go to Italy with them as courier and guide at three hundred and fifty dollars a month, an advance of some fifty dollars over what he had received before. From Sicily they were to proceed by boat to Marseilles, where Mr. Bushmill would meet them. After that Mr. Corcoran’s services would be no longer required—the Bushmills and Mr. Nosby would sail immediately for home.
They left next morning. It was evident even before they reached Italy that Mr. Nosby had determined to run the expedition in his own way. He was aware that Hallie was less docile and less responsive than she had been before she came abroad, and when he spoke of the wedding a curious vagueness seemed to come over her, but he knew that she adored her father and that in the end she would do whatever her father liked. It was only a question of getting her back to America before any silly young men, such as this unbalanced spendthrift, had the opportunity of infecting her with any nonsense. Once in the factory town and in the little circle where she had grown up, she would slip gently back into the attitude she had held before.
So for the first four weeks of the tour he was never a foot from her side, and at the same time he managed to send Corcoran on a series of useless errands which occupied much of his time. He would get up early in the morning, arrange that Corcoran should take Mrs. Bushmill on a day’s excursion and say nothing to Hallie until they were safely away. For the opera in Milan, the concerts in Rome, he bought tickets for three, and on all automobile trips he made it plain to Corcoran that he was to sit with the chauffeur outside.
In Naples they were to stop for a day and take the boat trip to the Island of Capri in order to visit the celebrated Blue Grotto. Then, returning to Naples, they would motor south and cross to Sicily. In Naples Mr. Nosby received a telegram from Mr. Bushmill, in Paris, which he did not read to the others, but folded up and put into his pocket. He told them, however, that on their way to the Capri steamer he must stop for a moment at an Italian bank.
Mrs. Bushmill had not come along that morning, and Hallie and Corcoran waited outside in the cab. It was the first time in four weeks that they had been together without Mr. Nosby’s stiff, glossy presence hovering near.
“I’ve got to talk to you,” said Hallie in low voice. “I’ve tried so many times, but it’s almost impossible. He got father to say that if you molested me, or even were attentive to me, he could send you immediately home.”
“I shouldn’t have come,” answered Corcoran despairingly. “It was a terrible mistake. But I want to see you alone just once—if only to say good-by.”
As Nosby hurried out of the bank, he broke off and bent his glance casually down the street, pretending to be absorbed in some interesting phenomenon that was taking place there. And suddenly, as if life were playing up to his subterfuge, an interesting phenomenon did immediately take place on the corner in front of the bank. A man in his shirt sleeves rushed suddenly out of the side street, seized the shoulder of a small, swarthy hunchback standing there and, swinging him quickly around, pointed at their taxicab. The man in his shirt sleeves had not even looked at them—it was as if he had known that they would be there.
The hunchback nodded and instantly both of them disappeared, the first man into the side street which had yielded him up, the hunchback into nowhere at all. The incident took place so quickly that it made only an odd visual impression upon Corcoran—he did not have occasion to think of it again until they returned from Capri eight hours later.
The Bay of Naples was rough as they set out that morning, and the little steamer staggered like a drunken man through the persistent waves. Before long Mr. Nosby’s complexion was running through a gamut of yellows, pale creams and ghostly whites, but he insisted that he scarcely noticed the motion and forced Hallie to accompany him in an incessant promenade up and down the deck.
When the steamer reached the coast of the rocky, cheerful little island, dozens of boats put out from shore and swarmed about dizzily in the waves as they waited for passengers to the Blue Grotto. The constant Saint Vitus” dance which they performed in the surf turned Mr. Nosby from a respectable white to a bizarre and indecent blue and compelled him to a sudden decision.
“It’s too rough,” he announced. “We won’t go.”
Hallie, watching fascinated from the rail, paid no attention. Seductive cries were floating up from below:
“Theesa a good boat, lady an” ge’man!”
“I spik American—been America two year!”
“Fine sunny day for go to see Blue Grotte!”
The first passengers had already floated off, two to a boat, and now Hallie was drifting with the next batch down the gangway.
“Where are you going, Hallie?” shouted Mr. Nosby. “It’s too dangerous today. We’re going to stay on board.”
Hallie, half down the gangway, looked back over her shoulder.
“Of course I’m going!” she cried. “Do you think I’d come all the way to Capri and miss the Blue Grotto?”
Nosby took one more look at the sea, then he turned hurriedly away. Already Hallie, followed by Corcoran, had stepped into one of the small boats and was waving him a cheerful good-by.
They approached the shore, heading for a small dark opening in the rocks. When they arrived, the boatman ordered them to sit on the floor of the boat to keep from being bumped against the low entrance. A momentary passage through darkness, then a vast space opened up around them and they were in a bright paradise of ultramarine, a cathedral cave where the water and air and the high-vaulted roof were of the most radiant and opalescent blue.
“Ver” pret’,” singsonged the boatman. He ran his oar through the water and they watched it turn to an incredible silver.
“I’m going to put my hand in!” said Hallie, enraptured. They were both kneeling now, and as she leaned forward to plunge her hand under the surface the strange light enveloped them like a spell and their lips touched—then all the world turned to blue and silver, or else this was not the world, but a delightful enchantment in which they would dwell forever.
“Ver” beaut’ful,” sang the boatman. “Come back see Blue Grotte tomorrow, next day. Ask for Frederico, fine man for Blue Grotte. Oh, chawming!”
Again their lips sought each other, and blue and silver seemed to soar like rockets above them, burst and shower down about their shoulders in protective atoms of color, screening them from time, from sight. They kissed again. The voices of tourists were seeking echoes here and there about the cave. A brown naked boy dived from a high rock, cleaving the water like a silver fish, and starting a thousand platinum bubbles to churn up through the blue light.
“I love
