Gaspare, too, played his part. When Hermione spoke to him of returning
to the priest's house, almost wildly, and with the hot energy that
bursts so readily up in Sicilians, he begged her not to go back to the
/maledetta casa/ in which his Padrone's dead body had lain. As he
spoke a genuine fear of the cottage came upon him. All the latent
superstition that dwells in the contadino was stirred as dust by a
wind. In clouds it flew up about his mind. Fear looked out of his
great eyes. Dread was eloquent in his gestures. And he, too, referred
to the child, to the /povera piccola bambina/. It would cast ill-luck
on the child to bring her up in a chamber of death. Her saint would
forsake her. She too would die. The boy worked himself up into a
fever. His face was white. Drops of sweat stood on his forehead.

He had set out to be deceptive--what he would have called /un poco
birbante/, and he had even deceived himself. He knew that it would be
dangerous for his Padrona to live again near Marechiaro. Any day a
chance scrap of gossip might reach her ears. In time she would be
certain almost to hear something of the dead Padrone's close
acquaintance with the dwellers in the Casa delle Sirene. She would
question him, perhaps. She would suspect something. She would inquire.
She would search. She would find out the hideous truth. It was this
fear which made him argue on the same side as Artois. But in doing so
he caught another fear from his own words. He became really natural,
really truthful in his fear. And--she scarcely knew why--Hermione was
even more governed by him than by Artois. He had lived with them in
the Casa del Prete, had been an intimate part of their life there. And
he was Sicilian of the soil. The boy had a real power to move, to
dominate her, which he did not then suspect.