"Of what other parent can it be the child? In my opinion those who are said to be 'born in misery' never know what real misery is. It is only those who have drunk deep of the cup of joy who can drink deep of the cup of sorrow."
Hermione was about to speak, but Delarey suddenly burst in with the vehement exclamation:
"Where's the courage in keeping to the beaten track? Where's the courage in avoiding the garden for fear of the swamp?"
"That's exactly what I was going to say," said Hermione, her whole face lighting up. "I never expected to hear a counsel of cowardice from you, Emile."
"Or is it a counsel of prudence?"
He looked at them both steadily, feeling still as if he were face to face with children. For a man he was unusually intuitive, and to-night suddenly, and after he had begun to yield to his desire to be cruel, to say something that would cloud this dual happiness in which he had no share, he felt a strange, an almost prophetic conviction that out of the joy he now contemplated would be born the gaunt offspring, misery, of which he had just spoken. With the coming of this conviction, which he did not even try to explain to himself or to combat, came an abrupt change in his feelings. Bitterness gave place to an anxiety that was far more human, to a desire to afford some protection to these two people with whom he was sitting. But how? And against what? He did not know. His intuition stopped short when he strove to urge it on.
"Prudence," said Hermione. "You think it prudent to avoid the joy life throws at your feet?"
Abruptly provoked by his own limitations, angry, too, with his erratic mental departure from the realm of reason into the realm of fantasy—for so he called the debatable land over which intuition held sway—Artois hounded out his mood and turned upon himself.
"Don't listen to me," he said. "I am the professional analyst of life. As I sit over a sentence, examining, selecting, rejecting, replacing its words, so do I sit over the emotions of myself and others till I cease really to live, and could almost find it in my head to try to prevent them from living, too. Live, live—enter into the garden of paradise and never mind what comes after."
"I could not do anything else," said Hermione. "It is unnatural to me to look forward. The 'now' nearly always has complete possession of me."
"And I," said Artois, lightly, "am always trying to peer round the corner to see what is coming. And you, Monsieur Delarey?"
"I!" said Delarey.
He had not expected to be addressed just then, and for a moment looked confused.
"I don't know if I can say," he answered, at last. "But I think if the present was happy I should try to live in that, and if it was sad I should have a shot at looking forward to something better."
"That's one of the best philosophies I ever heard," said Hermione, "and after my own heart. Long live the philosophy of Maurice Delarey!"
Delarey blushed with pleasure like a boy. Just then three men came in smoking cigars. Hermione looked at her watch.
"Past eleven," she said. "I think I'd better go. Emile, will you drive with me home?"
"I!" he said, with an unusual diffidence. "May I?"
He glanced at Delarey.
"I want to have a talk with you. Maurice quite understands. He knows you go back to Paris to-morrow."
They all got up, and Delarey at once held out his hand to Artois.
"I am glad to have been allowed to meet Hermione's best friend," he said, simply. "I know how much you are to her, and I hope you'll let me be a friend, too, perhaps, some day."
He wrung Artois's hand warmly.
"Thank you, monsieur," replied Artois.
He strove hard to speak as cordially as Delarey.
Two or three minutes later Hermione and he were in a hansom driving down Regent Street. The fog hadlifted, and it was possible to see to right and left of the greasy thoroughfare.
"Need we go straight back?" said Hermione. "Why not tell him to drive down to the Embankment? It's quiet there at night, and open and fine—one of the few fine things in dreary old London. And I want to have a last talk with you, Emile."
Artois pushed up the little door in the roof with his stick.
"The Embankment—Thames," he said to the cabman, with a strong foreign accent.
"Right, sir," replied the man, in the purest cockney.
As soon as the trap was shut down above her head Hermione exclaimed:
"Emile, I'm so happy, so—so happy! I think you must understand why now. You don't wonder any more, do you?"
"No, I don't wonder. But did I ever express any wonder?"
"I think you felt some. But I knew when you saw him it would go. He's got one beautiful quality that's very rare in these days, I think—reverence. I love that in him. He really reverences everything that is fine, every one who has fine and noble aspirations and powers. He reverences you."
"If that is the case he shows very little insight."
"Don't abuse yourself to me to-night. There's nothing the matter now, is there?"
Her intonation demanded a negative, but Artois did not hasten to give it. Instead he turned the conversation once more to Delarey.
"Tell me something more about him," he said. "What sort of family does he come from?"
"Oh, a very ordinary family, well off, but not what is called specially well-born. His father has a large shipping business. He's a cultivated man, and went to Eton and Oxford, as Maurice did. Maurice's mother is veryhandsome, not at all intellectual, but fascinating. The Southern blood comes from her side."
"Oh—how?"
"Her mother was a Sicilian."
"Of the aristocracy, or of the people?"
"She was a lovely contadina. But what does it matter? I am not marrying Maurice's grandmother."
"How do you know that?"
"You mean that our ancestors live in us. Well, I can't bother. If Maurice were a crossing-sweeper, and his grandmother had been an evilly disposed charwoman, who could never get any one to trust her to char, I'd marry him to-morrow if he'd have me."
"I'm quite sure you would."
"Besides, probably the grandmother was a delicious old dear. But didn't you like Maurice, Emile? I felt so sure you did."
"I—yes, I liked him. I see his fascination. It is almost absurdly obvious, and yet it is quite natural. He is handsome and he is charming."
"And he's good, too."
"Why not? He does not look evil. I thought of him as a Mercury."
"The messenger of the gods—yes, he is like that."
She laid her hand on his arm, as if her happiness and longing for sympathy in it impelled her to draw very near to a human being.
