When the cards were thrown upon the table, and Maurice had dealt out a
lira to each one of the players as stakes, and cried, "Maddalena and I'll
share against you, Salvatore, and Gaspare!" she felt that she had nothing
more to wish for, that she was perfectly happy. But she was happier still
when, after a series of games, Maurice pushed back his chair and said: "I've had enough. Salvatore, you are like Gaspare, you have the devil's
luck. Together you can't be beaten. But now you play against each other
and let's see who wins. I'll put down twenty-five lire. Play till one of
you's won every soldo of it. Play all night if you like."
And he counted out the little paper notes on the table, giving two to
Salvatore and two to Gaspare, and putting one under a candlestick.
"I'll keep the score," he added, pulling out a pencil and a sheet of
paper. "No play higher than fifty, with a lira when one of you makes
'sette e mezzo' with under four cards."
"Per Dio!" cried Gaspare, flushed with excitement. "Avanti, Salvatore!"
"Avanti, Avanti!" cried Salvatore, in answer, pulling his chair close up
to the table, and leaning forward, looking like a handsome bird of prey
in the faint candlelight.
They cut for deal and began to play, while Maddalena and Maurice watched.
When Sicilians gamble they forget everything but the game and the money
which it brings to them or takes from them. Salvatore and Gaspare were at
once passionately intent on their cards, and as the night drew on and
fortune favored first one and then the other, they lost all thought of
everything except the twenty-five lire which were at stake. When
Maddalena slipped away into the darkness they did not notice her
departure, and when Maurice laid down the paper on which he had tried to
keep the score, and followed her, they were indifferent. They needed no
score-keeper, for they had Sicilian memories for money matters. Over the
table they leaned, the two candles, now burning low, illuminating their
intense faces, their violent eyes, their brown hands that dealt and
gathered up the cards, and held them warily, alert for the cheating that
in Sicily, when possible, is ever part of the game.
"Carta da cinquanta!"
They had forgotten Maurice's limit for the stakes.
"Carta da cento!"
Their voices died away from Maurice's ears as he stole through the
darkness seeking Maddalena.
Where had she gone, and why? The last question he could surely answer,
for as she stole past him silently, her long, mysterious eyes, that
seemed to hold in their depths some enigma of the East, had rested on his
with a glance that was an invitation. They had not boldly summoned him.
They had lured him, as an echo might, pathetic in its thrilling frailty.
And now, as he walked softly over the dry grass, he thought of those eyes
as he had first seen them in the pale light that had preceded the dawn.
Then they had been full of curiosity, like a young animal's. Now surely
they were changed. Once they had asked a question. They delivered a
summons to-night. What was in them to-night? The mystery of young
maidenhood, southern, sunlit, on the threshold of experience, waking to
curious knowledge, to a definite consciousness of the meaning of its
dreams, of the truth of its desires.