There were two weeks of golden days. The sun rose clear over the green hills behind the villa, and dropped at night into the blue sea the other side of Rome. Daphne counted off the minutes in pulse beats that were actual pleasure. Between box hedges, past the clusters of roses, chrysanthemums, and dahlias in the villa garden, she walked, wondering that she had never known before that the mere crawling of the blood through the veins could mean joy. She was utterly alone, solitary, speechless; there were moments when the thought of her sister's present trouble, and of the letter she was expecting from New York, would take the color from the sky; but no vexatious thought could long resist the enchantment of this air, and she forgot to be unhappy. She saw no more of the shepherd god, but always she was conscious of a presence in the sunshine on the hills.
On the eighth morning, as she paced the garden walks, a lizard scampered from her path, and she chased it as a five year old child might have done. A slim cypress tree stood in her way; she grasped it in her arms, and held it, laying her cheek against it as if it were a friend. Some new sense was dawning in her of kinship with branch and flower. She was forgetting how to think; she was Daphne, the Greek maiden, whose life was half the life of a tree.
When she took her arms from the tree she saw that he was there, looking at her from over the hedge, with the golden brown lights in eyes and hair, and the smile that had no touch of amusement in it, only of happiness.
"Sometimes," he murmured, "you remind me of Hebe, but on the whole, I think you are more like my sister Diana."
"Tell me about Diana," begged Daphne, coming near the hedge and putting one hand on the close green leaves.
"We were great friends as children," observed Apollo. "It was I who taught her how to hunt, and we used to chase each other in the woods. When I went faster then she did, she used to get angry and say she would not play. Oh, those were glorious mornings, when the light was clear at dawn!"
"Why are you here?" asked Daphne abruptly, "and, if you will excuse me, where did you come from?"
"Surely you have heard about the gods being exiled from Greece! We wander, for the world has cast us out. Some day they will need us again, and will pluck the grass from our shrines, and then we shall come back to teach them."
"Teach them what?" asked the girl. She could make out nothing from the mystery of that face, and besides, she did not dare to look too closely.
"I should teach them joy," he answered simply.
They were so silent, looking at each other over the dark green hedge, that the lizards crept back in the sunshine close to their feet. Daphne's blue gown and smooth dark hair were outlined against the deep green of her cypress tree. A grapevine that had grown about the tree threw the shadow of delicate leaf and curling tendril on her pale cheek and scarlet lips. The expression of the heathen god as he looked at her denoted entire satisfaction.
"I know what you would teach them," she said slowly. "You would show them how to ignore suffering and pain. You would turn your back on need. Oh, that makes me think that I have forgotten to take your friend Antoli any soup lately! For three days I took it, and then, and then—I have been worried about things."
His smile was certainly one of amusement now.
"You must pardon me for seeming to change the subject," he said. "Why should you worry? There is nothing in life worth worrying about."
Fine scorn crept into the girl's face.
"No," he continued, answering her expression. "I don't ignore. I am glad because I have chosen to be glad, and because I have won my content. There is a strenuous peace for those who can fight their way through to it."
Suddenly, through the beauty of his color, the girl saw, graven as with a fine tool upon his face, a story of grief mastered. In the lines of chin and mouth and forehead it lurked there, half hidden by his smile.
"Tell me," said Daphne impulsively. Her hand moved nearer on the hedge, but she did not know it. He shook his head, and the veil dropped again.
"Why tell?" he asked. "Isn't there present misery enough before our eyes always, without remembering the old?"
She only gazed at him, with a puzzled frown on her forehead.
"So you think it is your duty to worry?" he asked, the joyous note coming back into his voice.
Daphne broke into a smile.
"I suppose I do," she confessed. "And it's so hard here. I keep forgetting."
"Why do you want to remember?"
"It is so selfish not to."
He nodded, with an air of ancient wisdom.
"I have lived on this earth more years than you have, some thousands, you remember, and I can assure you that more people forget their fellows because of their own troubles than because of their own joys."
The girl pulled at a tendril of the vine with her fingers, eyeing her companion keenly.
"I presume," she said, with a tremor in her voice, "that you are an Englishman, or an American who has studied Greek thought deeply, being tired of modern people and modern ways, and that you are trying to get back to an older, simpler way of living."
"It has ever been the custom," said Apollo, gently taking the tendril of the vine from her fingers, "for a nation to refuse to believe the divinity of the others' gods."
"Anyway," mused the girl, not quite conscious that she was speaking aloud, "whatever you think, you are good to the shepherd."