"A bearer of good tidings—that is what he has been to me. I want you to like and understand him so much, Emile; you more, far more, than any one else."
The cab was now in a steep and narrow street leading down from the Strand to the Thames Embankment—a street that was obscure and that looked sad and evil by night. Artois glanced out at it, and Hermione, seeing that he did so, followed his eyes. They saw a man and a woman quarrelling under a gas-lamp. The woman was cursing and crying. The man put out his handand pushed her roughly. She fell up against some railings, caught hold of them, turned her head and shrieked at the man, opening her mouth wide.
"Poor things!" Hermione said. "Poor things! If we could only all be good to each other! It seems as if it ought to be so simple."
"It's too difficult for us, nevertheless."
"Not for some of us, thank God. Many people have been good to me—you for one, you most of all my friends. Ah, how blessed it is to be out here!"
She leaned over the wooden apron of the cab, stretching out her hands instinctively as if to grasp the space, the airy darkness of the spreading night.
"Space seems to liberate the soul," she said. "It's wrong to live in cities, but we shall have to a good deal, I suppose. Maurice needn't work, but I'm glad to say he does."
"What does he do?"
"I don't know exactly, but he's in his father's shipping business. I'm an awful idiot at understanding anything of that sort, but I understand Maurice, and that's the important matter."
"'SPACE SEEMS TO LIBERATE THE SOUL,' SHE SAID""'SPACE SEEMS TO LIBERATE THE SOUL,' SHE SAID"
They were now on the Thames Embankment, driving slowly along the broad and almost deserted road. Far off lights, green, red, and yellow, shone faintly upon the drifting and uneasy waters of the river on the one side; on the other gleamed the lights from the houses and hotels, in which people were supping after the theatres. Artois, who, like most fine artists, was extremely susceptible to the influence of place and of the hour, with its gift of light or darkness, began to lose in this larger atmosphere of mystery and vaguely visible movement the hitherto dominating sense of himself, to regain the more valuable and more mystical sense of life and its strange and pathetic relation with nature and the spirit behind nature, which often floated upon him like a tide when he was creating, but which he was accustomed to hold sternly in leash. Now he was not in the mood to rein it in. Maurice Delarey and his business, Hermione, her understanding of him and happiness in him, Artois himself in his sharply realized solitude of the third person, melted into the crowd of beings who made up life, whose background was the vast and infinitely various panorama of nature, and Hermione's last words, "the important matter," seemed for the moment false to him. What was, what could be, important in the immensity and the baffling complexity of existence?
"Look at those lights," he said, pointing to those that gleamed across the water through the London haze that sometimes makes for a melancholy beauty, "and that movement of the river in the night, tremulous and cryptic like our thoughts. Is anything important?"
"Almost everything, I think, certainly everything in us. If I didn't feel so, I could scarcely go on living. And you must really feel so, too. You do. I have your letters to prove it. Why, how often have I written begging you not to lash yourself into fury over the follies of men!"
"Yes, my temperament betrays the citadel of my brain. That happens in many."
"You trust too much to your brain and too little to your heart."
"And you do the contrary, my friend. You are too easily carried away by your impulses."
She was silent for a moment. The cabman was driving slowly. She watched a distant barge drifting, like a great shadow, at the mercy of the tide. Then she turned a little, looked at Artois's shadowy profile, and said:
"Don't ever be afraid to speak to me quite frankly—don't be afraid now. What is it?"
He did not answer.
"Imagine you are in Paris sitting down to write to me in your little red-and-yellow room, the morocco slipper of a room."
"And if it were the Sicilian grandmother?"
He spoke half-lightly, as if he were inclined to laugh with her at himself if she began to laugh.
But she said, gravely:
"Go on."
"I have a feeling to-night that out of this happiness of yours misery will be born."
"Yes? What sort of misery?"
"I don't know."
"Misery to myself or to the sharer of my happiness?"
"To you."
"That was why you spoke of the garden of paradise and the deadly swamp?"
"I think it must have been."
"Well?"
"I love the South. You know that. But I distrust what I love, and I see the South in him."
"The grace, the charm, the enticement of the South."
"All that, certainly. You said he had reverence. Probably he has, but has he faithfulness?"
"Oh, Emile!"
"You told me to be frank."
"And I wish you to be. Go on, say everything."
"I've only seen Delarey once, and I'll confess that I came prepared to see faults as clearly as, perhaps more clearly than, virtues. I don't pretend to read character at a glance. Only fools can do that—I am relying on their frequent assertion that they can. He strikes me as a man of great charm, with an unusual faculty of admiration for the gifts of others and a modest estimate of himself. I believe he's sincere."
"He is, through and through."
"I think so—now. But does he know his own blood? Our blood governs us when the time comes. He ismodest about his intellect. I think it quick, but I doubt its being strong enough to prove a good restraining influence."
"Against what?"
"The possible call of the blood that he doesn't understand."
"You speak almost as if he were a child," Hermione said. "He's much younger than I am, but he's twenty-four."
"He is very young looking, and you are at least twenty years ahead of him in all essentials. Don't you feel it?"
"I suppose—yes, I do."
"Mercury—he should be mercurial."
"He is. That's partly why I love him, perhaps. He is full of swiftness."
"So is the butterfly when it comes out into the sun."
"Emile, forgive me, but sometimes you seem to me deliberately to lie down and roll in pessimism rather as a horse—"
"Why not say an ass?"
She laughed.
"An ass, then, my dear, lies down sometimes and rolls in dust. I think you are doing it to-night. I think you were preparing to do it this afternoon. Perhaps it is the effect of London upon you?"
"London—by-the-way, where are you going for your honeymoon? I am sure you know, though Monsieur Delarey may not."
"Why are you sure?"
"Your face to-night when I asked if it was to be Italian."
She laid her hand again upon his arm and spoke eagerly, forgetting in a moment his pessimism and the little cloud it had brought across her happiness.
"You're right; I've decided."
"Italy—and hotels?"
"No, a thousand times no!"
"Where then?"
"Sicily, and my peasant's cottage."
"The cottage on Monte Amato where you spent a summer four or five years ago contemplating Etna?"
"Yes. I've not said a word to Maurice, but I've taken it again. All the little furniture I had—beds, straw chairs, folding-tables—is stored in a big room in the village at the foot of the mountain. Gaspare, the Sicilian boy who was my servant, will superintend the carrying up of it on women's heads—his dear old grandmother takes the heaviest things, arm-chairs and so on—and it will all be got ready in no time. I'm having the house whitewashed again, and the shutters painted, and the stone vases on the terrace will be filled with scarlet geraniums, and—oh, Emile, I shall hear the piping of the shepherds in the ravine at twilight again with him, and see the boys dance the tarantella under the moon again with him, and—and—"
She stopped with a break in her voice.
"Put away your pessimism, dear Emile," she continued, after a moment. "Tell me you think we shall be happy in our garden of paradise—tell me that!"
But he only said, even more gravely:
"So you're taking him to the real South?"
"Yes, to the blue and the genuine gold, and the quivering heat, and the balmy nights when Etna sends up its plume of ivory smoke to the moon. He's got the south in his blood. Well, he shall see the south first with me, and he shall love it as I love it."
He said nothing. No spark of her enthusiasm called forth a spark from him. And now she saw that, and said again:
"London is making you horrible to-night. You are doing London and yourself an injustice, and Maurice, too."
"It's very possible," he replied. "But—I can say it to you—I have a certain gift of—shall I call it divination?—where men and women are concerned. It is not merely that I am observant of what is, but that I can often instinctively feel that which must be inevitably produced by what is. Very few people can read the future in the present. I often can, almost as clearly as I can read the present. Even pessimism, accentuated by the influence of the Infernal City, may contain some grains of truth."
"What do you see for us, Emile? Don't you think we shall be happy together, then? Don't you think that we are suited to be happy together?"
When she asked Artois this direct question he was suddenly aware of a vagueness brooding in his mind, and knew that he had no definite answer to make.
"I see nothing," he said, abruptly. "I know nothing. It may be London. It may be my own egoism."
And then he suddenly explained himself to Hermione with the extraordinary frankness of which he was only capable when he was with her, or was writing to her.
"I am the dog in the manger," he concluded. "Don't let my growling distress you. Your happiness has made me envious."
"I'll never believe it," she exclaimed. "You are too good a friend and too great a man for that. Why can't you be happy, too? Why can't you find some one?"
"Married life wouldn't suit me. I dislike loneliness yet I couldn't do without it. In it I find my liberty as an artist."
"Sometimes I think it must be a curse to be an artist, and yet I have often longed to be one."
"Why have you never tried to be one?"
"I hardly know. Perhaps in my inmost being I feel I never could be. I am too impulsive, too unrestrained, too shapeless in mind. If I wrote a book it might be interesting, human, heart-felt, true to life, I hope, not stupid, I believe; but it would be a chaos. You—how it would shock your critical mind! I could never selectand prune and blend and graft. I should have to throw my mind and heart down on the paper and just leave them there."
"If you did that you might produce a human document that would live almost as long as literature, that even just criticism would be powerless to destroy."
"I shall never write that book, but I dare say I shall live it."
"Yes," he said. "You will live it, perhaps with Monsieur Delarey."
And he smiled.
"When is the wedding to be?"
"In January, I think."
"Ah! When you are in your garden of paradise I shall not be very far off—just across your blue sea on the African shore."
"Why, where are you going, Emile?"
"I shall spend the spring at the sacred city of Kairouan, among the pilgrims and the mosques, making some studies, taking some notes."
"For a book? Come over to Sicily and see us."
"I don't think you will want me there."
The trap in the roof was opened, and a beery eye, with a luscious smile in it, peered down upon them.
"'Ad enough of the river, sir?"
"Comment?" said Artois.
"We'd better go home, I suppose," Hermione said.
She gave her address to the cabman, and they drove in silence to Eaton Place.
Lucrezia Gabbicame out onto the terrace of the Casa del Prete on Monte Amato, shaded her eyes with her brown hands, and gazed down across the ravine over the olive-trees and the vines to the mountain-side opposite, along which, among rocks and Barbary figs, wound a tiny track trodden by the few contadini whose stone cottages, some of them scarcely more than huts, were scattered here and there upon the surrounding heights that looked towards Etna and the sea. Lucrezia was dressed in her best. She wore a dark-stuff gown covered in the front by a long blue-and-white apron. Although really happiest in her mind when her feet were bare, she had donned a pair of white stockings and low slippers, and over her thick, dark hair was tied a handkerchief gay with a pattern of brilliant yellow flowers on a white ground. This was a present from Gaspare bought at the town of Cattaro at the foot of the mountains, and worn now for the first time in honor of a great occasion.
To-day Lucrezia was in the service of distinguished forestieri, and she was gazing now across the ravine straining her eyes to see a procession winding up from the sea: donkeys laden with luggage, and her new padrone and padrona pioneered by the radiant Gaspare towards their mountain home. It was a good day for their arrival. Nobody could deny that. Even Lucrezia, who was accustomed to fine weather, having lived all her life in Sicily, was struck to a certain blinking admiration as she stepped out on to the terrace,and murmured to herself and a cat which was basking on the stone seat that faced the cottage between broken columns, round which roses twined:
"Che tempo fa oggi! Santa Madonna, che bel tempo!"
On this morning of February the clearness of the atmosphere was in truth almost African. Under the cloudless sky every detail of the great view from the terrace stood out with a magical distinctness. The lines of the mountains were sharply defined against the profound blue. The forms of the gray rocks scattered upon their slopes, of the peasants' houses, of the olive and oak trees which grew thickly on the left flank of Monte Amato below the priest's house, showed themselves in the sunshine with the bold frankness which is part of the glory of all things in the south. The figures of stationary or moving goatherds and laborers, watching their flocks or toiling among the vineyards and the orchards, were relieved against the face of nature in the shimmer of the glad gold in this Eden, with a mingling of delicacy and significance which had in it something ethereal and mysterious, a hint of fairy-land. Far off, rising calmly in an immense slope, a slope that was classical in its dignity, profound in its sobriety, remote, yet neither cold nor sad, Etna soared towards the heaven, sending from its summit, on which the snows still lingered, a steady plume of ivory smoke. In the nearer foreground, upon a jagged crest of beetling rock, the ruins of a Saracenic castle dominated a huddled village, whose houses seemed to cling frantically to the cliff, as if each one were in fear of being separated from its brethren and tossed into the sea. And far below that sea spread forth its waveless, silent wonder to a horizon-line so distant that the eyes which looked upon it could scarcely distinguish sea from sky—a line which surely united not divided two shades of flawless blue, linking them in a brotherhood which should be everlasting. Few sounds, and these butslight ones, stirred in the breast of the ardent silence; some little notes of birds, fragmentary and wandering, wayward as pilgrims who had forgotten to what shrine they bent their steps, some little notes of bells swinging beneath the tufted chins of goats, the wail of a woman's song, old in its quiet melancholy, Oriental in its strange irregularity of rhythm, and the careless twitter of a tarantella, played upon a reed-flute by a secluded shepherd-boy beneath the bending silver green of tressy olives beside a tiny stream.
Lucrezia was accustomed to it all. She had been born beside that sea. Etna had looked down upon her as she sucked and cried, toddled and played, grew to a lusty girlhood, and on into young womanhood with its gayety and unreason, its work and hopes and dreams. That Oriental song—she had sung it often on the mountain-sides, as she set her bare, brown feet on the warm stones, and lifted her head with a native pride beneath its burdening pannier or its jar of water from the well. And she had many a time danced to the tarantella that the shepherd-boy was fluting, clapping her strong hands and swinging her broad hips, while the great rings in her ears shook to and fro, and her whole healthy body quivered to the spirit of the tune. She knew it all. It was and had always been part of her life.
Hermione's garden of paradise generally seemed homely enough to Lucrezia. Yet to-day, perhaps because she was dressed in her best on a day that was not a festa, and wore a silver chain with a coral charm on it, and had shoes on her feet, there seemed to her a newness, almost a strangeness in the wideness and the silence, in the sunshine and the music, something that made her breathe out a sigh, and stare with almost wondering eyes on Etna and the sea. She soon lost her vague sensation that her life lay, perhaps, in a home of magic, however, when she looked again at the mule track which wound upward from the distant town,in which the train from Messina must by this time have deposited her forestieri, and began to think more naturally of the days that lay before her, of her novel and important duties, and of the unusual sums of money that her activities were to earn her.
Gaspare, who, as major-domo, had chosen her imperiously for his assistant and underling in the house of the priest, had informed her that she was to receive twenty-five lire a month for her services, besides food and lodging, and plenty of the good, red wine of Amato. To Lucrezia such wages seemed prodigal. She had never yet earned more than the half of them. But it was not only this prospect of riches which now moved and excited her.
She was to live in a splendidly furnished house with wealthy and distinguished people; she was to sleep in a room all to herself, in a bed that no one had a right to except herself. This was an experience that in her most sanguine moments she had never anticipated. All her life had been passed en famille in the village of Marechiaro, which lay on a table-land at the foot of Monte Amato, half-way down to the sea. The Gabbis were numerous, and they all lived in one room, to which cats, hens, and turkeys resorted with much freedom and in considerable numbers. Lucrezia had never known, perhaps had never desired, a moment of privacy, but now she began to awake to the fact that privacy and daintiness and pretty furniture were very interesting, and even touching, as well as very phenomenal additions to a young woman's existence. What could the people who had the power to provide them be like? She scanned the mule-track with growing eagerness, but the procession did not appear. She saw only an old contadino in a long woollen cap riding slowly into the recesses of the hills on a donkey, and a small boy leading his goats to pasture. The train must have been late. She turned round from the view and examined her new home once more. Already she knew it by heart, yet the wonder of it still encompassed her spirit.
Hermione's cottage, the eyrie to which she was bringing Maurice Delarey, was only a cottage, although to Lucrezia it seemed almost a palace. It was whitewashed, with a sloping roof of tiles, and windows with green Venetian shutters. Although it now belonged to a contadino, it had originally been built by a priest, who had possessed vineyards on the mountain-side, and who wished to have a home to which he could escape from the town where he lived when the burning heats of the summer set in. Above his vineyards, some hundreds of yards from the summit of the mountain, and close to a grove of oaks and olive-trees, which grew among a turmoil of mighty boulders, he had terraced out the slope and set his country home. At the edge of the rough path which led to the cottage from the ravine below was a ruined Norman arch. This served as a portal of entrance. Between it and the cottage was a well surrounded by crumbling walls, with stone seats built into them. Passing that, one came at once to the terrace of earth, fronted by a low wall with narrow seats covered with white tiles, and divided by broken columns that edged the ravine and commanded the great view on which Lucrezia had been gazing. On the wall of this terrace were stone vases, in which scarlet geraniums were growing. Red roses twined around the columns, and, beneath, the steep side of the ravine was clothed with a tangle of vegetation, olive and peach, pear and apple trees. Behind the cottage rose the bare mountain-side, covered with loose stones and rocks, among which in every available interstice the diligent peasants had sown corn and barley. Here and there upon the mountains distant cottages were visible, but on Monte Amato Hermione's was the last, the most intrepid. None other ventured to cling to the warm earth so high above the sea and in a place so solitary.That was why Hermione loved it, because it was near the sky and very far away.
Now, after an earnest, ruminating glance at the cottage, Lucrezia walked across the terrace and reverently entered it by a door which opened onto a flight of three steps leading down to the terrace. Already she knew the interior by heart, but she had not lost her awe of it, her sense almost of being in a church when she stood among the furniture, the hangings, and the pictures which she had helped to arrange under Gaspare's orders. The room she now stood in was the parlor of the cottage, serving as dining-room, drawing-room, boudoir, and den. Although it must be put to so many purposes, it was only a small, square chamber, and very simply furnished. The walls, like all the walls of the cottage inside and out, were whitewashed. On the floor was a carpet that had been woven in Kairouan, the sacred African town where Artois was now staying and making notes for his new book. It was thick and rough, and many-colored almost as Joseph's coat; brilliant but not garish, for the African has a strange art of making colors friends instead of enemies, of blending them into harmonies that are gay yet touched with peace. On the walls hung a few reproductions of fine pictures: an old woman of Rembrandt, in whose wrinkled face and glittering dark eyes the past pleasures and past sorrows of life seemed tenderly, pensively united, mellowed by the years into a soft bloom, a quiet beauty; an allegory of Watts, fierce with inspiration like fire mounting up to an opening heaven; a landscape of Frederick Walker's, the romance of harvest in an autumn land; Burne-Jones's "The Mill," and a copy in oils of a knight of Gustave Moreau's, riding in armor over the summit of a hill into an unseen country of errantry, some fairy-land forlorn. There was, too, an old Venetian mirror in a curiously twisted golden frame.
At the two small windows on either side of the door, which was half glass, half white-painted wood, were thin curtains of pale gray-blue and white, bought in the bazaars of Tunis. For furniture there were a folding-table of brown, polished wood, a large divan with many cushions, two deck-chairs of the telescope species, that can be made long or short at will, a writing-table, a cottage piano, and four round wicker chairs with arms. In one corner of the room stood a tall clock with a burnished copper face, and in another a cupboard containing glass and china. A door at the back, which led into the kitchen, was covered with an Oriental portière. On the writing-table, and on some dwarf bookcases already filled with books left behind by Hermione on her last visit to Sicily, stood rough jars of blue, yellow, and white pottery, filled with roses and geraniums arranged by Gaspare. To the left of the room, as Lucrezia faced it, was a door leading into the bedroom, of the master and mistress.
After a long moment of admiring contemplation, Lucrezia went into this bedroom, in which she was specially interested, as it was to be her special care. All was white here, walls, ceiling, wooden beds, tables, the toilet service, the bookcases. For there were books here, too, books which Lucrezia examined with an awful wonder, not knowing how to read. In the window-seat were white cushions. On the chest of drawers were more red roses and geraniums. It was a virginal room, into which the bright, golden sunbeams stole under the striped awning outside the low window with surely a hesitating modesty, as if afraid to find themselves intruders. The whiteness, the intense quietness of the room, through whose window could be seen a space of far-off sea, a space of mountain-flank, and, when one came near to it, and the awning was drawn up, the snowy cone of Etna, struck now to the soul of Lucrezia a sense of half-puzzled peace. Her large eyes openedwider, and she laid her hands on her hips and fell into a sort of dream as she stood there, hearing only the faint and regular ticking of the clock in the sitting-room. She was well accustomed to the silence of the mountain world and never heeded it, but peace within four walls was almost unknown to her. Here no hens fluttered, no turkeys went to and fro elongating their necks, no children played and squalled, no women argued and gossiped, quarrelled and worked, no men tramped in and out, grumbled and spat. A perfectly clean and perfectly peaceful room—it was marvellous, it was—she sighed again. What must it be like to be gentlefolk, to have the money to buy calm and cleanliness?
Suddenly she moved, took her hands from her hips, settled her yellow handkerchief, and smiled. The silence had been broken by a sound all true Sicilians love, the buzz and the drowsy wail of the ceramella, the bagpipes which the shepherds play as they come down from the hills to the villages when the festival of the Natale is approaching. It was as yet very faint and distant, coming from the mountain-side behind the cottage, but Lucrezia knew the tune. It was part of her existence, part of Etna, the olive groves, the vineyards, and the sea, part of that old, old Sicily which dwells in the blood and shines in the eyes, and is alive in the songs and the dances of these children of the sun, and of legends and of mingled races from many lands. It was the "Pastorale," and she knew who was playing it—Sebastiano, the shepherd, who had lived with the brigands in the forests that look down upon the Isles of Lipari, who now kept his father's goats among the rocks, and knew every stone and every cave on Etna, and who had a chest and arms of iron, and legs that no climbing could fatigue, and whose great, brown fingers, that could break a man's wrist, drew such delicate tones from the reed pipe that, when he played it, even the oldman's thoughts were turned to dancing and the old woman's to love. But now he was being important, he was playing the ceramella, into which no shepherd could pour such a volume of breath as he, from which none could bring such a volume of warm and lusty music. It was Sebastiano coming down from the top of Monte Amato to welcome the forestieri.
The music grew louder, and presently a dog barked outside on the terrace. Lucrezia ran to the window. A great white-and-yellow, blunt-faced, pale-eyed dog, his neck surrounded by a spiked collar, stood there sniffing and looking savage, his feathery tail cocked up pugnaciously over his back.
"Sebastiano!" called Lucrezia, leaning out of the window under the awning—"Sebastiano!"
Then she drew back laughing, and squatted down on the floor, concealed by the window-seat. The sound of the pipes increased till their rough drone seemed to be in the room, bidding a rustic defiance to its whiteness and its silence. Still squatting on the floor, Lucrezia called out once more:
"Sebastiano!"
Abruptly the tune ceased and the silence returned, emphasized by the vanished music. Lucrezia scarcely breathed. Her face was flushed, for she was struggling against an impulse to laugh, which almost overmastered her. After a minute she heard the dog's short bark again, then a man's foot shifting on the terrace, then suddenly a noise of breathing above her head close to her hair. With a little scream she shrank back and looked up. A man's face was gazing down at her. It was a very brown and very masculine face, roughened by wind and toughened by sun, with keen, steady, almost insolent eyes, black and shining, stiff, black hair, that looked as if it had been crimped, a mustache sprouting above a wide, slightly animal mouth full of splendid teeth, and a square, brutal, but very manlychin. On the head was a Sicilian cap, long and hanging down at the left side. There were ear-rings in the man's large, well-shaped ears, and over the window-ledge protruded the swollen bladder, like a dead, bloated monster, from which he had been drawing his antique tune.
He stared down at Lucrezia with a half-contemptuous humor, and she up at him with a wide-eyed, unconcealed adoration. Then he looked curiously round the room, with a sharp intelligence that took in every detail in a moment.
"Per Dio!" he ejaculated. "Per Dio!"
He looked at Lucrezia, folded his brawny arms on the window-sill, and said:
"They've got plenty of soldi."
Lucrezia nodded, not without personal pride.
"Gaspare says—"
"Oh, I know as much as Gaspare," interrupted Sebastiano, brusquely. "The signora is my friend. When she was here before I saw her many times. But for me she would never have taken the Casa del Prete."
"Why was that?" asked Lucrezia, with reverence.
"They told her in Marechiaro that it was not safe for a lady to live up here alone, that when the night came no one could tell what would happen."
"But, Gaspare—"
"Does Gaspare know every grotto on Etna? Has Gaspare lived eight years with the briganti? And the Mafia—has Gaspare—"
He paused, laughed, pulled his mustache, and added:
"If the signora had not been assured of my protection she would never have come up here."
"But now she has a husband."
"Yes."
He glanced again round the room.
"One can see that. Per Dio, it is like the snow on the top of Etna."
Lucrezia got up actively from the floor and came close to Sebastiano.
"What is the padrona like, Sebastiano?" she asked. "I have seen her, but I have never spoken to her."
"She is simpatica—she will do you no harm."
"And is she generous?"
"Ready to give soldi to every one who is in trouble. But if you once deceive her she will never look at you again."
"Then I will not deceive her," said Lucrezia, knitting her brows.
"Better not. She is not like us. She thinks to tell a lie is a sin against the Madonna, I believe."
"But then what will the padrone do?" asked Lucrezia, innocently.
"Tell his woman the truth, like all husbands," replied Sebastiano, with a broadly satirical grin. "As your man will some day, Lucrezia mia. All husbands are good and faithful. Don't you know that?"
"Macchè!"
She laughed loudly, with an incredulity quite free from bitterness.
"Men are not like us," she added. "They tell us whatever they please, and do always whatever they like. We must sit in the doorway and keep our back to the street for fear a man should smile at us, and they can stay out all night, and come back in the morning, and say they've been fishing at Isola Bella, or sleeping out to guard the vines, and we've got to say, 'Si, Salvatore!' or 'Si, Guido!' when we know very well—"
"What, Lucrezia?"
She looked into his twinkling eyes and reddened slightly, sticking out her under lip.
"I'm not going to tell you."
"You have no business to know."
"And how can I help—they're coming!"
Sebastiano's dog had barked again on the terrace.Sebastiano lifted the ceramalla quickly from the window-sill and turned round, while Lucrezia darted out through the door, across the sitting-room, and out onto the terrace.
"Are they there, Sebastiano? Are they there?"
He stood by the terrace wall, shading his eyes with his hand.
"Ecco!" he said, pointing across the ravine.
Far off, winding up from the sea slowly among the rocks and the olive-trees, was a procession of donkeys, faintly relieved in the brilliant sunshine against the mountain-side.
"One," counted Sebastiano, "two, three, four—there are four. The signore is walking, the signora is riding. Whose donkeys have they got? Gaspare's father's, of course. I told Gaspare to take Ciccio's, and—it is too far to see, but I'll soon make them hear me. The signora loves the 'Pastorale.' She says there is all Sicily in it. She loves it more than the tarantella, for she is good, Lucrezia—don't forget that—though she is not a Catholic, and perhaps it makes her think of the coming of the Bambino and of the Madonna. Ah! She will smile now and clap her hands when she hears."
He put the pipe to his lips, puffed out his cheeks, and began to play the "Pastorale" with all his might, while Lucrezia listened, staring across the ravine at the creeping donkey, which was bearing Hermione upward to her garden of paradise near the sky.
"And then, signora, I said to Lucrezia, 'the padrona loves Zampaglione, and you must be sure to—'"
"Wait, Gaspare! I thought I heard—Yes, it is, it is! Hush! Maurice—listen!"
Hermione pulled up her donkey, which was the last of the little procession, laid her hand on her husband's arm, and held her breath, looking upward across the ravine to the opposite slope where, made tiny by distance, she saw the white line of the low terrace wall of the Casa del Prete, the black dots, which were the heads of Sebastiano and Lucrezia. The other donkeys tripped on among the stones and vanished, with their attendant boys, Gaspare's friends, round the angle of a great rock, but Gaspare stood still beside his padrona, with his brown hand on her donkey's neck, and Maurice Delarey, following her eyes, looked and listened like a statue of that Mercury to which Artois had compared him.
"It's the 'Pastorale,'" Hermione whispered. "The 'Pastorale'!"
Her lips parted. Tears came into her eyes, those tears that come to a woman in a moment of supreme joy that seems to wipe out all the sorrows of the past. She felt as if she were in a great dream, one of those rare and exquisite dreams that sometimes bathe the human spirit, as a warm wave of the Ionian Sea bathes the Sicilian shore in the shadow of an orange grove, murmuring peace. In that old tune of the "Pastorale" all her thoughts of Sicily, and her knowledge of Sicily, and her imaginations, and her deep and passionatelytender and even ecstatic love of Sicily seemed folded and cherished like birds in a nest. She could never have explained, she could only feel how. In the melody, with its drone bass, the very history of the enchanted island was surely breathed out. Ulysses stood to listen among the flocks of Polyphemus. Empedocles stayed his feet among the groves of Etna to hear it. And Persephone, wandering among the fields of asphodel, paused with her white hands out-stretched to catch its drowsy beauty; and Arethusa, turned into a fountain, hushed her music to let it have its way. And Hermione heard in it the voice of the Bambino, the Christ-child, to whose manger-cradle the shepherds followed the star, and the voice of the Madonna, Maria stella del mare, whom the peasants love in Sicily as the child loves its mother. And those peasants were in it, too, people of the lava wastes and the lava terraces where the vines are green against the black, people of the hazel and the beech forests, where the little owl cries at eve, people of the plains where, beneath the yellow lemons, spring the yellow flowers that are like their joyous reflection in the grasses, people of the sea, that wonderful purple sea in whose depth of color eternity seems caught. The altars of the pagan world were in it, and the wayside shrines before which the little lamps are lit by night upon the lonely mountain-sides, the old faith and the new, and the love of a land that lives on from generation to generation in the pulsing breasts of men.
And Maurice was in it, too, and Hermione and her love for him and his for her.
Gaspare did not move. He loved the "Pastorale" almost without knowing that he loved it. It reminded him of the festa of Natale, when, as a child, dressed in a long, white garment, he had carried a blazing torch of straw down the steps of the church of San Pancrazio before the canopy that sheltered the Bambino. It wasa part of his life, as his mother was, and Tito the donkey, and the vineyards, the sea, the sun. It pleased him to hear it, and to feel that his padrona from a far country loved it, and his isle, his "Paese" in which it sounded. So, though he had been impatient to reach the Casa del Prete and enjoy the reward of praise which he considered was his due for his forethought and his labors, he stood very still by Tito, with his great, brown eyes fixed, and the donkey switch drooping in the hand that hung at his side.
And Hermione for a moment gave herself entirely to her dream.
She had carried out the plan which she had made. She and Maurice Delarey had been married quietly, early one morning in London, and had caught the boat-train at Victoria, and travelled through to Sicily without stopping on the way to rest. She wanted to plunge Maurice in the south at once, not to lead him slowly, step by step, towards it. And so, after three nights in the train, they had opened their eyes to the quiet sea near Reggio, to the clustering houses under the mountains of Messina, to the high-prowed fishermen's boats painted blue and yellow, to the coast-line which wound away from the straits till it stole out to that almost phantasmal point where Siracusa lies, to the slope of Etna, to the orange gardens and the olives, and the great, dry water courses like giant highways leading up into the mountains. And from the train they had come up here into the recesses of the hills to hear their welcome of the "Pastorale." It was a contrast to make a dream, the roar of ceaseless travel melting into this radiant silence, this inmost heart of peace. They had rushed through great cities to this old land of mountains and of legends, and up there on the height from which the droning music dropped to them through the sunshine was their home, the solitary house which was to shelter their true marriage.
Delarey was almost confused by it all. Half dazed by the noise of the journey, he was now half dazed by the wonder of the quiet as he stood near Gaspare and listened to Sebastiano's music, and looked upward to the white terrace wall.
Hermione was to be his possession here, in this strange and far-off land, among these simple peasant people. So he thought of them, not versed yet in the complex Sicilian character. He listened, and he looked at Gaspare. He saw a boy of eighteen, short as are most Sicilians, but straight as an arrow, well made, active as a cat, rather of the Greek than of the Arab type so often met with in Sicily, with bold, well-cut features, wonderfully regular and wonderfully small, square, white teeth, thick, black eyebrows, and enormous brown eyes sheltered by the largest lashes he had ever seen. The very low forehead was edged by a mass of hair that had small gleams of bright gold here and there in the front, but that farther back on the head was of a brown so dark as to look nearly black. Gaspare was dressed in a homely suit of light-colored linen with no collar and a shirt open at the throat, showing a section of chest tanned by the sun. Stout mountain boots were on his feet, and a white linen hat was tipped carelessly to the back of his head, leaving his expressive, ardently audacious, but not unpleasantly impudent face exposed to the golden rays of which he had no fear.
As Delarey looked at him he felt oddly at home with him, almost as if he stood beside a young brother. Yet he could scarcely speak Gaspare's language, and knew nothing of his thoughts, his feelings, his hopes, his way of life. It was an odd sensation, a subtle sympathy not founded upon knowledge. It seemed to now into Delarey's heart out of the heart of the sun, to steal into it with the music of the "Pastorale."
"I feel—I feel almost as if I belonged here," he whispered to Hermione, at last.
She turned her head and looked down on him from her donkey. The tears were still in her eyes.
"I always knew you belonged to the blessed, blessed south," she said, in a low voice. "Do you care for that?"
She pointed towards the terrace.
"That music?"
"Yes."
"Tremendously, but I don't know why. Is it very beautiful?"
"I sometimes think it is the most beautiful music I have ever heard. At any rate, I have always loved it more than all other music, and now—well, you can guess if I love it now."
She dropped one hand against the donkey's warm shoulder. Maurice took it in his warm hand.
"All Sicily, all the real, wild Sicily seems to be in it. They play it in the churches on the night of the Natale," she went on, after a moment. "I shall never forget hearing it for the first time. I felt as if it took hold of my very soul with hands like the hands of the Bambino."
She broke off. A tear had fallen down upon her cheek.
"Avanti Gaspare!" she said.
Gaspare lifted his switch and gave Tito a tap, calling out "Ah!" in a loud, manly voice. The donkey moved on, tripping carefully among the stones. They mounted slowly up towards the "Pastorale." Presently Hermione said to Maurice, who kept beside her in spite of the narrowness of the path:
"Everything seems very strange to me to-day. Can you guess why?"
"I don't know. Tell me," he answered.
"It's this. I never expected to be perfectly happy. We all have our dreams, I suppose. We all think now and then, 'If only I could have this with that, this person in that place, I could be happy.' And perhaps we have sometimes a part of our dream turned into reality, though even that comes seldom. But to have the two, to have the two halves of our dream fitted together and made reality—isn't that rare? Long ago, when I was a girl, I always used to think—'If I could ever be with the one I loved in the south—alone, quite alone, quite away from the world, I could be perfectly happy.' Well, years after I thought that I came here. I knew at once I had found my ideal place. One-half of my dream was made real and was mine. That was much, wasn't it? But getting this part of what I longed for sometimes made me feel unutterably sad. I had never seen you then, but often when I sat on that little terrace up there I felt a passionate desire to have a human being whom I loved beside me. I loved no one then, but I wanted, I needed to love. Do men ever feel that? Women do, often, nearly always I think. The beauty made me want to love. Sometimes, as I leaned over the wall, I heard a shepherd-boy below in the ravine play on his pipe, or I heard the goat-bells ringing under the olives. Sometimes at night I saw distant lights, like fire-flies, lamps carried by peasants going to their homes in the mountains from a festa in honor of some saint, stealing upward through the darkness, or I saw the fishermen's lights burning in the boats far off upon the sea. Then—then I knew that I had only half my dream, and I was ungrateful, Maurice. I almost wished that I had never had this half, because it made me realize what it would be to have the whole. It made me realize the mutilation, the incompleteness of being in perfect beauty without love. And now—now I've actually got all I ever wanted, and much more, because I didn't know then at all what it would really mean to me to have it. And, besides, I never thought that God would select me for perfect happiness. Why should he? What have I ever done to be worthy of such a gift?"
"You've been yourself," he answered.
At this moment the path narrowed and he had to fall behind, and they did not speak again till they had clambered up the last bit of the way, steep almost as the side of a house, passed through the old ruined arch, and came out upon the terrace before the Casa del Prete.
Sebastiano met them, still playing lustily upon his pipe, while the sweat dripped from his sunburned face; but Lucrezia, suddenly overcome by shyness, had disappeared round the corner of the cottage to the kitchen. The donkey boys were resting on the stone seats in easy attitudes, waiting for Gaspare's orders to unload, and looking forward to a drink of the Monte Amato wine. When they had had it they meant to carry out a plan devised by the radiant Gaspare, to dance a tarantella for the forestieri while Sebastiano played the flute. But no hint of this intention was to be given till the luggage had been taken down and carried into the house. Their bright faces were all twinkling with the knowledge of their secret. When at length Sebastiano had put down the ceramella and shaken Hermione and Maurice warmly by the hand, and Gaspare had roughly, but with roars of laughter, dragged Lucrezia into the light of day to be presented, Hermione took her husband in to see their home. On the table in the sitting-room lay a letter.
"A letter already!" she said.
There was a sound almost of vexation in her voice. The little white thing lying there seemed to bring a breath of the world she wanted to forget into their solitude.
"Who can have written?"
She took it up and felt contrition.
"It's from Emile!" she exclaimed. "How good of him to remember! This must be his welcome."
"Read it, Hermione," said Maurice. "I'll look after Gaspare."
She laughed.
"Better not. He's here to look after us. But you'll soon understand him, very soon, and he you. You speak different languages, but you both belong to the south. Let him alone, Maurice. We'll read this together. I'm sure it's for you as well as me."
And while Gaspare and the boys carried in the trunks she sat down by the table and opened Emile's letter. It was very short, and was addressed from Kairouan, where Artois had established himself for the spring in an Arab house. She began reading it aloud in French: