"Shall start for Kairouan at once; wire me Tunisia Palace Hotel, Tunis,Madame Delarey."
"Shall start for Kairouan at once; wire me Tunisia Palace Hotel, Tunis,
Madame Delarey."
and sent Antonino with it flying down the hill. Then she got time-tables and a guide-book of Tunisia, and sat down at her writing-table to make out the journey; while Lucrezia, conscious that something unusual was afoot, watched her with solemn eyes.
Hermione found that she would gain nothing by starting that night. By leaving early the next morning she would arrive at Trapani in time to catch a steamer which left at midnight for Tunis, reachingAfrica at nine on the following morning. From Tunis a day's journey by train would bring her to Kairouan. If the steamer were punctual she might be able to catch a train immediately on her arrival at Tunis. If not, she would have to spend one day there.
Already she felt as if she were travelling. All sense of peace had left her. She seemed to hear the shriek of engines, the roar of trains in tunnels and under bridges, to shake with the oscillation of the carriage, to sway with the dip and rise of the action of the steamer.
Swiftly, as one in haste, she wrote down times of departure and arrival: Cattaro to Messina, Messina to Palermo, Palermo to Trapani, Trapani to Tunis, Tunis to Kairouan, with the price of the ticket—a return ticket. When that was done and she had laid down her pen, she began for the first time to realize the change a morsel of paper had made in her life, to realize the fact of the closeness of her new knowledge of what was and what was coming to Maurice's ignorance. The travelling sensation within her, an intense interior restlessness, made her long for action, for some ardent occupation in which the body could take part. She would have liked to begin at once to pack, but all her things were in the bedroom where Maurice was sleeping. Would he sleep forever? She longed for him to wake, but she would not wake him. Everything could be packed in an hour. There was no reason to begin now. But how could she remain just sitting there in the great tranquillity of this afternoon of spring, looking at the long, calm line of Etna rising from the sea, while Emile, perhaps, lay dying?
She got up, went once more to the terrace, and began to pace up and down under the awning. She had not told Lucrezia that she was going on the morrow. Maurice must know first. What would he say? How would he take it? And what would he do? Even in themidst of her now growing sorrow—for at first she had hardly felt sorry, had hardly felt anything but that intense restlessness which still possessed her—she was preoccupied with that. She meant, when he woke, to give him the telegram, and say simply that she must go at once to Artois. That was all. She would not ask, hint at anything else. She would just tell Maurice that she could not leave her dearest friend to die alone in an African city, tended only by an Arab, and a doctor who came to earn his fee.
And Maurice—what would he say? What would he—do?
If only he would wake! There was something terrible to her in the contrast between his condition and hers at this moment.
And what ought she to do if Maurice—?
She broke off short in her mental arrangement of possible happenings when Maurice should wake.
The afternoon waned and still he slept. As she watched the light changing on the sea, growing softer, more wistful, and the long outline of Etna becoming darker against the sky, Hermione felt a sort of unreasonable despair taking possession of her. So few hours of the day were left now, and on the morrow this Sicilian life—a life that had been ideal—must come to an end for a time, and perhaps forever. The abruptness of the blow which had fallen had wakened in her sensitive heart a painful, almost an exaggerated sense of the uncertainty of the human fate. It seemed to her that the joy which had been hers in these tranquil Sicilian days, a joy more perfect than any she had conceived of, was being broken off short, as if it could never be renewed. With her anxiety for her friend mingled another anxiety, more formless, but black and horrible in its vagueness.
"If this should be our last day together in Sicily!" she thought, as she watched the light softening amongthe hills and the shadows of the olive-trees lengthening upon the ground.
"If this should be our last night together in the house of the priest!"
It seemed to her that even with Maurice in another place she could never know again such perfect peace and joy, and her heart ached at the thought of leaving it.
"To-morrow!" she thought. "Only a few hours and this will all be over!"
It seemed almost incredible. She felt that she could not realize it thoroughly and yet that she realized it too much, as in a nightmare one seems to feel both less and more than in any tragedy of a wakeful hour.
A few hours and it would all be over—and through those hours Maurice slept.
The twilight was falling when he stirred, muttered some broken words, and opened his eyes. He heard no sound, and thought it was early morning.
"Hermione!" he said, softly.
Then he lay still for a moment and remembered.
"By Jove! it must be long past time for déjeuner!" he thought.
He sprang up and put his head into the sitting-room.
"Hermione!" he called.
"Yes," she answered, from the terrace.
"What's the time?"
"Nearly dinner-time."
He burst out laughing.
"Didn't you think I was going to sleep forever?" he said.
"Almost," her voice said.