He laughed outright.
"I find that most people are better than their beliefs," he answered. "Now, Miss Willis, I wonder if I dare ask you questions about the way of living that has brought you to believe in the divine efficacy of unhappiness."
"My father is a clergyman," answered the girl, with a smile.
"Exactly!" said the heathen god.
"We have lived very quietly, in one of the streets of older New York. I won't tell you the number, for of course it would not mean anything to you."
"Of course not," said Apollo.
"He is rector of a queer little old-fashioned church that has existed since the days of Washington. It is quaint and irregular, and I am very fond of it."
"It isn't the Little Church of All the Saints?" demanded her companion.
"It is. How did you know?"
"Divination," he answered.
"Oh!" said Daphne. "Why don't you divine the rest?"
"I should rather hear you tell it, if you don't mind."
"I have studied with my father a great deal," she went on. "And then, there have been a great many social things, for I have an aunt who entertains a great deal, and she always needs me to help her. That has been fun, too."
"Then it has been religion and dinners," he summarized briefly.
"It has."
"With a Puritan ancestry, I suppose?"
"For a god," murmured Daphne, "it seems to me you know a great deal too much about some things, and not enough about others."
"I have brought you something," he said, suddenly changing the subject.
He lifted the sheepskin coat and held out to her a tiny lamb, whose heavy legs hung helpless, and whose skin shone pink through the little curls of wool. The girl stretched out her arms and gathered the little creature in them.
"A warm place to lie, and warm milk are what it needs," he said. "It was born out of its time, and its mother lies dead on the hills. Spring is for birth, not autumn."
Daphne watched him as he went back to his sheep, then turned toward the house. Giacomo and Assunta saw her coming in her blue dress between the beds of flowers with the lambkin in her arms.
"Like our Lady!" said Assunta, hurrying to the rescue.
The two brown ones asked no questions, possibly because of the difficulty of conversing with the Signorina, possibly from some profounder reason.
"Maybe the others do not see him," thought the girl in perplexity. "Maybe I dream him, but this lamb is real."
She sat in the sun on the marble steps of the villa, the lamb on her lap. A yellow bowl of milk stood on the floor, close to the little white head that dangled from her blue knee. Daphne, acting on Assunta's directions, curled one little finger under the milk and offered the tip of it to the lamb to suck. He responded eagerly, and so she wheedled him into forgetfulness of his dead mother.
An hour later, as she paced the garden paths, a faint bleat sounded at the hem of her skirt, and four unsteady legs supported a weak little body that tumbled in pursuit of her.
Up the long smooth road that lay by the walls of the villa came toiling a team of huge grayish oxen, with monstrous spreading horns tied with blue ribbons. The cart that they drew was filled with baskets loaded with grapes, and a whiff of their fragrance smote Daphne's nostrils as she walked on the balcony in the morning air.
"Assunta, Assunta!" she cried, leaning over the gray, moss-coated railing, "what is it?"
Assunta was squatting on the ground in the garden below, digging with a blunt knife at the roots of a garden fern. There was a gray red cotton shawl over her head, and a lilac apron upon her knees.
"It's the vintage, Signorina," she answered, "the wine makes itself."
"Everything does itself in this most lazy country," remarked Daphne. "Dresses make themselves, boots repair themselves, food eats itself. There's just one idiom, si fa,"—
"What?" asked Assunta.
"Reflections," answered the girl, smiling down on her. "Assunta, may I go and help pick grapes?"
"Ma che!" screamed the peasant woman, losing her balance in her sudden emotion and going down on her knees in the loosened soil.
"The Signorina, the sister of the Contessa, go to pick grapes in the vineyard?"
"Si'" answered Daphne amiably. Her face was alive with laughter.
"But the Contessa would die of shame!" asserted Assunta, rising with bits of dirt clinging to her apron, and gesticulating with the knife. "It would be a scandal, and all the pickers would say, 'Behold the mad English-Woman!'"
She looked up beseechingly at her mistress. She and Giacomo never could tell beforehand which sentences the Signorina was going to understand.
"Come with me!" coaxed the girl.
"But does the Signorina want to"—
"I want everything!" Daphne interrupted. "Grapes and flowers and wine and air and sunshine. I want to see and feel and taste and touch and smell everything there is. The days are too short to take it all in. Hurry!"
As most of this outburst was in English, Assunta could do nothing but look up with an air of deepened reproach. Daphne disappeared from the railing, and a minute later was at Assunta's side.
"Come, come, come!" she cried, pulling her by the lilac apron. "Our time is brief, and we must gather rosebuds while we may. I am young and you are old, and neither of us has any time to lose."
Before she knew it, Assunta was trotting meekly down the road at the young lady's heels, carrying a great flat basket for the Signorina's use in picking grapes.
They were bound for the lower slopes; the grapes ripened earlier there, the peasant woman explained, and the frosts came later. The loaded wagons that they met were going to Arata, a wine press in the valley beyond this nearest hill. Perhaps the Signorina would like to go there to see the new wine foaming in the vat? Strangers often went to see this.
Daphne's blood went singing through her veins with some new sense of freedom and release, for the gospel of this heathen god was working in her pulses. Wistfully her eyes wandered over the lovely slopes with their clothing of olive and of vine, and up and down the curling long white roads. At some turning of the way, or at some hilltop where the road seemed to touch the blue sky, surely she would see him coming with that look of divine content upon his face!
Suddenly she realized that they were inside the vineyard walls, for fragrance assailed her nostrils, fragrance of ripened grapes, of grapes crushed under foot as the swift pickers went snipping the full purple bunches with their shears.
"I shall see Bacchus coming next," she said to herself, but hoping that it would not be Bacchus. "He will go singing down the hill with the Maenads behind him, with fluttering hair and draperies."
It was not nearly so picturesque as she had hoped, she confessed to herself, as her thoughts came down to their customary level. The vineyard of her dreams, with its long, trailing vines, was not found in this country; there were only close-clipped plants trained to stakes. But there was a sound of talking and of laughter, and the pickers, moving among the even lines in their gay rags, lent motley color to the picture. There was scarlet of waistcoat or of petticoat, blue and saffron of jacket and apron, and a blending of all bright tints in the kerchiefs above the hair. The rich dark soil made a background for it all: the moving figures, the clumps of pale green vine leaves, the great baskets of piled-up grapes.
Assunta was chattering eagerly with a young man who smiled, and took off his hat to the Signorina, and said something polite, with a show of white teeth. Daphne did not know what it was, but she took the pair of scissors that were given her, and began to cut bunch after bunch of grapes. If she had realized that the peasant woman, her heart full of shame, had confessed to the overseer her young lady's whim, and had won permission for her to join the ranks of the pickers, she might have been less happy. As it was, she noticed nothing, but diligently cut her grapes, piling them, misty with bloom, flecked with gold sunlights, in her basket. Then she found a flat stone and sat on it, watching the workers and slowly eating a great bunch of grapes. She had woven green leaves into the cord of her red felt hat; the peasants as they passed smiled back to her in swift recognition of her friendliness and charm.
Her thoughts flamed up within her with sudden anger at herself. This vivid joy in the encompassing beauty had but one meaning: it was her sense of the glad presence of this new creature, man or god, who seemed continually with her, were he near or far.
"I'm as foolish as a sixteen-year-old girl," she murmured, fingering the grapes in the basket with their setting of green leaves, "and yet, and yet he isn't a man, really; he is only a state of mind!"
She sat, with the cool air of autumn on her cheeks, watching the pickers, who went with even motion up the great slope. Sometimes there was silence on the hillside; now and then there was a fragment of song. One gay, tripping air, started by three women who stood idle with arms akimbo for a moment on the hillside, was caught up and echoed back by invisible singers on the other side of the hill. And once the red-cheeked Italian lads who were carrying loaded baskets down toward the vineyard gates burst into responsive singing that made her think that she had found, on the Roman hills, some remnant of the old Bacchic music, of the alternate strains that marked the festival of the god of wine. It was something like this:—
Carlo.
"Of all the gifts of all the godsI choose the ruddy wine.The brimming glass shall be my lot"—
Giovanni (interrupting).
"Carlotta shall be mine!Take you the grape, I only askThe shadow of the vineTo screen Carlotta's golden head"—
Carlo (interrupting).
"Give me the ruddy wine."
Together.
G. "Carlotta shall be mine!"C. "Give me the ruddy wine!"
Assunta was visibly happy when the Signorina signified her willingness to go home. The pride of the house servant was touched by being compelled to come too closely in contact with the workers in the fields, and where is there pride like that of a peasant? But her joy was short-lived. Outside the great iron gates stood a team of beautiful fawn-colored oxen, with spotless flanks, and great, blue, patient eyes looking out from under broad foreheads. They were starting, with huge muscles quivering under their white skin, to carry a load of grapes to the wine press, the yield of this year being too great for the usual transportation on donkey back.
"Assunta, I go too," cried Daphne.
Five minutes later the Signorina, with her unwilling handmaid at her side, rode in triumph up the broad highway with the measured motion of slow oxen feet. Place had been made for them among the grape baskets, and they sat on folded blankets, Assunta's face wearing the expression of one who was a captive indeed, the Signorina's shining with simple happiness and somewhat stained by grapes.
The wine press was nothing after all but a machine, and though a certain interest attached to the great vats, hollowed out in the tufa rock, into which the new-made wine trickled, Daphne soon signified her willingness to depart. Before she left they brought her a great glass of rich red grape juice fresh from the newly crushed grapes. She touched her lips to it, then looked about her. Assunta was talking to the workman who had given it to her, and he was looking the other way. She feasted her eyes on the color of the thing she held in her hand. It was a rough glass whose shallow bowl had the old Etruscan curves of beauty, and the crimson wine caught the sunlight in a thousand ways. Bending over, she poured it out slowly on the green grass.
"A libation to Apollo," she said, not without reverence.
"I shall call you," said Daphne to the lamb on the fourth day of his life with her, "I shall call you Hermes, because you go so fast."
Very fast indeed he went. By garden path, or on the slopes below the villa, he followed her with swift gallop, interrupted by many jumps and gambols, and much frisking of his tail. If he lost himself in his wayward pursuit of his mistress, a plaintive bleat summoned her to his side. On the marble stairs of the villa, even in the sacred precincts of the salon, she heard the tinkle of his hard little hoofs, and she had no courage to turn him back. He bleated so piteously outside the door when his lady dined that at last he won the desire of his heart and lapped milk from a bowl on the floor at her side as she ate her salad or broke her grapes.
"What scandal!" muttered Giacomo every time he brought the bowl. The Contessa would discharge him if she knew! But he always remembered, even if Daphne forgot, and meekly dried the milk from his sleek black trousers whenever Hermes playfully dashed his hoof, instead of his nose, into the bowl. As Giacomo explained to Assunta in the kitchen, it was for the Signorina, and the Signorina was very lonely.
She was less lonely with Hermes, for he spoke her language.
"It is almost time to hear from Eustace," Daphne told him one day, as she sat on a stone under an olive tree in the orchard below the house. Hermes stood before her, his head down, his tail dejectedly drooped.
"Perhaps," she added, dreamily looking up at the blue sky through its broken veil of gray-green olive leaves, "perhaps he does not want me back, and the letter will tell me so."
Hermes gave an incredible jump high in the air, lighted on his four feet, pranced, gamboled, curveted.
"It is very hard to know one's duty or to do it, Hermes," said Daphne, patting his woolly brow. Hermes intimated, by means of frisking legs and tail, that he would not try.
"I believe you are bewitched," said the girl, suddenly taking him up in her arms. "I believe you are some little changeling god sent by your master Apollo to put his thoughts into my head."
He squirmed, and she put him down. Then she gave him a harmless slap on his fleecy side.
"But you aren't a good interpreter, Hermes. Some way I think that his joyousness lies the other side of pain. He never ran away from hard things."
This was more than the lambkin could understand or bear, and he fled, hiding from her in the tall fern of a thicket in a corner of the field.
The days were drifting by too fast. Already the Contessa Accolanti had been away three weeks, and her letters held out no hope of an immediate return. Giacomo and Assunta were very sorry for their young mistress, not knowing how little she was sorry for herself, and they tried to entertain her. They had none of the hard exclusiveness of English servants, but admitted her generously to such of their family joys as she would share. Giacomo introduced her to the stables and the horses; Assunta initiated her into some of the mysteries of Italian cooking. Tommaso, the scullion, and Pia, the maid, stood by in grinning delight one day when the Contessa's sister learned to make macaroni.
"Now I know," said Daphne, after she had stood for half an hour under the smoke-browned walls of the kitchen watching Assunta's manipulation of eggs and flour, the long kneading, the rolling out of a thin layer of dough, with the final cutting into thin strips; "to make Sunday and festal-day macaroni you take all the eggs there are, and mix them up with flour, and do all that to it; and then you boil it on the stove, and make a sauce for it out of everything there is in the house, bits of tomato, and parsley, and onion, and all kinds of meat. E vero?"
"Si," said Assunta, marveling at the patois that the Signorina spoke, and wondering if it contained Indian words.
The very sight of the rows of utensils on the kitchen walls deepened the rebellious mood of this descendant of the Puritans.
"Even the pots and pans have lovely shapes," said Daphne wistfully, for the slender necks, the winning curves, the lines of shallow bowl and basin bore testimony to the fact that the meanest thought of this people was a thought of beauty. "I wonder why the Lord gave to them the curve, to us the angle?"
When the macaroni was finished, Assunta invited the Signorina to go with her to a little house set by itself on the sloping hill back of the kitchen.
"E carin', eh?" demanded Assunta, as she opened the door.
Fragrance met them at the threshold, fragrance of fruit and of honey. The warm sun poured in through the dirty, cobwebbed window when Assunta lifted the shade. Ranged on shelves along the wall stood bottles of yellow oil; partly buried in the ground were numerous jars of wine, bottles and jars both keeping the beautiful Etruscan curves. On shallow racks were spread bunches of yellow and of purple grapes, and golden combs of honey gleamed from dusky corners.
"Ecco!" said Assunta, pointing to the wine jar from which she had been filling the bottle in her hand. "The holy cross! Does the Signorina see it?"
"Si," said Daphne.
"And here also?" asked Assunta, pointing to another.
The girl nodded doubtfully. Two irregular scratches could, by imaginative vision, be translated into a cross.
"As on every one, Signorina," said Assunta triumphantly. "And nobody puts it there. It comes by itself."
"Really?" asked the girl.
"Veramente," replied the peasant woman. "It has to, and not only here, but everywhere. You see, years and years ago, there were heathen spirits in the wine, and they made trouble when our Lord came. I have heard that the jars burst and the wine was wasted because the god of the wine was angry that the real God was born. And it lasted till San Pietro came and exorcised the wicked spirit, and he put a cross on a wine jar to keep him away. Since then every wine jar bears somewhere the sign of the cross."
"What became of the poor god?" asked Daphne.
"He fled, I suppose to hell," answered Assunta piously.
"Poor heathen gods!" murmured Daphne.
The sunshine, flooding the little room, fell full on her face, and made red lights in her brown hair.
"There was a god of the sun, too, named Apollo," she said, warming her hands in level rays. "Was he banished too?"
Assunta shrugged her shoulders.
"Who knows? They dare not show their faces here since the Holy Father has blessed the land."
Hermes bleated at the door, and the trio descended the hill together, Assunta carrying a basket of grapes and a bottle of yellow oil, Daphne with a slender flask of red wine in her hand.
The next day the heavens opened, and rain poured down. The cascades above the villa became spouting waterfalls; the narrow path beside them a leaping brook. The rain had not the steady and persistent motion of well-conducted rain; it came in sheets, blown by sudden gusts against the windows, or driven in wild spurts among the cypresses. The world from the villa windows seemed one blur of watery green, with a thin gray veil of mist to hide it.
Daphne paced the mosaic floors in idleness, or spelled out the meaning of Petrarchan sonnets in an old vellum copy she had found in the library. Sometimes she sat brooding in one of the faded gilt and crimson chairs in the salon, by the diminutive fireplace where two or three tiny twigs burned out their lives in an Italian thought of heat.
What did a Greek god do when sunshine disappeared? she wondered. Or had the god of the sun gone away altogether, and was this deluge the result? The shepherd Antoli had been taken home, Giacomo assured her, but he was exceedingly reticent when asked who was herding the sheep, only shrugging his shoulders with a "Chi lo sa?"
On the second day of the rain Daphne saw that the flock had come near the house. From the dining-room window she could see the sheep, with water soaking into their thick wool. Some one was guarding them. With little streams dashing from the drooping felt hat to the sheepskin clad shoulders, the keeper stood, motionless in the pelting rain. The sheep ate greedily the wet, juicy grass, while the shepherd leaned on his staff and watched. Undoubtedly it was Antoli's peasant successor, Daphne thought, as she stood with her face to the dripping window pane. Then the shepherd turned, and she recognized, under the wet hat brim, the glowing color and undaunted smile of her masquerading god. Whether he saw her or not she could not tell, but she stood by the storm-washed window in her scarlet house gown and watched, longing to give him shelter.
He came to her next through music, when the rain clouds had broken away. That divine whistle, mellow, mocking, irresistible, still was heard when morning lay on the hills. Often, when afternoon had touched all the air to gold, when the shadows of chestnut and cypress and gnarled olive lay long on the grass, other sounds floated down to Daphne, music from some instrument that she did not know. It was no harp, surely, yet certain clear, ranging notes seemed to come from the sweeping of harp strings; again, it had all the subtle, penetrating melody of the violin. Whatever instrument gave it forth, it drew the girl's heart after it to wander its own way. When it was gay it won her feet to some dance measure, and all alone in the great empty rooms she would move to it with head thrown back and her whole body swaying in a new sense of rhythm. When it was sad, it set her heart to beating in great throbs, for then it begged and pleaded. There was need in it, a human cry that surely was not the voice of a god. It spoke out of a great yearning that answered to her own. Whether it was swift or slow she loved it, and waited for it day by day, thinking of Apollo and his harping to the muses nine.
So her old life and her old mood slipped away like a garment no longer needed: her days were set to melody, and her nights to pleasant dreams. The jangle of street cars and the twinges of conscience, the noises of her native city, and her heart searchings in the Little Church of All the Saints faded to the remoteness of a faint gray bar of cloud that makes the sunset brighter in the west. She went singing among the olives or past the fountain under the ilexes on the hill: duties and perplexities vanished in the clear sunshine and pleasant shadow of this golden world.
And all this meant that she had forgotten about the mails. She had ceased to long for letters containing good news, or to fear that one full of bad tidings would come, and every one knows that such a state of mind as this is serious. Now, when Assunta found her one morning, pacing the long, frescoed hall, by the side of the running water, and put a whole sheaf of letters into her hand, Daphne looked at them cautiously, and started to open one, then lost her courage and held them for a while to get used to them. Finally she went upstairs and changed her dress, putting on her short skirt and red felt hat, and walked out into the highway with Hermes skipping after her. She walked rapidly up the even way, under the high stone walls green with overhanging ivy and wistaria vines, and the lamb kept pace with her with his gay gallop, broken now and then by a sidelong leap of sheer joy up into the air. Presently she found a turning that she had not known before, marked by a little wayside shrine, and taking it, followed a narrow grass-grown road that curled about the side of a hill.
She read her father's letter first, walking slowly and smiling. If he were only here to share this wide beauty! Then she read her sister's, which was full of woeful exclamations and bad news. The sick man was slowly dying, and they could not leave him. Meanwhile she was desolated by thinking of her little sister. Of course she was safe, for Giacomo and Assunta were more trustworthy than the Italian government, but it must be very stupid, and she had meant to give Daphne such a gay time at the villa. She would write at once to some English friends at Lake Scala, ten miles away, to see if they could not do something to relieve her sister's solitude.
"To relieve my solitude!" gasped Daphne. "Oh I am so afraid something will!"
There were several other letters, all from friends at home. One, in a great square envelope, addressed with an English scrawl, she dreaded, and she kept it for the last. When she did tear it open her face grew quite pale. There was much in it about duty and consecration, and much concerning two lives sacrificed to the same great ideal. It breathed thoughts of denial and of annihilation of self, and,—yes, Eustace took her at her word and was ready to welcome again the old relation. If she would permit him, he would send back the ring.
Hermes hid behind a stone and dashed out at his mistress to surprise her, expecting to be chased as usual, but Daphne could not run. With heavy feet and downcast eyes she walked along the green roadway, then, when her knees suddenly became weak, sat down on a stone and covered her face with her hands. She had not known until this moment how she had been hoping that two and two would not make four; she had not really believed that this could be the result of her letter of atonement. Her soul had traveled far since she wrote that letter, and it was hard to find the way back. Hiding the brown and purple distances of the Campagna came pictures of dim, candle-lighted spaces, of a thin face with a setting of black and white priestly garments, and in her ears was the sound of a voice endlessly intoning. It made up a vision of the impossible.
She sat there a long, long time, and when she wakened to a consciousness of where she was, it was a whining voice that roused her.
"Signorina, for the love of heaven, give me a few soldi, for I am starving."
Daphne looked up and was startled, and yet old beggar women were common enough sights here among the hills. This one had an evil look, with her cunning, half-shut eyes.
The girl shook her head.
"I have no money with me," she remarked.
"But Signorina, so young, so beautiful, surely she has money with her." A dirty brown hand came all too close to Daphne's face, and she sprang to her feet.
"I have spoken," she said severely, giving a little stamp. "I have none. Now go away."
The whining continued, unintermittent. The old woman came closer, and her hand touched the girl's skirt. Wrenching herself away, Daphne found herself in the grasp of two skinny arms, and an actual physical struggle began. The girl had no time for fear, and suddenly help came. A firm hand caught the woman's shoulder, and the victim was free.
"Are you hurt?" asked Apollo anxiously.
She shook her head, smiling.
"Frightened?"
"No. Don't you always rescue me?"
"But this is merest accident, my being here. It really isn't safe for you alone on these roads."
"I knew you were near."
"And yet, I have just this minute come round the hill. You could not possibly have seen me."
"I have ways of knowing," said Daphne, smiling demurely.
A faint little bleat interrupted them.
"Oh, oh!" cried the girl, "she is running away with Hermes!"
Never did Apollo move more swiftly than he did then! Daphne followed, with flying feet. He reached the beggar woman, held her, took the lamb with one hand from her and handed it to Daphne. There followed a scene which the girl remembered afterward with a curious sense of misgiving and of question. The thief gave one glance at the beautiful, angry face of the man, then fell at his feet, groveling and beseeching. What she was saying the girl did not know, but her face and figure bore a look of more than mortal fear.
"What does she think him?" murmured the girl. Then she turned away with him, and, with the lamb at their heels, they walked together back along the grassy road.
"You look very serious," remarked her protector. "You are sure it is not fright?"
She shook her head, holding up her bundle of letters.
"Bad news?"
"No, good," she answered, smiling bravely.
"I hope good news will be infrequent," he answered. "You look like Iphigenia going to be sacrificed."
"I will admit that there is a problem," said the girl. "There's a question about my doing something."
"And you know it must be right to do it because you hate it?" he asked.
She nodded.
"Don't you think so, too? Now when you answer," she added triumphantly, "I shall know what kind of god you are."
They had reached the turning of the ways, and he stopped, as if intending to leave her. "I cannot help you," he said sadly, "for I do not know the case. Only, I think it is best not to decide by any abstruse rule. Life is life's best teacher, and out of one's last experience comes insight for the next. But don't be too sure that duty and unhappiness are one."
She left him, standing by the little wayside shrine with a strange look on his face. A tortured Christ hung there, casting the shadow of pain upon the passers-by. The expression in the brown eyes of the heathen god haunted her all the way down the hill, and throughout the day: they seemed to understand, and yet be glad.
It was nine o'clock as the Signorina descended the stairs. Through the open doorway morning met her, crisp and cool, with sunshine touching grass and green branch, still wet with dew. The very footfalls of the girl on the shallow marble steps were eager and expectant, and her face was gayer than those of the nymphs in the frescoes on the wall. At the bottom of the stairs, Giacomo met her, his face wreathed in smiles.
"Bertuccio has returned," he announced.
"Si, si, Signorina," came the voice of Assunta, who was pushing her way through the dining-room door behind Giacomo. She had on her magenta Sunday shawl, and the color of her wrinkled cheeks almost matched it.
"What is Bertuccio?" asked the girl. "A kitten?"
"A kitten!" gasped Assunta.
"Corpo di Bacco!" swore Giacomo.
Then the two brown ones devoted mind and body to explanation. Giacomo gesticulated and waved the napkin he had in his hand; Assunta shook her black silk apron: and they both spoke at once.
"Il mio Bertuccio! It is my little son, Signorina, and my only, and the Signorina has never seen his like. When he was three years old he wore clothing for five years, and now he is six inches taller than his father."
This and much more said Assunta, and she said it as one word. Giacomo, keeping pace and giving syllable for syllable, remarked:—
"It is our Bertuccio who has been working in a tunnel in the Italian Alps, and has come home for rest. He is engineer, Signorina, and has genius. And before he became this he was guide here in the mountains, and he knows every path, every stone, every tree."
"What?" asked Daphne feebly.
Then, in a multitude of words that darkened knowledge, they said it all over again. Bertuccio, the light of their eyes, the sole hope of their old age, had come home. He could be the Signorina's guide among the hills, being very strong, very trusty, molto forte, molto fedele.
"Oh, I know!" cried the Signorina, with a sudden light in her face. "Bertuccio is your son!"
"Si, si, si, Signorina!" exclaimed Giacomo and Assunta together, ushering her into the dining-room.
"It is the blessed saints who have managed it," added Assunta devoutly. "A wreath of flowers from Rome, all gauze and spangles, will I lay at the shrine of our Lady, and there shall be a long red ribbon to say my thanks in letters of gold."
The hope of the house was presented to the Signorina after breakfast. He was a broad-shouldered, round-headed offshoot of Italian soil, with honest brown eyes like those of both father and mother. It was a face to be trusted, Daphne knew, and when, recovering from the embarrassment caused by his parents' pride in him, he blurted out the fact that he had already been to the village that morning to find a little donkey for the Signorina's wider journeyings, the girl welcomed the plan with delight. Grinning with pride Bertuccio disappeared among the stables, and presently returned, leading an asinetto. It was a little, dun-colored thing, wearing a red-tasseled bridle and a small sheepskin saddle with red girth, but all the gay trappings could not soften the old primeval sadness of the donkey's face, under his long, questioning ears. So Daphne won palfrey and cavalier.
In the succeeding days the two jogged for hours together over the mountain roads. Now they followed some grassy path climbing gently upward to the site of a buried town, where only mound and gray fragment of stone marked garden and forum. Here was a bit of wall, with a touch of gay painting mouldering on an inner surface,—Venus, in robe of red, rising from a daintily suggested sea in lines of green. They gathered fragments of old mosaic floor in their hands, blue lapis lazuli, yellow bits of giallo antico, red porphyry, trodden by gay feet and sad, unnumbered years ago. They found broken pieces of iridescent glass that had fallen, perhaps, from shattered wine cups of the emperors, and all these treasures Bertuccio stored away in his wide pockets. Again, they climbed gracious heights and looked down over slopes and valleys, where deep grass grew over rich, crumbling earth, deposit of dead volcanoes, or saw, circled by soft green hills, some mountain lake, reflecting the perfect blue of Italian sky.
Bertuccio usually walked behind; Daphne rode on ahead, with the sun burning her cheeks, and the air, fragrant with the odor of late ripening grapes on the upper hillsides, bringing intoxication. She seemed to herself so much a thing of falling rain, rich earth, and wakening sunshines that she would not have been surprised to find the purple bloom of those same grapes gathering on her cheeks, or her soft wisps of hair curling into tendrils, or spreading into green vine leaves. They usually came home in the splendor of sunset, tired, happy, the red of Daphne's felt hat, the gorgeousness of Bertuccio's blue trousers and yellow waistcoat lighting the gloom of the cool, green-shaded ways. Hermes always ran frisking to meet them, outstripping by his swiftness the slow plodding of the little ass. Perhaps the lambkin felt the shadow of a certain neglect through these long absences, but at least he was generous and loved his rival. Quitting the kitchen and dining-room, he chose for his portion the pasture where the donkey grazed, in silence and in sadness, and frisked dangerously near his comrade's heels. For all his melancholy, the asinetto was not insensible to caresses, and at night, when the lamb cuddled close to him as the two lay in the grass in the darkness, would curl his nose round now and then protectingly to see how this small thing fared.
So Daphne kept forgetting, forgetting, and nothing recalled her to her perplexity, except her donkey. San Pietro Martire she named him, for on his face was written the patience and the suffering of the saints. Some un-Italian sense of duty stiffened his hard little legs, gave rigid strength to his back. Willing to trudge on with his load, willing to rest, carrying his head a little bent, blinking mournfully at the world from under the drab hair on his forehead, San Pietro stood as a type of the disciplined and chastened soul. His very way of cropping the grass had something ascetic in it, reminding his mistress of Eustace at a festive dinner.
"San Pietro, San Pietro," said Daphne one day, when Bertuccio was plodding far in the rear, whistling as he followed, "San Pietro, must I do it?"
There was a drooping forward of the ears, a slight bending of the head, as the little beast put forth more strength to meet the difficulty of rising ground.
"San Pietro, do you know what you are advising? Do you at all realize what it is to be a clergyman's wife?"
The steady straining of the donkey's muscles seemed to say that, to whatever station in life it pleased Providence to call him, he would think only of duty.
Then Daphne alighted and sat on a stone, with the donkey's face to hers, taking counsel of those long ears which were always eloquent, whether pricked forward in expectation or laid back in wrath.
"San Pietro, if I should give it up, and stay here and live,—for I never knew before what living is,—if I should just try to keep this sunshine and these great spaces of color, what would you think of me?"
Eyes, ears, and the tragic corners of the mouth revealed the thought of this descendant of the burden bearers for all the earth's thousands of years.
"Little beast, little beast," said Daphne, burying her face in the brownish fuzz of his neck, and drying her eyes there, "you are the one thing in this land of beauty that links me with home. You are the Pilgrim Fathers and the Catechism in one! You are the Puritan Conscience made visible! I will do it; I promise."
San Pietro Martire looked round with mild inquiry on his face as to the meaning and the purpose of caresses in a hard world like this.