He wondered a little why she did not come to him, but only answered him from a distance.
"I'll dress and be out in a moment," he called.
"All right!"
Now that Maurice was awake at last, Hermione's grief at the lost afternoon became much more acute, but shewas determined to conceal it. She remained where she was just then because she had been startled by the sound of her husband's voice, and was not sure of her power of self-control. When, a few minutes later, he came out upon the terrace with a half-amused, half-apologetic look on his face, she felt safer. She resolved to waste no time, but to tell him at once.
"Maurice," she said, "while you've been sleeping I've been living very fast and travelling very far."
"How, Hermione? What do you mean?" he asked, sitting down by the wall and looking at her with eyes that still held shadows of sleep.
"Something's happened to-day that's—that's going to alter everything."
He looked astonished.
"Why, how grave you are! But what? What could happen here?"
"This came."
She gave him the doctor's telegram. He read it slowly aloud.
"Artois!" he said. "Poor fellow! And out there in Africa all alone!"
He stopped speaking, looked at her, then leaned forward, put his arm round her shoulder, and kissed her gently.
"I'm awfully sorry for you, Hermione," he said. "Awfully sorry, I know how you must be feeling. When did it come?"
"Some hours ago."
"And I've been sleeping! I feel a brute."
He kissed her again.
"Why didn't you wake me?"
"Just to share a grief? That would have been horrid of me, Maurice!"
He looked again at the telegram.
"Did you wire?" he asked.
"Yes."
"Of course. Perhaps to-morrow, or in a day or two, we shall have better news, that he's turned the corner. He's a strong man, Hermione; he ought to recover. I believe he'll recover."
"Maurice," she said. "I want to tell you something."
"What, dear?"
"I feel I must—I can't wait here for news."
"But then—what will you do?"
"While you've been sleeping I've been looking out trains."
"Trains! You don't mean—"
"I must start for Kairouan to-morrow morning. Read this, too."
And she gave him Emile's letter.
"Doesn't that make you feel his loneliness?" she said, when he had finished it. "And think of it now—now when perhaps he knows that he is dying."
"You are going away," he said—"going away from here!"
His voice sounded as if he could not believe it.
"To-morrow morning!" he added, more incredulously.
"If I waited I might be too late."
She was watching him with intent eyes, in which there seemed to flame a great anxiety.
"You know what friends we've been," she continued. "Don't you think I ought to go?"
"I—perhaps—yes, I see how you feel. Yes, I see. But"—he got up—"to leave here to-morrow! I felt as if—almost as if we'd been here always and should live here for the rest of our lives."
"I wish to Heaven we could!" she exclaimed, her voice changing. "Oh, Maurice, if you knew how dreadful it is to me to go!"
"How far is Kairouan?"
"If I catch the train at Tunis I can be there the day after to-morrow."
"And you are going to nurse him, of course?"
"Yes, if—if I'm in time. Now I ought to pack before dinner."
"How beastly!" he said, just like a boy. "How utterly beastly! I don't feel as if I could believe it all. But you—what a trump you are, Hermione! To leave this and travel all that way—not one woman in a hundred would do it."
"Wouldn't you for a friend?"
"I!" he said, simply. "I don't know whether I understand friendship as you do. I've had lots of friends, of course, but one seemed to me very like another, as long as they were jolly."
"How Sicilian!" she thought.
She had heard Gaspare speak of his boy friends in much the same way.
"Emile is more to me than any one in the world but you," she said.
Her voice changed, faltered on the last word, and she walked along the terrace to the sitting-room window.
"I must pack now," she said. "Then we can have one more quiet time together after dinner."
Her last words seemed to strike him, for he followed her, and as she was going into the bedroom, he said:
"Perhaps—why shouldn't I—"
But then he stopped.
"Yes, Maurice!" she said, quickly.
"Where's Gaspare?" he asked. "We'll make him help with the packing. But you won't take much, will you? It'll only be for a few days, I suppose."
"Who knows?"
"Gaspare! Gaspare!" he called.
"Che vuole?" answered a sleepy voice.
"Come here."
In a moment a languid figure appeared round the corner. Maurice explained matters. Instantly Gaspare became a thing of quicksilver. He darted to helpHermione. Every nerve seemed quivering to be useful.
"And the signore?" he said, presently, as he carried a trunk into the room.
"The signore!" said Hermione.
"Is he going, too?"
"No, no!" said Hermione, swiftly.
She put her finger to her lips. Delarey was just coming into the room.
Gaspare said no more, but he shot a curious glance from padrona to padrone as he knelt down to lay some things in the trunk.
By dinner-time Hermione's preparations were completed. The one trunk she meant to take was packed. How hateful it looked standing there in the white room with the label hanging from the handle! She washed her face and hands in cold water, and came out onto the terrace where the dinner-table was laid. It was a warm, still night, like the night of the fishing, and the moon hung low in a clear sky.
"How exquisite it is here!" she said to Maurice, as they sat down. "We are in the very heart of calm, majestic calm. Look at that one star over Etna, and the outlines of the hills and of that old castle—"
She stopped.
"It brings a lump into my throat," she said, after a little pause. "It's too beautiful and too still to-night."
"I love being here," he said.
They ate their dinner in silence for some time. Presently Maurice began to crumble his bread.
"Hermione," he said. "Look here—"
"Yes, Maurice."
"I've been thinking—of course I scarcely know Artois, and I could be of no earthly use, but I've been thinking whether it would not be better for me to come to Kairouan with you."
For a moment Hermione's rugged face was lit up by afire of joy that made her look beautiful. Maurice went on crumbling his bread.
"I didn't say anything at first," he continued, "because I—well, somehow I felt so fixed here, almost part of the place, and I had never thought of going till it got too hot, and especially not now, when the best time is only just beginning. And then it all came so suddenly. I was still more than half asleep, too, I believe," he added, with a little laugh, "when you told me. But now I've had time, and—why shouldn't I come, too, to look after you?"
As he went on speaking the light in Hermione's face flickered and died out. It was when he laughed that it vanished quite away.
"Thank you, Maurice," she said, quietly. "Thank you, dear. I should love to have you with me, but it would be a shame!"
"Why?"
"Why? Why—the best time here is only just beginning, as you say. It would be selfish to drag you across the sea to a sick-bed, or perhaps to a death-bed."
"But the journey?"
"Oh, I am accustomed to being a lonely woman. Think how short a time we've been married! I've nearly always travelled alone."
"Yes, I know," he said. "Of course there's no danger. I didn't mean that, only—"
"Only you were ready to be unselfish," she said. "Bless you for it. But this time I want to be unselfish. You must stay here to keep house, and I'll come back the first moment I can—the very first. Let's try to think of that—of the day when I come up the mountain again to my—to our garden of paradise. All the time I'm away I shall pray for the moment when I see these columns of the terrace above me, and the geraniums, and—and the white wall of our little—home."
She stopped. Then she added:
"And you."
"Yes," he said. "But you won't see me on the terrace."
"Why not?"
"Because, of course, I shall come to the station to meet you. That day will be a festa."
She said nothing more. Her heart was very full, and of conflicting feelings and of voices that spoke in contradiction one of another. One or two of these voices she longed to hush to silence, but they were persistent. Then she tried not to listen to what they were saying. But they were pitilessly distinct.
Dinner was soon over, and Gaspare came to clear away. His face was very grave, even troubled. He did not like this abrupt departure of his padrona.
"You will come back, signora?" he said, as he drew away the cloth and prepared to fold up the table and carry it in-doors.
Hermione managed to laugh.
"Why, of course, Gaspare! Did you think I was going away forever?"
"Africa is a long way off."
"Only nine hours from Trapani. I may be back very soon. Will you forget me?"
"Did I forget my padrona when she was in England?" the boy replied, his expressive face suddenly hardening and his great eyes glittering with sullen fires.
Hermione quickly laid her hand on his.
"I was only laughing. You know your padrona trusts you to remember her as she remembers you."
Gaspare lifted up her hand quickly, kissed it, and hurried away, lifting his own hand to his eyes.
"These Sicilians know how to make one love them," said Hermione, with a little catch in her voice. "I believe that boy would die for me if necessary."
"I'm sure he would," said Maurice. "But one doesn't find a padrona like you every day."
"Let us walk to the arch," she said. "I must take my last look at the mountains with you."
Beyond the archway there was a large, flat rock, a natural seat from which could be seen a range of mountains that was invisible from the terrace. Hermione often sat on this rock alone, looking at the distant peaks, whose outlines stirred her imagination like a wild and barbarous music. Now she drew down Maurice beside her and kept his hand in hers. She was thinking of many things, among others of the little episode that had just taken place with Gaspare. His outburst of feeling, like fire bursting up through a suddenly opened fissure in the crust of the earth, had touched her and something more. It had comforted her, and removed from her a shadowy figure that had been approaching her, the figure of a fear. She fixed her eyes on the mountains, dark under the silver of the moon.
"Maurice," she said. "Do you often try to read people?"
The pleasant look of almost deprecating modesty that Artois had noticed on the night when they dined together in London came to Delarey's face.
"I don't know that I do, Hermione," he said. "Is it easy?"
"I think—I'm thinking it especially to-night—that it is horribly difficult. One's imagination seizes hold of trifles, and magnifies them and distorts them. From little things, little natural things, one deduces—I mean one takes a midget and makes of it a monster. How one ought to pray to see clear in people one loves! It's very strange, but I think that sometimes, just because one loves, one is ready to be afraid, to doubt, to exaggerate, to think a thing is gone when it is there. In friendship one is more ready to give things their proper value—perhaps because everything is of less value. Do you know that to-night I realize for the first time the enormous difference there is between the love one gives in love and the love one gives in friendship?"
"Why, Hermione?" he asked, simply.
He was looking a little puzzled, but still reverential.
"I love Emile as a friend. You know that."
"Yes. Would you go to Kairouan if you didn't?"
"If he were to die it would be a great sorrow, a great loss to me. I pray that he may live. And yet—"
Suddenly she took his other hand in hers.
"Oh, Maurice, I've been thinking to-day, I'm thinking now—suppose it were you who lay ill, perhaps dying! Oh, the difference in my feeling, in my dread! If you were to be taken from me, the gap in my life! There would be nothing—nothing left."
He put his arm round her, and was going to speak, but she went on:
"And if you were to be taken from me how terrible it would be to feel that I'd ever had one unkind thought of you, that I'd ever misinterpreted one look or word or action of yours, that I'd ever, in my egoism or my greed, striven to thwart one natural impulse of yours, or to force you into travesty away from simplicity! Don't—don't ever be unnatural or insincere with me, Maurice, even for a moment, even for fear of hurting me. Be always yourself, be the boy that you still are and that I love you for being."
She put her head on his shoulder, and he felt her body trembling.
"I think I'm always natural with you," he said.
"You're as natural as Gaspare. Only once, and—and that was my fault, I know; but you mean so much to me, everything, and your honesty with me is like God walking with me."
She lifted her head and stood up.
"Please God we'll have many more nights together here," she said—"many more blessed, blessed nights. The stillness of the hills is like all the truth of the world, sifted from the falsehood and made into one beautiful whole. Oh, Maurice, there is a Heaven on earth—whentwo people love each other in the midst of such a silence as this."
They went slowly back through the archway to the terrace. Far below them the sea gleamed delicately, almost like a pearl. In the distance, towering above the sea, the snow of Etna gleamed more coldly, with a bleaker purity, a suggestion of remote mysteries and of untrodden heights. Above the snow of Etna shone the star of evening. Beside the sea shone the little light in the house of the sirens.
And as they stood for a moment before the cottage in the deep silence of the night, Hermione looked up at the star above the snow. But Maurice looked down at the little light beside the sea.
Only when Hermione was gone, when the train from which she waved her hand had vanished along the line that skirted the sea, and he saw Gaspare winking away two tears that were about to fall on his brown cheeks, did Maurice begin to realize the largeness of the change that fate had wrought in his Sicilian life. He realized it more sharply when he had climbed the mountain and stood once more upon the terrace before the house of the priest. Hermione's personality was so strong, so aboundingly vital, that its withdrawal made an impression such as that made by an intense silence suddenly succeeding a powerful burst of music. Just at first Maurice felt startled, almost puzzled like a child, inclined to knit his brows and stare with wide eyes and wonder what could be going to happen to him in a world that was altered. Now he was conscious of being far away from the land where he had been born and brought up, conscious of it as he had not been before, even on his first day in Sicily. He did not feel an alien. He had no sensation of exile. But he felt, as he had not felt when with Hermione, the glory of this world of sea and mountains, of olive-trees and vineyards, the strangeness of its great welcome to him, the magic of his readiness to give himself to it.
He had been like a dancing faun in the sunshine and the moonlight of Sicily. Now, for a moment, he stood still, very still, and watched and listened, and was grave, and was aware of himself, the figure in the foreground of a picture that was marvellous.
The enthusiasm of Hermione for Sicily, the flood ofunderstanding of it, and feeling for it that she had poured out in the past days of spring, instead of teaching Maurice to see and to feel, seemed to have kept him back from the comprehension to which they had been meant to lead him. With Hermione, the watcher, he had been but as a Sicilian, another Gaspare in a different rank of life. Without Hermione he was Gaspare and something more. It was as if he still danced in the tarantella, but had now for the moment the power to stand and watch his performance and see that it was wonderful.
This was just at first, in the silence that followed the music.
He gazed at Etna, and thought: "How extraordinary that I'm living up here on a mountain and looking at the smoke from Etna, and that there's no English-speaking person here but me!" He looked at Gaspare and at Lucrezia, and thought: "What a queer trio of companions we are! How strange and picturesque those two would look in England, how different they are from the English, and yet how at home with them I feel! By Jove, it's wonderful!" And then he was thrilled by a sense of romance, of adventure, that had never been his when his English wife was there beside him, calling his mind to walk with hers, his heart to beat with hers, calling with the great sincerity of a very perfect love.
"The poor signora!" said Gaspare. "I saw her beginning to cry when the train went away. She loves my country and cannot bear to leave it. She ought to live here always, as I do."
"Courage, Gaspare!" said Maurice, putting his hand on the boy's shoulder. "She'll come back very soon."
Gaspare lifted his hand to his eyes, then drew out a red-and-yellow handkerchief with "Caro mio" embroidered on it and frankly wiped them.
"The poor signora!" he repeated. "She did not like to leave us."
"Let's think of her return," said Maurice.
He turned away suddenly from the terrace and went into the house.
When he was there, looking at the pictures and books, at the open piano with some music on it, at a piece of embroidery with a needle stuck through the half-finished petal of a flower, he began to feel deserted. The day was before him. What was he going to do? What was there for him to do? For a moment he felt what he would have called "stranded." He was immensely accustomed to Hermione, and her splendid vitality of mind and body filled up the interstices of a day with such ease that one did not notice that interstices existed, or think they could exist. Her physical health and her ardent mind worked hand-in-hand to create around her an atmosphere into which boredom could not come, yet from which bustle was excluded. Maurice felt the silence within the house to be rather dreary than peaceful. He touched the piano, endeavoring to play with one finger the tune of "O sole mio!" He took up two or three books, pulled the needle out of Hermione's embroidery, then stuck it in again. The feeling of loss began to grow upon him. Oddly enough, he thought, he had not felt it very strongly at the station when the train ran out. Nor had it been with him upon the terrace. There he had been rather conscious of change than of loss—of change that was not without excitement. But now—He began to think of the days ahead of him with a faint apprehension.
"But I'll live out-of-doors," he said to himself. "It's only in the house that I feel bad like this. I'll live out-of-doors and take lots of exercise, and I shall be all right."
He had again taken up a book, almost without knowing it, and now, holding it in his hand, he went to the head of the steps leading to the terrace and looked out. Gaspare was sitting by the wall with a very dismal face. He stared silently at his master for a minute. Then he said:
"The signora should have taken us with her to Africa. It would have been better."
"It was impossible, Gaspare," Maurice said, rather hastily. "She is going to a poor signore who is ill."
"I know."
The boy paused for a moment. Then he said:
"Is the signore her brother?"
"Her brother! No."
"Is he a relation?"
"No."
"Is he very old?"
"Certainly not."
Gaspare repeated:
"The signora should have taken us with her to Africa."
This time he spoke with a certain doggedness. Maurice, he scarcely knew why, felt slightly uncomfortable and longed to create a diversion. He looked at the book he was holding in his hand and saw that it wasThe Thousand and One Nights, in Italian. He wanted to do something definite, to distract his thoughts—more than ever now after his conversation with Gaspare. An idea occurred to him.
"Come under the oak-trees, Gaspare," he said, "and I'll read to you. It will be a lesson in accent. You shall be my professore."
"Si, signore."
The response was listless, and Gaspare followed his master with listless footsteps down the little path that led to the grove of oak-trees that grew among giant rocks, on which the lizards were basking.
"There are stories of Africa in this book," said Maurice, opening it.
Gaspare looked more alert.
"Of where the signora will be?"
"Chi lo sa?"
He lay down on the warm ground, set his back againsta rock, opened the book at hazard, and began to read slowly and carefully, while Gaspare, stretched on the grass, listened, with his chin in the palm of his hand. The story was of the fisherman and the Genie who was confined in a casket, and soon Gaspare was entirely absorbed by it. He kept his enormous brown eyes fixed upon Maurice's face, and moved his lips, silently forming, after him, the words of the tale. When it was finished he said:
"I should not like to be kept shut up like that, signore. If I could not be free I would kill myself. I will always be free."
He stretched himself on the warm ground like a young animal, then added:
"I shall not take a wife—ever."
Maurice shut the book and stretched himself, too, then moved away from the rock, and lay at full length with his hands clasped behind his head and his eyes, nearly shut, fixed upon the glimmer of the sea.
"Why not, Gasparino?"
"Because if one has a wife one is not free."
"Hm!"
"If I had a wife I should be like the Mago Africano when he was shut up in the box."
"And I?" Maurice said, suddenly sitting up. "What about me?"
For the first time it seemed to occur to Gaspare that he was speaking to a married man. He sat up, too.
"Oh, but you—you are a signore and rich. It is different. I am poor. I shall have many loves, first one and then another, but I shall never take a wife. My father wishes me to when I have finished the military service, but"—and he laughed at his own ingenious comparison—"I am like the Mago Africano when he was let out of the casket. I am free, and I will never let myself be stoppered-up as he did. Per Dio!"
Suddenly Maurice frowned.
"It isn't like—" he began.
Then he stopped. The lines in his forehead disappeared, and he laughed.
"I am pretty free here, too," he said. "At least, I feel so."
The dreariness that had come upon him inside the cottage had disappeared now that he was in the open air. As he looked down over the sloping mountain flank—dotted with trees near him, but farther away bare and sunbaked—to the sea with its magic coast-line, that seemed to promise enchantments to wilful travellers passing by upon the purple waters, as he turned his eyes to the distant plain with its lemon groves, its winding river, its little vague towns of narrow houses from which thin trails of smoke went up, and let them journey on to the great, smoking mountain lifting its snows into the blue, and its grave, not insolent, panache, he felt an immense sense of happy-go-lucky freedom with the empty days before him. His intellect was loose like a colt on a prairie. There was no one near to catch it, to lead it to any special object, to harness it and drive it onward in any fixed direction. He need no longer feel respect for a cleverness greater than his own, or try to understand subtleties of thought and sensation that were really outside of his capacities. He did not say this to himself, but whence sprang this new and dancing feeling of emancipation that was coming upon him? Why did he remember the story he had just been reading, and think of himself for a moment as a Genie emerging cloudily into the light of day from a narrow prison which had been sunk beneath the sea? Why? For, till now, he had never had any consciousness of imprisonment. One only becomes conscious of some things when one is freed from them. Maurice's happy efforts to walk on the heights with the enthusiasms of Hermione had surely never tired him, but rather braced him. Yet, left alone with peasants,with Lucrezia and Gaspare, there was something in him, some part of his nature, which began to frolic like a child let out of school. He felt more utterly at his ease than he had ever felt before. With these peasants he could let his mind be perfectly lazy. To them he seemed instructed, almost a god of knowledge.
Suddenly Maurice laughed, showing his white teeth. He stretched up his arms to the blue heaven and the sun that sent its rays filtering down to him through the leaves of the oak-trees, and he laughed again gently.
"What is it, signore?"
"It is good to live, Gaspare. It is good to be young out here on the mountain-side, and to send learning and problems and questions of conscience to the devil. After all, real life is simple enough if only you'll let it be. I believe the complications of life, half of them, and its miseries too, more than half of them, are the inventions of the brains of the men and women we call clever. They can't let anything alone. They bother about themselves and everybody else. By Jove, if you knew how they talk about life in London! They'd make you think it was the most complicated, rotten, intriguing business imaginable; all misunderstandings and cross-purposes, and the Lord knows what. But it isn't. It's jolly simple, or it can be. Here we are, you and I, and we aren't at loggerheads, and we've got enough to eat and a pair of boots apiece, and the sun, and the sea, and old Etna behaving nicely—and what more do we want?"
"Signore—"
"Well?"
"I don't understand English."
"Mamma mia!" Delarey roared with laughter. "And I've been talking English. Well, Gaspare, I can't say it in Sicilian—can I? Let's see."
He thought a minute. Then he said:
"It's something like this. Life is simple and splendid if you let it alone. But if you worry it—well, then, like a dog, it bites you."
He imitated a dog biting. Gaspare nodded seriously.
"Mi piace la vita," he remarked, calmly.
"E anche mi piace a me," said Maurice. "Now I'll give you a lesson in English, and when the signora comes back you can talk to her."
"Si, signore."
The afternoon had gone in a flash. Evening came while they were still under the oak-trees, and the voice of Lucrezia was heard calling from the terrace, with the peculiar baaing intonation that is characteristic of southern women of the lower classes.
Gaspare baaed ironically in reply.
"It isn't dinner-time already?" said Maurice, getting up reluctantly.
"Yes, meester sir, eef you pleesi," said Gaspare, with conscious pride. "We go way."
"Bravo. Well, I'm getting hungry."
As Maurice sat alone at dinner on the terrace, while Gaspare and Lucrezia ate and chattered in the kitchen, he saw presently far down below the shining of the light in the house of the sirens. It came out when the stars came out, this tiny star of the sea. He felt a little lonely as he sat there eating all by himself, and when the light was kindled near the water, that lay like a dream waiting to be sweetly disturbed by the moon, he was pleased as by the greeting of a friend. The light was company. He watched it while he ate. It was a friendly light, more friendly than the light of the stars to him. For he connected it with earthly things—things a man could understand. He imagined Maddalena in the cottage where he had slept preparing the supper for Salvatore, who was presently going off to sea to spear fish, or net them, or take them with lines for the market on the morrow. There was bread and cheese on the table, and the good red wine that couldharm nobody, wine that had all the laughter of the sun-rays in it. And the cottage door was open to the sea. The breeze came in and made the little lamp that burned beneath the Madonna flicker. He saw the big, white bed, and the faces of the saints, of the actresses, of the smiling babies that had watched him while he slept. And he saw the face of his peasant hostess, the face he had kissed in the dawn, ere he ran down among the olive-trees to plunge into the sea. He saw the eyes that were like black jewels, the little feathers of gold in the hair about her brow. She was a pretty, simple girl. He liked the look of curiosity in her eyes. To her he was something touched with wonder, a man from a far-off land. Yet she was at ease with him and he with her. That drop of Sicilian blood in his veins was worth something to him in this isle of the south. It made him one with so much, with the sunburned sons of the hills and of the sea-shore, with the sunburned daughters of the soil. It made him one with them—or more—one of them. He had had a kiss from Sicily now—a kiss in the dawn by the sea, from lips fresh with the sea wind and warm with the life that is young. And what had it meant to him? He had taken it carelessly with a laugh. He had washed it from his lips in the sea. Now he remembered it, and, in thought, he took the kiss again, but more slowly, more seriously. And he took it at evening, at the coming of night, instead of at dawn, at the coming of day—his kiss from Sicily.
He took it at evening.
He had finished dinner now, and he pushed back his chair and drew a cigar from his pocket. Then he struck a match. As he was putting it to the cigar he looked again towards the sea and saw the light.
"Damn!"
"Signore!"
Gaspare came running.
"I didn't call, Gaspare, I only said 'Mamma mia!' because I burned my fingers."
He struck another match and lit the cigar.
"Signore—" Gaspare began, and stopped.
"Yes? What is it?"
"Signore, I—Lucrezia, you know, has relatives at Castel Vecchio."
Castel Vecchio was the nearest village, perched on the hill-top opposite, twenty minutes' walk from the cottage.
"Ebbene?"
"Ebbene, signorino, to-night there is a festa in their house. It is the festa of Pancrazio, her cousin. Sebastiano will be there to play, and they will dance, and—"
"Lucrezia wants to go?"
"Si, signore, but she is afraid to ask."
"Afraid! Of course she can go, she must go. Tell her. But at night can she come back alone?"
"Signore, I am invited, but I said—I did not like the first evening that the padrona is away—if you would come they would take it as a great honor."
"Go, Gaspare, take Lucrezia, and bring her back safely."
"And you, signore?"
"I would come, too, but I think a stranger would spoil the festa."
"Oh no, signore, on the contrary—"
"I know—you think I shall be sad alone."
"Si, signore."
"You are good to think of your padrone, but I shall be quite content. You go with Lucrezia and come back as late as you like. Tell Lucrezia! Off with you!"
Gaspare hesitated no longer. In a few minutes he had put on his best clothes and a soft hat, and stuck a large, red rose above each ear. He came to say good-bye with Lucrezia on his arm. Her head was wrapped in a brilliant yellow-and-white shawl with saffron-colored fringes. They went off together laughing and skipping down the stony path like two children.
When their footsteps died away Delarey, who had walked to the archway to see them off, returned slowly to the terrace and began to pace up and down, puffing at his cigar. The silence was profound. The rising moon cast its pale beams upon the white walls of the cottage, the white seats of the terrace. There was no wind. The leaves of the oaks and the olive-trees beneath the wall were motionless. Nothing stirred. Above the cottage the moonlight struck on the rocks, showed the nakedness of the mountain-side. A curious sense of solitude, such as he had never known before, took possession of Delarey. It did not make him feel sad at first, but only emancipated, free as he had never yet felt free, like one free in a world that was curiously young, curiously unfettered by any chains of civilization, almost savagely, primitively free. So might an animal feel ranging to and fro in a land where man had not set foot. But he was an animal without its mate in the wonderful breathless night. And the moonlight grew about him as he walked, treading softly he scarce knew why, to and fro, to and fro.
Hermione was nearing the coast now. Soon she would be on board the steamer and on her way across the sea to Africa. She would be on her way to Africa—and to Artois.
Delarey recalled his conversation with Gaspare, when the boy had asked him whether Artois was Hermione's brother, or a relation, or whether he was old. He remembered Gaspare's intonation when he said, almost sternly, "The signora should have taken us with her to Africa." Evidently he was astonished. Why? It must have been because he—Delarey—had let his wife go to visit a man in a distant city alone. Sicilians did not understand certain things. He had realized his own freedom—now he began to realize Hermione's. Howquickly she had made up her mind. While he was sleeping she had decided everything. She had even looked out the trains. It had never occurred to her to ask him what to do. And she had not asked him to go with her. Did he wish she had?
A new feeling began to stir within him, unreasonable, absurd. It had come to him with the night and his absolute solitude in the night. It was not anger as yet. It was a faint, dawning sense of injury, but so faint that it did not rouse, but only touched gently, almost furtively, some spirit drowsing within him, like a hand that touches, then withdraws itself, then steals forward to touch again.
He began to walk a little faster up and down, always keeping along the terrace wall.
He was primitive man to-night, and primitive feelings were astir in him. He had not known he possessed them, yet he—the secret soul of him—did not shrink from them in any surprise. To something in him, some part of him, they came as things not unfamiliar.
Suppose he had shown surprise at Hermione's project? Suppose he had asked her not to go? Suppose he had told her not to go? What would she have said? What would she have done? He had never thought of objecting to this journey, but he might have objected. Many a man would have objected. This was their honeymoon—hers and his. To many it would seem strange that a wife should leave her husband during their honeymoon, to travel across the sea to another man, a friend, even if he were ill, perhaps dying. He did not doubt Hermione. No one who knew her as he did could doubt her, yet nevertheless, now that he was quite companionless in the night, he felt deserted, he felt as if every one else were linked with life, while he stood entirely alone. Hermione was travelling to her friend. Lucrezia and Gaspare had gone to their festa, to dance, to sing, to joke, to make merry, to make love—who knew? Down in thevillage the people were gossiping at one another's doors, were lounging together in the piazza, were playing cards in the caffès, were singing and striking the guitars under the pepper-trees bathed in the rays of the moon. And he—what was there for him in this night that woke up desires for joy, for the sweetness of the life that sings in the passionate aisles of the south?
He stood still by the wall. Two or three lights twinkled on the height where Castel Vecchio perched clinging to its rock above the sea. Sebastiano was there setting his lips to the ceramella, and shooting bold glances of tyrannical love at Lucrezia out of his audacious eyes. The peasants, dressed in their gala clothes, were forming in a circle for the country dance. The master of the ceremonies was shouting out his commands in bastard French: "Tournez!" "À votre place!" "Prenez la donne!" "Dansez toutes!" Eyes were sparkling, cheeks were flushing, lips were parting as gay activity created warmth in bodies and hearts. Then would come the tarantella, with Gaspare spinning like a top and tripping like a Folly in a veritable madness of movement. And as the night wore on the dance would become wilder, the laughter louder, the fire of jokes more fierce. Healths would be drunk with clinking glasses, brindisi shouted, tricks played. Cards would be got out. There would be a group intent on "Scopa," another calling "Mi staio!" "Carta da vente!" throwing down the soldi and picking them up greedily in "Sette e mezzo." Stories would be told, bets given and taken. The smoke would curl up from the long, black cigars the Sicilians love. Dark-browed men and women, wild-haired boys, and girls in gay shawls, with great rings swinging from their ears, would give themselves up as only southerners can to the joy of the passing moment, forgetting poverty, hardship, and toil, grinding taxation, all the cares and the sorrows that encompass the peasant's life, forgetting the flight of the hours, forgetting everything in the passion of thefesta, the dedication of all their powers to the laughing worship of fun.
Yes, the passing hour would be forgotten. That was certain. It would be dawn ere Lucrezia and Gaspare returned.
Delarey's cigar was burned to a stump. He took it from his lips and threw it with all his force over the wall towards the sea. Then he put his hands on the wall and leaned over it, fixing his eyes on the sea. The sense of injury grew in him. He resented the joys of others in this beautiful night, and he felt as if all the world were at a festa, as if all the world were doing wonderful things in the wonderful night, while he was left solitary to eat out his heart beneath the moon. He did not reason against his feelings and tell himself they were absurd. The dancing faun does not reason in his moments of ennui. He rebels. Delarey rebelled.
He had been invited to the festa and he had refused to go—almost eagerly he had refused. Why? There had been something secret in his mind which had prompted him. He had said—and even to himself—that he did not go lest his presence might bring a disturbing element into the peasants' gayety. But was that his reason?
Leaning over the wall he looked down upon the sea. The star that seemed caught in the sea smiled at him, summoned him. Its gold was like the gold, the little feathers of gold in the dark hair of a Sicilian girl singing the song of the May beside the sea: